The kids aren’t alright! That’s what everyone’s been saying, anyway. From AI-addled brains to social lives stunted by the pandemic, everyone’s got a theory about what’s 'wrong' with Gen Z.
Perhaps the biggest, most distressing headlines are about why my generation just can’t seem to find jobs. The Canadian youth unemployment rate currently sits at 12.6%, well above pre-pandemic numbers and the national average; in many regions around the world, including the UK, the situation doesn’t look much different. Many point to AI (certainly a driving factor), but much has also been made of Gen Z’s own temperament. A recent survey of nearly 1,000 business leaders found that one in six companies is hesitant to hire recent Gen Z college grads. A New York Times column from July claims that “Gen Z fell out of love with work.” And in the Wall Street Journal last September, NYU business professor Suzy Welch suggested that Gen Z is “unemployable.”
But it’s not all empty hand-wringing. It might be true that, as Welch argued, Gen Z doesn’t share the values of prospective employers. According to Welch, companies look to hire people who value external markers of prestige and success, as well as 'workcentrism,' the desire to work for its own sake. In contrast, she wrote, Gen Z values pleasure, self-care, beauty, and individuality over endless grinding and achievements. These values might sound vapid, but they’ve emerged from a confluence of non-trivial factors: existential panic about climate change fuels our desire for short-term happiness, political instability makes us crave personal stability, and we're skeptical that working harder will actually lead to a better life. And maybe this is my own generational bias talking, but I think these are perfectly reasonable things to care about. Who wouldn’t want happiness, security, and self-sufficiency?
The glossy sheen of social media also obviously plays a role in all this, incentivizing young people to imitate that skincare routine; buy that iced latte with cold foam; savour that lazy Saturday afternoon. Pleasure, self-care, beauty, and individuality may not be values shared with the highest-performing cubicle dwellers, but they are increasingly the values fostered by our digital existences. And they seem to be the values associated with another kind of worker, one unheard of 20 years ago: the influencer.
It's perhaps no surprise, then, that young people covet the job – a survey from 2023 suggests that more than half of Gen Z have some desire to be influencers. And who can blame us? Influencers make their own hours, create content about the topics that interest them, and lead lives free from corporate policies and bureaucracy. Plus, the perks can be incredible: meals at fancy restaurants, high-end makeup and skincare products, tickets to exclusive events, and maybe even brushing elbows with celebrities – all in exchange for creating online content. Sure, there’s no dental insurance involved, but Gen Z-ers are perhaps more willing to trade the practical for the glamorous.
Influencing isn’t as unrealistic a direction as it once was. Bloomberg recently reported that, although content creation used to belong in “the same category as moving to Hollywood or trying to make the NFL,” it is increasingly becoming a “plausible career pivot.” You might assume that an influencer needs hundreds of thousands of followers before they start earning a penny, but “a small but loyal audience can now generate enough income to rival a midlevel salary.”
Welch wrote, rather ominously, about how young people ought to consider the misalignment between their values and the values of the companies they'd like to work at. “Values, after all, are choices,” she told readers. “Like all choices, they have consequences” – the implication being that, if Gen Z-ers want to earn a living, they’ll have to fall in line.
But if influencing is a viable option, maybe the new generation can happily reject workcentrism.
To test my theory, I spoke with four influencers in their twenties and early thirties, with follower counts ranging from 1,600 to 111,000. I asked them about how much money they make, how they make it, and whether they believe that content creation is Gen Z’s solution to an increasingly punishing job market.
For Chompoo (@chomchawa), a late millennial with 44,000 Instagram followers, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Chompoo made content at home in Thailand for roughly six years before moving to Canada nearly three years ago. “I continued [influencing] when I moved to Canada because the job market is so hard,” she told me.
Chompoo has been making money since the early days of her career. While studying abroad in China, she had the idea to record a video – to send to her mom, but also to post online. Amazingly, a potential sponsor reached out to her almost immediately, and her career started to blossom.
Today, Chompoo works as a full-time freelancer making content online, and she sometimes picks up other gigs like emceeing events. Her annual income from influencing is around $30,000, and it doesn’t come consistently – in a given month, she’ll make anywhere from $300 to $5,000 through a combination of sponsorships, content monetization on YouTube and Facebook, and affiliate programs (which allow influencers to earn a small commission on product sales).
The job, she told me, is difficult – something I heard from influencers across the board. Content creators know that their coveted lifestyles look both frictionless and glamorous, and they were all quick to emphasize that influencing is hard work – and that they never clock out.
