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Workers care more and more about work-life balance. But a new TikTok-fueled trend is encouraging women to take a step back from hustling at work and focus on jobs that don’t deplete their energy.
The latest. The “lazy girl” jobs trend has overtaken quiet quitting and bare minimum Mondays as the latest anti-hustle trend, and it has been promoted as career advice for women who are after jobs that pay a decent salary, yet don’t require a lot of hard work. Gabrielle Judge, the creator of the original lazy girl jobs TikTok post—which now has over 330,000 likes—describes such jobs as those that pay the bills but aren’t a lot of work.
“I added ‘lazy’ into the term because ‘lazy girl’ jobs offer so much work-life balance it should feel as if you are almost operating at a lazy state when compared to the American Hustle culture,” Judge told News Australia.
“Mostly the term refers to menial office jobs as opposed to the service industry: people on computers, sending a few emails and taking home a comfortable salary,” author Daisy Jones said in an opinion piece for the Guardian.
Good idea? “While it’s encouraging to see the work ethic—and the dominant sense that work is valuable simply for work’s sake alone—being challenged, the individual ‘opt-out’ can only get us so far,” Jack Kellam, an editor at think tank Autonomy, told Dazed. He argued that it’s just another way of pushing back against the status quo and isn’t necessarily radical. After all, many “lazy girl jobs” are similar to “bullshit jobs,” a term anthropologist David Graeber came up with in 2018 to describe jobs without meaning, as Glamour noted.
But some say those who want lazy girl jobs are more likely looking for flexibility and better work-life balance than the rise-and-grind that’s motivated prior generations. “The ‘lazy girl’ trend addresses an ever-growing misalignment between companies and individuals, where non-inclusive workplace cultures are no longer being accepted,” Angelica Hunt, senior lead at the Dream Collective, a DE&I consultancy, told News Australia.
Regardless of how demanding your job is, we hope to see you by the pool, with a glass of rosé.