Hey, guys, It's Chelsea from The Financial Diet.
And this week's video is brought to you
by our own society at TFD.
If you haven't joined yet, there is so much that you're missing.
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Both hustle culture generally, but also the personal finance
media bubble, have been a bit of a breeding
ground over the past 10 years for advice that isn't just
bad on a technical level, but also profoundly damaging to us
on a personal level.
And these range from day to day sort of productivity habits,
to long-term investment advice.
So because we've got a fair amount to get into, let's
dive into six pieces of success advice
that are actually terrible for you.
So if you haven't joined, hit that Join button right
below this video, and we'll see you at the society at TFD.
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And this week, I wanted to extend
an olive branch to my Gen Z followers
or any Gen Z person that may be watching this and thinking,
who the hell is this crusty old [BLEEP]??
It's me.
I'm a millennial.
I'm soon to be 34 years old.
I've learned a few things.
And now that I'm on TikTok, I'm really expanding.
I feel like I'm really getting an education in Gen Z culture.
And it's worth noting that I'm not just a millennial.
I'm also a millennial who has spent basically
her entire working life in media, which
means I have been witness to so many trends
and think pieces and cultural stories and assessments
about my generation that I felt were completely unfair
and untethered from reality.
And it looks so far like Gen Z is
being subject to a lot of the same terrible media coverage.
I recently saw an article about how you guys are ruining
after work drinks, which I think someone best summed it up
on Twitter by saying, really ruining it
for all of those men who don't want to go home to their wives
and children, which I think is like the largest contingent who
is a big proponent of socializing for long hours
after work with your coworkers.
So to kind of cut through the noise and sort
of relate some of the most important things
that I've learned in navigating my 20s and early 30s,
I wanted to give this open letter
to Gen Z with some of my best insights.
Take it or leave it, besties.
First, I want to say, do not fall into the hustle culture
trap.
I will say that it seems on the surface, at least,
that Gen Z is already quite a bit better about this
than millennials were.
But it's still worth reiterating.
Because if there is one way that Silicon Valley and the startup
wave really ruined work for the rest of us,
it was the adoption of hustle culture
as a widespread default. Elon Musk once famously tweeted
that no one changes the world on 40 hours a week,
which for someone whose company's productivity
and profitability both skyrocketed
after switching to a 32-hour work week,
I personally call [BLEEP] on.
But other gurus have shared that same sentiment.
Gary Vaynerchuk wrote the following in his 2009 book,
Crush It! exclamation point.
"Live your passion."
OK, I got to get through this quote.
"What does that mean, anyway?
It means that when you get up for work every morning,
every single morning you are pumped,
because you get to talk about or work with
or do the thing that interests you the most in the world.
You don't live for vacations, because you don't need
a break from what you're doing.
Working, playing, and relaxing are one in the same.
You don't even pay attention to how many hours
you're working, because to you, it's not really work.
You're making money, but you do whatever
it is you're doing for free."
Um, also, I just feel like aside from how toxic
that is, I'm like, this is just like big,
doesn't want to be home with his family energy, which is,
again, the same thing that's driving people
to constantly want to go out after work with your coworkers
and further blur the lines between when you're working
and when you're off the clock.
You also have Kim Kardashian, who
famously asserted that no one wants to her work anymore
these days.
But as we know by now, hustle culture and the mindset
that we always need to be putting work first
in order to be happy and successful,
is literally not good for us.
"A study published in Occupational Medicine in 2017
suggests that longer working hours
are associated with poorer mental health
status, and increased anxiety and depression symptoms.
Long weekly working hours were also
associated with reduced sleep time and increased sleep
disturbance.
These results confirm the importance
of maintaining regular weekly working hours
and avoiding excessive overtime work in order
to reduce the risk of anxiety, depression, and sleep
disorders."
And as I mentioned in the beginning,
many millennials have fallen into this trap,
sometimes being referred to as the Happy
to Be Here Generation, overworking ourselves
to a point of burnout to prove that we
deserve to be in the room.
I've done a video recently on imposter syndrome
and how that all plays into it, and quite frankly, needs to go.
But even if you don't get to a place of burnout,
there was definitely in the past two decades
a normalization of working far beyond what
you were being paid to do just to justify that low paid job.
And of course, the entire girl-boss phenomenon
just sort of pink washed all of those incredibly toxic beliefs
and made it more acceptable and passable as feminism
for a truly cursed amount of time.
As Anne Helen Petersen described in her pivotal essay of 2019,
"To describe millennial burnout accurately as
to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality.
That we're not just high school graduates or parents
or knowledge workers, but all of the above, while recognizing
our status quo.
We're deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs
for less pay and less security, struggling
to achieve the same standards of living as our parents,
operating in psychological and physical precariousness,
all while being told that if we just work harder,
meritocracy will prevail and we'll begin thriving."