“You cannot separate working and your life anymore because everything can be content,” Chompoo told me, explaining that her boyfriend was initially incredulous at her filming content during their dates. “This thing can be more money, that thing can be engagement… Because your income is not stable. It’s not like a full-time job.”
Of the influencers I spoke to, Chompoo is the only one who has turned content creation into her full-time career, but two others – Tiffany (@foodie.tiffany) and Miche (@curious_miche) – hope they’re on their way. Both are Gen Z influencers with under 2,500 followers, and while they’ve made some money from content creation, they both have other jobs to pay the bills.
As a small creator who has posted regularly since February 2022, Tiffany isn’t making much income online (yet). Instead, she often does gifted collaborations with restaurants, where she films content in exchange for free food, usually at a value of $100 to $250. She has done a couple of paid collaborations recently, but, for her, “it’s hard to put yourself at a price when it’s something you love. I always feel so uncomfortable charging people.”
For now, in addition to filming content about food and travel, Tiffany works full time in the transportation industry. Asked if she’d ever consider shifting to full-time content creation, she didn’t hesitate: “I would love to.” She speculated that any content creator would take that leap if they knew they could make it work financially.
Miche is in the same boat as Tiffany. When we spoke in August, she was working four days a week in the service industry and three days 'side-hustling' on her social media content, focusing on sustainable fashion and interior decorating. In her roughly three years of content creation, she’s made around $4,000 from her efforts, charging anywhere from $300 to $1,000 for a piece of content. “As I grow, hopefully those prices will increase,” she said.
For both Miche and Tiffany, the production process can vary, depending on the video. Some require a lot of effort to film and edit; others are short, spontaneous clips. Both told me that, despite their best efforts and careful planning, it’s almost always the most random, low-effort piece of content that goes viral. “It’s so tricky to be a prisoner to the algorithm,” Miche said.
Still, she told me: “There’s a lot more opportunity in content creation, if you have a passion that you can turn into a profitable business for yourself.” Nine-to-fives can be difficult to secure, not to mention creatively stifling. On the other hand, said Miche, “if you, let’s say, like thrifting, interiors, fashion, why not capitalize on those things and share that love with others?”
Chompoo, Miche, and Tiffanny are all hard workers; while they manage day jobs or competing freelance obligations, they take additional time out of their personal lives to produce content. But none of them seems to value work for its own sake – rather, Chompoo loves the variety and flexibility of the work, Miche loves connecting with people, and Tiffany loves creating content so much that she sometimes struggles to charge for it. Throughout my interviews for this piece, the word 'love' came up again, and again, and again.
Perhaps, then, young people aren’t so 'unemployable' after all. Perhaps they’re actually willing to work very hard, even at the cost of their personal lives, if the work feels worthwhile or interesting to them. This isn't 'workcentrism' in the way that Welch defines it, but it is, on some level, a willingness to centre work.
Of course, though, the real question is: Can content creation earn Gen Z-ers a good, consistent living? It’s tricky, especially for Canadian creators, who have more niche audiences and fewer avenues for monetization. Many Canadian creators create content specific to the country or city they’re in, and even Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is less populated and less touristed than somewhere like New York. And some forms of income available to American influencers aren’t accessible to their Canadian peers; for example, TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program, which lets large creators across seven different countries get paid for videos longer than a minute, is not available in Canada.
Still, the atmosphere seems cautiously hopeful. “Right now I am just paying the bills through my service industry position, but the content opportunities are there, and it’s within reach,” Miche told me. Tiffany echoed the optimism: “It’s possible to turn what some may call a hobby into a full-time 9-5. It is possible.”
Admittedly, though, I remained unconvinced until I spoke to Amanda (@mandaround), a Gen Z content creator with 111,000 followers who started out posting informative videos about Canadian universities. Today, she’s working on law school applications, and her Instagram bio describes her content as “unis, careers, finances, & infinite sidequests!”
Amanda and I are roughly the same age, and we both graduated from the same university in 2024. But when I asked her about her influencing income, she was saying numbers that my bank account has never even dreamed of.
“So far this year, I’ve had about $190,000 hit my account,” Amanda said, when we spoke in early September. She added that she’s expecting to make a total of $300,000 by the end of 2026, bringing her all-time content creation revenue past a million dollars, over the four years in which she’s been paid for her content creation work. “That’s quite a lot, obviously,” she said – even if, these days, 20% of that income goes towards paying her management team.
Amanda has been creating content since 2020 and making money from it since 2022. Her first-ever video, about McMaster University's integrated science program, reached 60,000 views – which, at the time, felt to her like going viral. From there, she started posting about other programs at McMaster and other Canadian universities, and brands started flocking to her. “I was just filling this niche that nobody was in yet. At that point, nobody was doing Canadian student content with such a heavy emphasis on the Canadian lens,” Amanda said.
