No, people have not fallen out of love with work

Detailed summary

There is a more straightforward reason for employees’ decreased willingness to go above and beyond – not enough money and control ...

Have people lost the will to work? This theory – until now quite wishy-washy – appeared to gain some quantitative heft in the UK last week thanks to the latest edition of the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey.

The results revealed the lowest job satisfaction in the survey’s history and a broad-based decline since 2015 in the proportion of employees who said they were willing to work harder than was required to help their employer succeed. A rising share of Britons said they would prefer to work fewer than full-time hours, driven by men (both fathers and non-fathers).

This has revived a debate that took place in the aftermath of the pandemic, when young workers posted on TikTok about “quiet quitting” their jobs, while overworked youth in China spoke of “tang ping” (or “lying flat”). Some theorised that people no longer wanted to toil in a “bullshit job” that didn’t contribute to society, in the words of social anthropologist David Graeber.

But it is worth examining the rest of the data. The share of people who say they would prefer not to work at all remains a very low and stable 4 per cent. So why might they want to work less? It is not because they think their jobs are “bullshit”.

In fact, the proportion who say their job is useful to society has risen steadily from 54 per cent in 1989 to 73 per cent in 2025 – the highest in the survey’s history.

Nor is it because people have lost all ambition and drive. The workforce’s largest “unmet wants” in 2025 – the gap between the proportion of people rating a certain work attribute as important and those reporting that they actually have it – were for a high income and advancement opportunities. Both of these gaps have widened since 2015. This does not smack of a country that just wants to slack off.

But it does point to a more straightforward reason for people’s decreased willingness to go above and beyond for their employers: not enough money and progression.

Real weekly earnings in the UK have risen overall since…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Irish Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.