They spend most of the day at work without knowing what they are doing. They are not workers or employees in the classical sense, but they are not free and owners of their time as they pretend. As philosopher Byung-Chol Han warns, they exploit themselves under the illusion of autonomy: they believe that managing their time will liberate them, when in fact they enslave themselves. “I’m my own boss,” they repeat, as the algorithm sets the pace and the traditional workday fades away.
The lucky ones work long hours in their pajamas in front of a screen, while others spend their days in a rental car or riding a bike with a backpack on their backs. They don’t have a boss, but they don’t have rights either. There is no stability, no future, and no stopping. Freedom has become a performance: you always have to be available, productive and connected. At the end of the day, fatigue leaves no room for the question “Why?” In that air saturated with screens and stimuli, this generation floats, without anchors or horizons.
The result is an existential void covered in frenetic activity with the fantasy that a stroke of luck in a virtual bet will turn them into millionaires or celebrities. Without a family project or children, living in an eternal present with no desire for transcendence, everything is “expensive and temporary,” the song says. And it’s not just the costs of living that we hope will barely cover their costs: there’s also fear. Fear of commitment, of the responsibility to take care of others when they can’t even take care of themselves. How to start a family if the house is rented, the job is risky, and the future is a fantasy?
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is an essential pillar of democracy. This is why it bothers those who believe they are the bearers of the truth.
Deep down there is something deeper: the suspicion that the world might collapse. The environmental crisis, current and potential wars, and artificial intelligence that threatens to eliminate jobs and that already thinks better than us. Anticipating tomorrow is an intolerable luxury. This is the generation that will live longer, but will reach old age with less: without savings, without retirement, without children to accompany them. Instead, they may coexist with technologies that listen to them, care for them, and that simulate companionship with an emotional efficiency that humans can no longer afford. The utopia of connection has become high-definition loneliness.
They also do not believe in education, which has lost its promise of social progress. Institutions, from school to state, are empty, bureaucratic, and impotent if not oppressive. The only thing left is for every man to work for himself, masquerading as meritocracy, ignoring that the “starting line” is becoming increasingly unequal.
Everything solid fades into the need for acceptance measured by the number of likes pretending to be a community. What remains is an exhausted, narcissistic, and emotionally fragmented generation. People who “could work from anywhere in the world,” but no longer know where they are.
The result is an existential void covered in frenetic activity. It is produced, delivered, accomplished, “done,” without meaning or roots. There is no belonging or community, just exhausted people immersed in hyper-connected individualism. Perhaps the great challenge is not economic or technological, but spiritual, and to stop confusing freedom with availability.
*Sociologist. Social psychologist.
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