For one brand campaign, she might make $50,000, a number she knows many people may think is ridiculous. But, Amanda pointed out, it’s much cheaper for brands to pay her than to pay for TV advertising, which requires writers, actors, a production company, and a camera crew, all for a 30-second commercial that someone might catch a glimpse of while channel-surfing.
“Nowadays, you have people like me, who have very specific audiences that they can reach through a voice that isn’t necessarily ad-like,” Amanda said. “People trust me, so they’re more likely to engage and are willing to listen to what I talk about. And [brands] can pay me $50,000 to do ideation, script, film, editing.”
She did warn that brand deals can be harder to come by for Canadian creators, and admitted that she makes “a disproportionate amount of money” relative to her follower count; she suspects that her audience – young, engaged, and specific without being too niche – makes her “really attractive to brands.” Still, Amanda does believe that content creation is a viable way for people to earn money. Asked whether she thinks the challenging job market has made influencing more popular, she agreed that it’s playing a role.
“I don’t know too many people who are jobless and then decide to try content creation. Generally, what I have seen is: people are working corporate, they hate their job, and because the job market is so bad, they can’t really easily switch jobs,” Amanda said. “So they stay on and try to become a content creator while they’re doing corporate [work], with the eventual goal of leaving that job.”
Even for people who aren’t looking to leave their full-time jobs, she said, there’s a strong financial incentive: high cost of living can prompt them to start influencing, as a way to “maybe actually afford to go out to dinner a couple times a month.”
Amanda’s influencing income could pay for a lot of dinners out. She’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars, and she’s done that while adhering to a set of principles about which brand deals to accept: the product has to actually be helpful to students, and that means no tobacco, no alcohol, and absolutely no gambling. She’s turned down “at least six figures of income” from brands that don’t align with her values.
For some, influencing absolutely could be the solution to the Gen Z unemployment crisis; for others, it’s more like a salve to the affordability crisis.
I didn’t expect to identify with the influencers I spoke to. I like to think of myself as someone with below-average screentime for my age (please don’t fact check this), and I probably covet dental coverage more than celebrity sightings (although, hey, it’s a tossup). Still, researching this as a Gen Z-er, I couldn’t help but turn every question back on myself. Do I see the world through yesterday’s corporate values, or are my professional impulses distinctly contemporary? And, if I do share similar values to my Gen Z peers (as I suspect I do), how is it that I’m contentedly working a nine-to-five? On that note, should I start an Instagram account where I post content about being a business journalist? “Hey guys! Today, I listened to three podcasts about the bond market. Leave a comment below if you have concerns about the global bond selloff!”
...Okay, I’m probably not going to do that. But on some level, we’re all wrestling with the same question: is it possible to get paid well and pursue work you truly love and believe in? Gen Z influencers seem stubbornly intent on giving it a try – and that resonates with me. Throughout university, I remained convinced that it was possible to follow my writerly dreams and pay my bills, even as everyone was telling me otherwise. I’m happy to report that, today, I’m doing both of those things.
I’m not saying it’s always true that ‘when there’s a will, there’s a way.’ But it’s certainly true that, if there is a way, you’ll need a will to find it. Gen Z-ers – with our apparently wacky fixations on caring for ourselves, defining ourselves as individuals, and being happy – seem to know that.
As a result, influencing is decidedly ‘in.’ For some, it absolutely could be the solution to the Gen Z unemployment crisis; for others, it’s more like a salve to the affordability crisis, a way to supplement your income so that you don't spend your entire paycheque on rent for your studio apartment. Crucially, it’s a way to pursue something you’re passionate about – even if, in many cases, that passion can’t yet pay the bills on its own. Many side-hustling influencers have full-time ambitions, and the opportunities are only growing. Down the line, content creation might be more common as a career than as a side gig.
In her Wall Street Journal op-ed, Welch conceded that “maybe business will change someday,” away from anxious workcentrism and towards balance and passion. But she suggested that this cultural shift is a long way away, that it could only happen “when Generation Z is in charge.” I disagree. As boomers continue aging out of the workforce, businesses will always need new hires. And increasingly, these prospective new hires may not need them back – not when self-employment through social media is becoming a more viable career option.
Will Gen Z flip corporate culture? Or will they go down swinging (i.e. making TikToks about it)? For the moment, in any case, it’s a bit of a standoff between the corporate-minded old guard and the unconventionally enterprising youths they’re hesitant to hire. I know who I'm betting on – and hey, maybe I will make an Instagram reel about it.