Now, it is easier said than done to put up
some of these professional boundaries,
but one of my biggest messages to Gen Z
has to be that at every possible turn, assert those boundaries
and never slip into giving your employers the impression
that you are willing to work more than you're being
paid for just to keep your job.
If you start becoming the person who answers emails at 9:00 PM,
you're going to be expected to be that person,
and suffer repercussions when you suddenly
stop being that person.
Plus, you're also putting pressure
on your coworkers to also be that person, which sucks.
But I do want to play devil's advocate on this
for one second, and say that, do not
think that doing just the bare minimum in any given
pursuit in life will get you where you want to be.
I've talked about this in a Members Only video,
which you can see here and is at the link in our description.
But I have seen some pretty darn entitled and inconsiderate
behavior from, I hate to say it, but especially
younger contractors and job applicants and stuff like that,
that I do feel goes beyond the act of setting boundaries,
and tips more into making other people's lives harder through,
to be honest, a certain level of selfishness or lack
of accountability.
I think a good thing to remember in any given group situation,
whether it's a school project or a team of employees,
that the hyper individualist, me above everyone's
self-careification of how we think about taking care
of ourselves, often does come at the expense of other people.
So healthy boundary-setting is things
like not answering emails past your workday,
or not taking on projects that are well
beyond your scope of work.
But it doesn't involve bailing out
on things at the last minute or leaving things
unfinished that someone else is going to have to work overtime
in order to fix.
Another thing I want to say to Gen Z,
is that you need to be even more wary
of financial misinformation than you think you do.
It is incredibly easy to stumble on bad advice on the internet,
especially when it comes to money.
One of the rare men we trust at TFD TM, The Plain Bagel,
has taken it upon himself to do a series reacting
to the worst investing videos he's seen on TikTok.
And while there are organizations in place
to help consumers and place regulations on banking
and financial services, like the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, online creators are just not held
to the same standards of not spreading misinformation,
thanks to freedom of speech.
In the past, pf advice was largely gate-kept and only
accessible to rich white men.
It's much more accessible now, which is a good thing,
but that does mean that it's a lot easier to get swept up
in misinformation when it comes to financial planning.
Get rich quick schemes are nothing new,
but social media, and especially TikTok,
have made it so that it's even easier to target and exploit
the most vulnerable people.
According to Bloomberg, "The more vulnerable
the person, the more that they will
look for the unreal opportunity to make a financial killing,
where in point of fact, they may be
killed by that very decision," said
EU Financial Services Commissioner Mairead
McGuinness.
"There's need for discussion both
within the financial system and those who are part of it,
but also with the social media providers
as to what is acceptable."
And it's really important to note
that when we look, for example, at the recent crypto meltdowns,
the people who have generally been left most vulnerable,
who were holding the bag when the music stopped,
are in many cases, the most marginalized communities.
Disproportionately lower income people, people of color,
et cetera.
And this is no secret.
These communities are actively being
preyed on by this misinformation in the same way
that stay at home mothers on a military base with almost
no job opportunities are being preyed upon by MLMs.
We at TFD aren't going to name them,
but we know some people who have blown up
on TikTok with terrible unqualified financial advice.
And there's really little that can be done on a day
to day basis to prevent them, when
the platforms and the regulators aren't stepping in.
So at the bare minimum, and I'm not
saying you have to trust me, there
are plenty of good sources, be extremely
choosy about who you choose to listen to about money.
And on a similar note, I would just
want to tell Gen Z to be pretty careful about what
you post online.
Now, this is not like what we were
told when we were graduating high school, which
was like, if there's a picture of you
on Facebook drinking a beer, you'll never get hired.
Obviously, that was not true.
There's still photo albums of me dancing
at a nightclub on Facebook looking a whole mess,
so clearly, that didn't prevent anything in my life.
But social media has increasingly
made it easy to overshare our lives past what we would likely
do if we thought about it more clearly.
And also, to blend the personal and professional
to the extent where basically every aspect of our lives
is open for monetization.
A recent TFC episode that I did with amazing internet person
and friend, Franchesca Ramsay, was
all about the ways in which over-mixing
her personal and professional lives
and sharing a bit more than she should have
about what was going on in her personal life, really
ended up costing her.
And I do recommend you guys check out that video.
But this is something that many, many influencers have spoken
to, and even just everyday people,
who regret some of the stuff they posted
have had to reckon with.
Oversharing and social media burnout
have actually led to what could be
considered as a mass exodus of influencers from social media.
According to BuzzFeed, "Many creators
have expressed frustrations about Instagram
over the past year, and some are making big changes about how
they run their business.
Fashion blogger, Natalie Borton announced in March 2021 that
she would be stepping back from Instagram partnerships,
saying that she was 'ready to change things up.'
