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”.
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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 2015, but they’re still barely above where they were in 2008 after a dreadful decade and a half for living standards.
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On top of that, the proportion of respondents who said their job had good opportunities for advancement fell from 35 to 26 per cent.
This fits with stories I hear from UK workers and employers about wage compression on the lower rungs due to the rising minimum wage, and from white-collar managers who complain they have to rate each team member’s performance on a forced-distribution curve, even if no one has performed badly.
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I suspect there is something else at play, too. We know from a different long-running data set – the Skills and Employment Survey – that Britons have experienced a remarkable loss of autonomy at work over recent years.
In 1992, 62 per cent of surveyed workers said they had a great deal of discretion over which tasks to do and how to do them. By 2024, only 34 per cent said the same.
This decline was initially most evident among people in lower-paid jobs, but between 2017 and 2024, “task discretion” fell among professionals and more highly skilled workers too. This does not appear to be UK-specific: a large continuing survey of workers across Europe has found “a concerning decrease in workers’ ability to influence collective work processes and apply their own ideas”.
I have begun to think of this as the “routinisation” of professional work. Why has it happened? When I last wrote about the phenomenon, I heard from many readers with whom it resonated. Most of them attributed the trend to increased regulatory demands and technology, which had made it easier for employers to codify, structure and monitor people’s work.
Some pointed out the benefits: allowing less leeway for personal discretion can make for more consistency and fewer mistakes – particularly important in safety-critical sectors such as medicine.
But I also heard from those who said their jobs had become more frustrating and less fun, from academics tied up in bureaucracy to tech workers who said so-called “agile” working practices had morphed into the opposite.
Employers have no doubt been quick to measure the gains of this routinisation process. Now we are beginning to see the costs. It’s not hard to understand why, if you have little control over how you work, you might feel less willing or able to go above and beyond.
Britons haven’t fallen out of love with work itself. They just don’t love to work like this. – The Financial Times Limited 2026
