Why Does Gen Z Stay Jobless?

I am part of Gen Z. My ideas here are probably weaker than the work of big researchers, or of people who go outside and run real surveys. But I still have my own views about my country and about the world. This is a piece about why people like us can’t find jobs, why we don’t like the jobs that are open, how work is organized, and how resources are spent on people. Why can’t we find work? And why are we so picky about it? Most of this will be based on my own subjective opinions.

The problem started long before us. If we go all the way back, we can say this is a deep issue made of many factors. It is not really a butterfly effect. It is more like a snowball: small things stick together and grow until nobody can ignore them. To put it simply, today automation is rising and artificial intelligence is filling the gaps that used to need human workers. On top of that, there is favoritism inside many sectors, and the skills companies ask for often don’t match what new graduates actually have. So the truth is: the problems began long ago, and they piled up until they reached a level nobody could see clearly.

Reason 1: Pensions

You can decide for yourself how connected this is. Early forms of retirement go very far back — even to Roman times. Under Augustus (around the 1st century BC–AD), there was a system that paid soldiers after their service.

But the event that really changed the world happened in 1889, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck built the first modern state pension for ordinary people in Germany. After that, many countries copied the idea. Officially, pensions were built so that older people could live in welfare and comfort — or at least, that is how it was made to look.

Here we must be careful about a very popular statistic: “In 1889 people only lived to 40–50, so nobody even reached retirement.” This is not fully true. That low average was mostly caused by high infant and child death rates. Bismarck set the retirement age at 70, very few people reached it, and the share of old people in society was much smaller than today. In other words, for the state, the system was cheap. Money moved from the public into a pool, and from that pool it went back to companies or the state as more liquidity. Today the situation is upside down: the old average lifespan of 40–50 has jumped to 70–80.

How do pensions work?

The idea is simple. The minimum wage you “earn” is not really the full amount. The company takes a part of it before it reaches your hand, and usually you never see this cut (in some countries you may pay it yourself — I don’t know the details of that). This money is collected from everyone into one big pool. Then the state or the company shares it among retired people. In countries like the USA, the state pension is very low, so companies offer 401(k) plans: a part of your salary is taken automatically and put into investment funds, and your employer usually adds to it too. There is also a third type, where people invest for the future on their own through banks or insurance companies, and the state supports this with tax cuts.

What does this have to do with Gen Z being jobless?

Most countries give part of the pool to retired people. And this is where the trouble starts. Next month, the money cut from your salary goes into the pool — and it either stays there, or the state uses it for something else. Either way, for people like us, that money has no real return. It has already left our hands and gone into other projects, or it just sits in the pool. So what is the real problem? The number of retired people is growing.

Think of it like a ratio going the wrong way. The more workers there are compared to retirees, the more workers “support” each retiree, and the lighter the load. Today this balance is flipping. But we have to be clear about the numbers, because different sources talk about different scales:

In the 1950s, worldwide, there were about 12 working-age people for every person aged 65+.
Today that global ratio is still around 8, and by 2050 it is expected to drop to about 4.
But in developed countries, and especially the USA, it is much sharper: in 2020 the USA had about 2.8 workers per retiree, and by the 2050s it may fall to around 2.1.

The direction is clear: fewer workers support each retiree. This puts a heavy load on states and lowers the share left for each worker. The state fills this gap either by raising taxes, or indirectly through the central bank — that is, by printing money with nothing behind it. When the amount of goods and services does not grow, but new money is printed just to pay pensions, this shows up directly as inflation (money losing its value). The result is a higher cost of living, less liquidity inside sectors, and salaries that stay close to the minimum wage. So many people stop chasing the job they studied for, and look for new ways to earn more. That leaves them wandering without a job, and the cycle repeats.

Reason 2: The Dominance of White-Collar Work

White-collar jobs exploded after World War II (the 1950s), as the service sector grew. In the USA, for the first time, white-collar workers passed blue-collar workers in 1956.

