I'd rather be lazy than live like a millennial workaholic

No deadlines in my dreams

A few months ago, at 2 am I was hunched over my laptop. I had skipped dinner, was behind on my work, and the only thing growing faster than my to-do list was the twitch in my eye. Somewhere between classes, project meetings, a job, and research work, I found myself blocking five minutes for a stretch break … on Google Calendar. Safe to say, that was my breaking point—not a dramatic collapse, just the grim realisation that slay can mean crushing it or being crushed. Spoiler: I was the one getting slayed.

For Gen Z, hustle culture is not so much about making money, it is about making social capital, making meaning. Us, post-1997 babies have inherited a world where our worth is measured in LinkedIn internships and certification updates, side hustles and a mythical “10x mindset” alongside excelling in academic pursuits. We grew up watching 16-year-olds become millionaires on Instagram, startup founders drop out of college to “change the world”. The message was crystal clear: if you are not disrupting an industry by breakfast, you are already behind.

And I fell prey to this. As a 20-year-old college student with resources, a good education and a few strengths available at my disposal, I was almost wired to think that if I was not doing something 24/7, I was either wasting my potential or doing injustice to the privilege I have. It was a rabbit hole that seemed never-ending. I was chasing targets that were designed to keep me chasing. But now, it feels like a bad hangover that I am desperate to shake off.

The slippery slope of self-worth

With hustle culture, success is often tallied like an inventory list. Before it used to be ‘mere paas bank balance hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai!’ Today, the answer is murkier: mere paas 500+ LinkedIn connections hai, tech-giant internship hai or worse, mere paas anxiety ki subscription hai. And unlike the noble son in Deewar, we can’t even retort ‘mere paas ma hai’, because you’ve left her on read for the 100th time again as you desperately scramble to keep up with your self-imposed hyper-productivity.

I used to think my value was fully tied to my output: awards, deadlines, hustle points. But the goalposts constantly kept moving. I won a university debate championship award? Someone’s got a shinier trophy on a bigger platform. I thought of graphic designing on the side to build a portfolio while I was at university? Someone’s already on Shark Tank pitching their startup idea to Aman Gupta. It felt like running on a treadmill—maximum effort and speed, but no real destination. Work always weighed over life, and yet it still never felt like you were doing enough… or anything.

The hustle hangover

Somewhere between ‘It girl’ morning routines that began at 4 am, influencers posting about grinding in silence, and being sold the dream of becoming our own CEO—we had just had enough. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z survey says only 6% of us want to climb the corporate ladder. We choose balance and wellness over constant success in work: we are not lazy, we are just done bleeding energy for a system that is built for machines and not humans. If even Elon Musk—the guy whose motto is ‘I will sleep when I colonize Mars’—admitted overwork negatively impacted his health and relationships, then Gen Z must be onto something, right?

We no longer glorify the grind, but question it. My friend Priya, a 23-year-old marketing executive, told me how her manager, who’s in his late 30s, often makes snide comments about her leaving the office at 5 pm sharp, when her work hours end: “Back in my day, we stayed extra to get our work done,” he tsk-tsks (here’s how experts recommend you tackle a bad boss). Another friend, Arjun, a 21-year-old working his first job at a Gurugram tech giant gets passive aggressive emails from his team lead about “commitment” when he does not respond to weekend messages. The generational divide in how we approach work, is real and exhausting.

But here is the thing: millennials, who in their formative years of life, have had to live through multiple economic recessions and tectonic shifts in technology, had to internalise the grind and burnout in order to stay afloat. And because everyone and everything around them reinforced it. Gen Z meanwhile, had their coming-of-age during a global pandemic that forced the entire world into a huge pause. We watched everything stop, watched people realise who “essential workers” actually were, we saw that the hustle economy crumbled under its own weight the moment we could not physically show up to prove our worth. This pandemic exhaustion shaped our ambition differently. We learnt that time is finite, life is fragile and maybe, just maybe, we do not need to optimize every breathing moment. We learnt we needed to take our lives back.

The Gen Z-approved anti-hustle toolkit

If like me, you’re ready to stop grinding (yourself down into a paste), and start bringing some balance to your days, here are some tools I’ve been using to work smarter and live harder:

Prioritise with purpose: Forgo to-do lists that keep piling up, for the Top 5. Write down five non-negotiable tasks each day. Do them well, then rest without guilt.

Work smarter, not longer: Ditch 12-hour marathons pretending to be productive. Your brain works best in 90-minute bursts with brief breaks in between. It is about the passion in your hours, not just the hours.

Build an emotional firewall: Keep your self-worth separate from work output. Byung Chul Han, a South Korean philosopher rightly mentions in his book, The Burnout Society, that mass burnout and depression is a result of an “imperative to achieve”, where we start working as a perpetual productivity machine. One bad day, one missed deadline, one rejection, does not define your value as a human being.

Create tiny rituals: A 10-minute walk, a 30-minute padel match with friends, one daily sit-down meal with the family. These small moments are not distractions, they are reset buttons you can program into your day.

Be a quiet quitter: Don’t worry, despite the name this doesn’t involve actually quitting a job—’quiet quitting’ just means rejecting overachievement and endless hustle culture. Do your job well, but do not let it dictate your life.

Invest in joy: Keep emotional energy for hobbies, friends or binge-watching Gossip Girl for the 10th time. Ensure you have activities that you do outside of work—research shows having hobbies that are not connected to your professional life can help in mitigating stress and improving overall well being.

Burnout used to feel like a bruised badge of ambition for me, a rite of passage I had to endure. But today, I see it as a vibrant red flag. I’m still ambitious, I am still hungry to build, create, and lead, but I am done treating my body like a heated laptop running 25 tabs with 2% battery and no charger in sight. So, I am going to try to hit pause, breathe, and reheat that cup of chai while I’m at it. The world isn’t going to end, and in that quieter moment, I just might find my way back to myself.