Lynzy Coughlan of the blog Lynzy and Co
announced in November 2021 that she would also
be leaving Instagram and deleted her account, which
had nearly 500,000 followers.
Home renovation bloggers Anna and Gabe Liesemeyer recently
said that they would be taking a step back from Instagram,
posting less on their Instagram stories, phasing out ad deals,
and working on growing their design business.
And Erin Kern of the blog Cotton Stem officially quit
the creative industry entirely at the end of last year,
telling her nearly 600,000 Instagram followers,
'please know you'll be missed.'"
So there are some things that I regret
sharing in the past, especially when I was working
at another media company and had to write four articles a day
to make quota, and was just writing
any old thing on that keyboard.
But overall, over the past several years,
I do feel pretty comfortable with the balance I've
achieved between the way that social media is
additive to my life and enables me to do more of what I love
and have more freedom, versus what I give to it.
For example, I for the past several years,
have really basically posted almost nothing about my friends
or family or details of my personal life.
And that really hasn't at all affected me negatively.
Like, I'm still able to share a lot,
and I still have a really great relationship with my community,
but I don't feel vulnerable.
I also have never done any kind of sponcon or ads
on any of my personal accounts.
Like, that's all pretty siloed in TFD,
which I do think is another good boundary to keep.
But overall, I do think that when Gen Z is navigating
social media, just especially given how incredibly easy
it is to share and how far and wide things can travel
and how much people come to expect more of what you share
even once, it's really worth doing less and allowing
that to ramp up slowly versus giving too much of yourself
early on and then being stuck in a position
where if you suddenly don't want to share as much,
people aren't interested in you.
Lastly, and this is just a personal bone I'm picking,
but I'm just going to say it to Gen Z, and take it as you will.
Please stop making canceling plans into a personality.
Like, this stuff is all over social media.
And I've done rants about it before, which
I'll link in the description, but I really
do feel like a lot of the therapy advice
and the self-care advice that has really proliferated
on the internet has just been incredibly
selfish and self-centered.
And as I mentioned in the point about work,
like, actively to the detriment of other people.
As I pointed out in some of those videos,
like, if you are canceling plans at the last minute,
by definition, someone is being canceled on.
If you are showing up late, by definition,
someone else's time has been wasted.
And that's not to say that things don't happen,
but to make a joke about like, oh, that amazing feeling
when like you bail on plans at the last minute to stay in bed,
it's like [BLEEP] you, dude.
Like, someone else, like the insinuation
that your time and your energy and your calendar
are so much more valuable than everyone
else's, and their frustration or disappointment or wasted time
is of no value, is just, to me, it's like anti community,
it's anti, it's anti-human.
It's anti-human.
I'm like the Jordan Peterson of hating
when people cancel things and are really, really
inconsiderate.
That's my brand.
And also, as I've mentioned before on the channel,
but it is worth repeating, if you
want to look at the actual social problems that
are actually really destroying American's lives,
loneliness and social isolation are about as far up there
as you can get.
So the idea of somehow making ourselves
better by further distancing and discounting each other
is pretty darn counterintuitive.
America was facing mental health challenges
prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that
were fueled in part by an epidemic of loneliness
that continues today.
But now, according to confirmatory data
from Morning Consult commissioned by Cigna,
more than half of US adults, 58%, are considered lonely.
This is fairly consistent with prepandemic research that
showed 61% of adults experiencing loneliness
in 2019 after a seven percentage point increase from 2018.
And yet, some of the most popular and most relatable
social media posts are about the relief of canceling plans.
And do not get me wrong, I am all about boundaries
and I do understand that sometimes things happen and we
all have to give grace to each other.
I totally get that.
But a good boundary to set is first and foremost,
not committing to things that you probably
won't be able to see through.
But the other is that there's a big difference between having
to cancel on someone or be extremely late because
of an extenuating circumstance, and just
doing it for your own pleasure at the expense
of the other person I really believe
that if we don't have community, if we're not
taking care of each other and showing up for each other,
that we have nothing.
And there is basically limitless data
that shows that people are happier
and more satisfied and more fulfilled the more community
and human connections they have.
It's part of the reason rich people do statistically
become assholes, because they become more socially isolated.
They don't have to rely on communities.
They don't have to interact with each other
if they don't want to.
They can pay people to do basically everything
and never have to see another human being.
Community is all we have.
And if I can impart one personal piece of wisdom to Gen Z,
it's that the last thing you want to be discounting
is the precious community that you have around you.
And not answering work emails after 5
PM is not the same thing as bailing on your friend's
birthday two hours before her party starts
because you'd rather stay home and watch Netflix.
One is healthy boundaries, the other makes you a dick.
As always, guys, thank you for watching,
and don't forget to hit the Subscribe button
and to come back every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday
for new and awesome videos.
Bye.