As companies grew, bureaucracy expanded, and global trade came back to life, there was a huge boom in office workers, accountants, and managers. After this, you might expect white-collar growth to slow down — but it didn’t. In the 1980s, computers and the internet entered offices, white-collar employment doubled, and new digital roles appeared. In the 2000s, plaza-based jobs in finance, marketing, and human resources spread even more. Baby boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y dominated these fields and filled every gap. So younger people who studied these same fields were left outside. And now, automation is taking over much of accounting and HR, while AI is melting away even more jobs.

Couldn’t blue-collar work cover the gap? Between the 1970s and 1990s, most factories in the West — textiles, cars, food — moved out of developed countries and into places like China, looking for cheaper labor. By the 2000s, more automation in assembly work reduced the need for muscle. “Skilled blue-collar” shrank down to people who truly learned the job and could continue as operators or technicians. Today these jobs have shifted into what we could call “new-collar” work: logistics, courier delivery, warehouse management, and field maintenance. But even here, things like drone couriers and automated warehouses raised unemployment. Still, this remains a field with a real shortage of skilled workers.

How did all this affect Gen Z?

Now we are talking about me. My generation was trained to be white-collar. We grew up with office programs, at the peak of software. We were told these fields suited us and that the future would be shaped by them, so we chose this path. Nobody could have warned us about these results. Our parents couldn’t follow it either — they were not people of our time, and back then they did not have the knowledge to see it coming. We can see it.

When I go to a company, sit for an interview, or check a job listing, they ask me for 5 to 10 years of experience. There are almost no entry-level jobs left. And that makes sense, because there are already unemployed people who worked 5 or even 30 years and then lost their jobs. Companies will pick them first. Instead of training someone from a new generation, they choose someone from their own generation who adapts more easily. Entry-level positions haven’t fully disappeared, though. The real problem is that there aren’t enough companies big enough to offer them. Thousands of companies open and close every year, but the number of experienced candidates they can grab is in the millions. When I stand in front of a boss or an HR person next to someone with 10 years of experience, a person like me — holding a fresh university diploma — is hard to choose. The logical choice is the experienced one, because they are more likely to keep the company alive. That is why there are thousands of motorcycle couriers around, and why people chase easy money. We can’t even become blue-collar workers easily, because that experience also takes years — and at the end of those years, we would still be competing with people from our own generation who entered the sector four years earlier, with no guarantee that we are any better.

And beyond all this, we were left face to face with an ugly reality on a psychological level, and most older generations never went through it. I mean social media. It is one of the most useful tools in the world, but because it grew up with us, we can see how much other people earn in other countries and what kind of lives they live. Is most of it a lie? Yes, a big part of it is fake. But when a guy posts a relaxed photo by the pool, and I am here grinding my teeth, trying to save a little money this month, the only thing it gives me is a depressed way of thinking and a feeling that my life is out of balance. If we had been offered jobs based on what our own country actually supports, and had built our plans around that, maybe we wouldn’t be in such a bad place. You tell a university graduate, “You’ll be a manual laborer.” And I say, “No, I won’t — I got my diploma, you can’t push me onto that road.” As states, institutions, and companies, you were supposed to balance this. And when we don’t accept manual labor, people say, “Gen Z is too picky.” Yes, I am picky. A person spends part of their life on education for a reason — not for nothing.

Conclusion

Salaries close to the minimum wage, a mismatch between the education given and the real jobs open in the market, and a generation that (although it changes from country to country) grew up expecting more comfort — all of this builds a wall in front of our work and our lives. Speaking for myself, by the standards of where I live, I am somewhere in the middle. I studied computer programming and kept jumping from sector to sector until I reached textiles — and even textiles is a dying field now. I’m tired of looking for the next place to jump.

The best advice I can give my own generation is this: attack. At this point, with automation and AI here, the ones left standing won’t only be the ones with knowledge — they will be the ones with strong connections. So don’t be afraid to move from sector to sector. Try to meet everyone you think can survive, introduce yourself, be clear about what you can do, and prove it. Otherwise, we may go down in history as a generation that faded away.