A popular economist says there's no separation between work and play anymore because everything Gen Z does is Googleable
Claire Savage/AP Photo
- An economist said Gen Z has no work-life separation because of social media.
- Yanis Varoufakis said everything Gen Z posts online can be used against them in job interviews.
- Some experts recommend wiping your social media history after leaving college.
A former finance minister of Greece said social media has removed any “separation between work and play” for Gen Z because everything they post online can be used against them by employers.
62-year-old Yanis Varoufakis, who is a well-known economist and academic, described the bleak reality for Gen Z at work in an interview with Fortune.
“If you are an upper middle-class kid and you have aspirations for life, you know that every video you upload on TikTok, everything you write on Twitter, everything you put on Facebook is going to be thrown at you during a job interview,” Varoufakis said.
He explained that Gen Z is not driven by “inner liberty” but rather by how they’re being perceived online.
“There’s no nice, clean separation between work and play anymore,” he says. “And that cannot leave that generation untouched. It really poisons their way of relating to one another because even [that] is going to become part of their CV.”
He added that Gen Z is an “alienated” group because of how social media has shaped their lives.
“They get much older, much faster as a result of living in a social media world in which they are compelled to try to find an identity which in the end is not self-driven.”
Social media has created a “boundary-less universe,” between people’s professional and personal lives, Ben Voyer, ESCP Business School professor previously told Business Insider.
Voyer suggests deleting phases of social media from when you’re young and wiping the slate clean when approaching graduation so that employers don’t find anything unsavory when they Google you.
He also advises workers to think carefully before posting about politics.
"If it's very important to who you are, to your identity, it's important that you express that," he told BI. "But for other other things, veering too much into politics is probably something that could backfire."