Why is everyone younger than me allergic to work?

Finalement! The French have realised that the quintessential crisis facing the world of work is not the question of finding employment but of how that employment must be shaped, bent and often broken to meet the mercurial needs of the modern employee.

A new non-fiction book, for instance, called The Age of Laziness, describes France as a country where “young people” are seemingly allergic to the demands of hard, unglamorous work (the restaurant sector especially). Meanwhile, a new generation of French TikTok stars led by the Sorbonne graduate Laurène Lévy are instructing their guileless followers to be “militant for wellbeing at work”, to be their best selves on the job and accept only the most nurturing, respectful and lucrative appointments.And if these terms cannot be met, Levy also provides handy hints for getting fired and snagging the best possible unemployment benefits.

We’ve known about this for years over here, or at least since the end of the pandemic, when we began to realise just how arbitrary our jobs really were. The furlough scheme had revealed that work and remuneration were actually two separate things. The death toll from Covid made most people rethink their deepest priorities. While the social media boom had, overnight, transformed digital natives into wannabe box-room superstars who wouldn’t lift a finger for less than a grand a day, and certainly wouldn’t take orders from anyone who hadn’t yet recognised their essential fabulousness or honoured the supreme significance of their psychological and emotional wellbeing.

I saw this coming, though, long before the pandemic. I’d share regular coffees with confident young graduates, film enthusiasts mostly, who wanted advice for breaking into journalism but always seemed crestfallen when I told them the truth. I started as a part-time scribbler who supplemented his income on north London building sites, then in west London restaurants, and only gradually segued into full-time journalism. The kids were always horrified by this, the ones I meet today even more so. My favourite was a master’s graduate who, after I advised him to get some part-time waitering work, scoffed aloud, scrunched up his nose and said, “The thing is, me? I’m all about the writing.” Yeah, and he’s currently all about living back at home with his mother and not being a journalist, the pompous plonker.

The “benefits influencer” Laurène Lévy

Personally, I have no regrets about my time spent toiling in the kitchen of a high-end Soho restaurant, despite being throttled by a chef — or, for that matter, working on a building site where abuse and flying shovels were hurled at me by an angry foreman. Scary at the time, yes, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to my own kids, but it’s also where the juicy stuff resides. That’s how you learn about people and the way to handle belligerence and anger. And the gift back then was in seeing how the same people changed, how conflicts dissipated, and how everyone moved on without getting cancelled. We weren’t cursed with the luxury of a flouncy storm-off, followed by wilting for weeks under the duvet and furiously posting social media rants that begin, “You won’t believe what happened in work today! #mymentalhealthjourneyisincrisis”.

It’s not just the kids, though. I also struggle with the “quiet quitters” my own age. You know? The ones who are using the working from home employment template as cover for sticking it to the man, which ultimately means giving the rest of us more hassle. I recently met someone who giggled and did the naughty finger quotes around “working from home” when describing his weekly schedule to me, meaning he was really a three-day-a-week quiet quitter getting paid a five-day-a-week salary. I wanted to reply, “Wow. So you’re basically stealing?” I didn’t though, and just steadied myself with the sobering knowledge that soon, inevitably, factoring in the growing number of quiet quitters combined with the oversensitive TikTokkers and swathes of young quitters, there’s only going to be a handful of gullible twits left, including me, doing all the work. Quel dommage indeed!

Pampered pooches on patrol

Never liked those Border Force sniffer dogs. Can’t stand that moment when they breathe all over your bags at the airport and you stand stock-still, slightly stressed and wondering if your life and future freedom, for those few seconds, depends entirely on the nostrils of an excitable mutt who could reasonably make a terrible mistake and land you in a lot of bother, public humiliation and subsequent transport chaos. It transpires that I now have an even better reason to resent the little curs after official Home Office figures revealed that the government last year spent £1,000 on Swedish dog massage classes for their staff.

Yep, let that insanity sink in. Border Force staff were apparently sent to canine massage therapy centres in Worcestershire and Herefordshire to learn how best to administer full-body doggie rubbing, kneading and tapping to relieve doggie stress and enhance doggie happiness. Strange. I have a dog. And you know how I relieve her stress and enhance her happiness? I walk her and I feed her. End of.

The real appeal of Pilates

And you thought Pilates was a mind-body exercise programme designed for strengthening the core and improving posture, balance and flexibility? Nope, apparently, and for women only, Pilates is an absolute f*** factory, or sheer exercise Viagra. A recent study from Sakarya University in Turkey found that women who took up Pilates saw a 95 per cent improvement in their desire, orgasm rates and overall sexual satisfaction within just 12 weeks. It’s something, they suspect, connected to the strengthening of the pelvic floor muscles but, unsurprisingly, I have questions. My sister, for instance, has become obsessed with Pilates. She loves it so much and does it so often that she’s become an instructor. I don’t know what her husband thinks about all this but, well, he certainly smiles a lot.