There’s been a few new acronyms coming around the block to describe the current existential millennial trend of saying fuck it and quitting. The New York Times reports this in an article titled “Welcome to the YOLO Economy”.
Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay. Others are scoffing at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and threatening to quit unless they’re allowed to work wherever and whenever they want…..
….If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s “YOLO” — “you only live once,” an acronym popularized by the rapper Drake a decade ago and deployed by cheerful risk-takers ever since. The term is a meme among stock traders on Reddit, who use it when making irresponsible bets that sometimes pay off anyway. (This year’s GameStop trade was the archetypal YOLO.) More broadly, it has come to characterize the attitude that has captured a certain type of bored office worker in recent months.
I can imagine these scenarios right now. “I’M QUITTING!!”, the millennial types into Slack. “YOLO am I rite?”. Suddenly their computer suddenly goes blank and a small line of text appears on the white screen - “please ship your Macbook back to this address…”
I have to say I like this trend. Burnout is real and should be avoided. When it comes down to it, why work long hours or work a job that you hate?
Dror Poleg writes about his take on the YOLO economy. He calls it instead the TINA economy (There is no alternative).
We live in a world with low-to-negative interest rates where your money is guaranteed to lose value by simply sitting in the bank. The cost of anything real is going up — houses, medical care, toilet paper, Coca Cola. All industries are or will soon be disrupted by technology, including the technology industry itself. Traditional institutions seem unable to rise up to the challenges ahead (pick your preferred left/right argument as to why).
Why would you sacrifice your best years for a corporate job if that job is not likely to be there in five — let alone ten — years? Why put your money on safe assets when they are guaranteed to diminish your purchasing power? Why would you trust the government to catch you if you fall when the government cannot fulfill its own basic functions even while you’re still on your feet?
He adds an even further take on it. If you’re not privileged enough to be working an office job, you literally have nothing to lose. There is no alternative (TINA). Embrace risk, or suffer guaranteed decline.
I’d like to think that there’s an easier explanation: maybe it’s just much easier to do whatever you want to do now.
If millennials are going full YOLO, TINA, or quitting en masse, we will see a moderate amount of people either one, evaluating the risk incorrectly or two, being completely fine with the downside when it happens.
That risk of failure is okay because our generational safety net has improved. Philo of MD&A has thoughts on when and why people pursue variance over expected value.
In the field of innovation, the distribution of returns strongly favors those who swing for the fences, as the downside is limited, but the upside is uncapped. As Jeff Bezos observed in his 2015 annual letter, in baseball the most runs you can get in one swing is four, but in business, “every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score a thousand runs”.
This payoff structure is one factor that can allow under-resourced startups to surpass established incumbents. Employees do not benefit from scoring a thousand runs in a single swing; they do, however, run the risk of getting fired if they are associated with a failure. Venture capitalists seek to better align incentives by sharing in the upside of any successes and funding founders who have failed before.
I think back to how my parents generation suffered a lot more than I did to get into America. They never had the opportunity to go YOLO until much later in their lives (building their own house and farm). Granted they were immigrants but the standard of working one job for 20+ years was for risk aversion. They both had great engineering jobs and made middle to upper class incomes where we lived in Vancouver.
I would suspect that nowadays there’s a larger percentage of people that are much luckier than our parents generation when it comes to career selection. We are now both more aware of the infinite upside of a high risk strategy combined with an understanding that there is lower downside risk in failure.
This can be seen by the fact that the U.S. has worked on its fall back plan. We have pumped trillions of dollars into making sure a recession will never occur again. And millennials have also now been quite content with being forced to moved back into their parents house in failure.
I’d like to think that we can all quit our “jobs” to go for the YOLO now. Around two years ago I spent around three to six months contemplating the benefits and consequences to quitting my job to work on a startup. It was the best decision I made, but at the time I had no reference for how common this was. Now it seems popular enough that the NYT can report on it.
In the age of content creators, freelancers, and a bunch of infinite ways to make money, more and more people that were before not willing to take the jump are now understanding that they can. We now have the luxury of figuring out what our dream path will be. And for many that will actually be the hardest part.