Shall We Work
I watched a video for a Google engineer who got retrenched last month.
The first 45 seconds played like a paradise montage: Wonderful meal. Free haircut. Shots of him shooting hoops on the indoor basketball court during work hours.
“I got my dream job!”
Then, in the final fifteen seconds, the video turned into a horror movie.
The layoffs started.
Everyone started to work harder. Nobody leaves the office. Life gets dragged on.
Another round came, and his keycard stopped working.
Within sixty seconds, a single short summarized an entire modern tech career: the golden cage that feeds you right up until it swallows you whole.
How did we make work such a hero story?
The Escape and the Satire
Look around. Now people refusing the grind are becoming the new hero.
Look at Ben Sumadiwiria playing “Bobby Saputra”. The self-proclaimed “Professional Son” in Indonesia.
It is funny precisely because it hurts.
This is not stupid. The term “full-time children” originated from China.
A country where years of economic slow-down brought children back to work for their parents doing daily chores in exchange for a basic allowance.
They didn’t have a booming housing market that trick them into “Mortgage Slave”. So the work didn’t look that useful.
The gender data makes it even more fascinating.
In many hyper-competitive societies, we see growing numbers of young men quietly stepping back, dropping out of the traditional ladder, or retreating into gaming and digital spaces.
The financial math no longer adds up. Buying a home feels impossible anyway, so why burn out?
See what work is for here? House?
While modern women entered the formal workplace in massive numbers. But the old expectation to manage the emotional labor, family dynamics, and household safety nets didn’t vanish.
They ended up doing both shifts and quietly deciding that having babies is simply too much unpaid labor.
The Trap of the Equation
We touched on the two phenomena: work for house, work for free perks. Now let’s talk about work for money.
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I know this classic catch here:
- If you work, you have no time to spend your money.
- If you don’t work, you have no money to spend your time.
So every adult is caught in between: not having a job and worrying about finding one, OR working and worrying about getting fired.
In between the two, The new generation looked at the retirement math and realized the equation is rigged.
Look at the retirement reality in America: Most people work until 62 to 65, but the actual window where a person has both the financial freedom AND the physical health to truly enjoy their time is often just a tiny 3 to 5 year sliver before the body breaks down.
That’s why life is too short.
And here is the darkest punchline:
The more successful you were, the harder you crash. The deeper your identity was tied to the corporate ladder, the more restless, aimless, and miserable you feel the day you stop. The person who never cared that much to begin with ends up happier than the corporate hero.
The Irony of the System
Governments have got into a major dilemma.
America delayed the retirement age, but the average retirement age is actually earlier, around 62. Singapore push the elderly re-employment rate to 70.
But that was when technology wasn’t that exciting.
Look at the absurdity of the current structure:
Now mid-career PMETs (40–50s) are getting thrown out in the middle.
On one hand, elderly workers (60 — 70s) are cheaper, heavily subsidized by government grants, and bring low-risk experience.
Another side, Robots and AI are faster, emotionless, and never ask the boss for a pay raise.
The Youth, can’t even find the ladder. They started to think “job” sounds like a relic from their grandfather’s era.
So we ended up building a society phasing out the work with the older generations, while leaving the youth to figure out on their own.
Takeaway
Work is not for identity : the free name cards, meals and basketball courts are just velvet handcuffs designed to keep you from leaving.
Work is not for money: because you trade away the time required to spend the money itself.
Work is not for stability: when the mid-career PMET got throw out, and youth can’t even enter. The ladder is not available anymore.
If work no longer guarantees money, no longer provides identity, and no longer delivers stability…
You tell me.
Shall we work?
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