Generation Z can't work alongside people with different views and don't have the skills to debate. - Says Channel 4 boss as she cites the pandemic as the main cause of the workplace challenge.

Young people in the workplace don't have the skills to debate, disagree and work alongside people with different opinions, Channel 4's chief executive has said.

Speaking at the Royal Television Society's Cambridge Convention, Alex Mahon said 'particularly post-pandemic' Gen Z youngsters 'haven't got the skills to discuss' and 'haven't got the skills to disagree'.

She said this phenomenon, which was being seen in the workplace, was a 'dangerous step change'.

The Channel 4 boss cited the time youngsters had spent 'being out of colleges' during the pandemic, meaning they had not been exposed as much to 'people with a difference of opinion'.

Gen Z usually refers to people born between the middle to late 1990s and the early 2010s.

Ms Mahon told the Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention: 'What we are seeing with young people who come into the workplace - particularly post pandemic - with this concentration of short form content [short videos on services like Tik Tok and YouTube] is they haven't got the skills to debate things.

'They haven't got the skills to discuss, they haven't got the skills to disagree and commit because they haven't been raised, particularly with being out of colleges to have those kind of debates, to get to the point where you've got people with a difference of opinion to you and you're happy to work alongside that, and that is a really dangerous step change in my view that we are seeing.'

Last year Channel 4 carried out research which showed these youngsters are less tolerant of others' views than their parents or grandparents.

The study found that young people could therefore be said to be 'less liberal' than their elders. The research branded this phenomenon as the 'rise of the Young Illiberal Progressives' or 'Yips'.

During Ms Mahon's appearance at the event she unveiled new research which showed that many 'associate their short form social media consumption with feeling a lack of control'.

It was added: 'When the algorithm is in charge, people say they feel emotionally out of control - the immediate dopamine-hit fades rapidly and they are left feeling empty.'

It added that it gave them a sense that their lives had been 'encroached upon'.

The research said viewers in Britain felt 'anxious about video overload'.

People watch over five hours per day 'and the video day is lengthening', Ms Mahon revealed, adding that 'short-form viewing has piled on to long form viewing, and gaming has piled in on top of both'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12542363/generation-z-alex-mahon-channel-4-gen-z-cambridge-convention.html

https://archive.md/5WZjA

 

[tehpope]

I'm not gonna debate someone over politics or non work shit seriously. I'm there to make money. Not to give you asspats about the way you live your life. Grow up, get some balls and thicker skin.

 

[Screamer_2]

I'm older than gen Z and plenty of my peers have fallen down this well aswell. A slight disagreement turns to them getting enraged and emotional. They can't discuss or debate. Any argument against what they think causes them emotional stress and they fucking lose it. They honestly get emotionally charged at even trying to think through their political positions.

 

[ForTheHoard]

Illiberal Progressives

That's a funny way to say "tyrants."

 

[Mukhrani]

It's not just genz. Is the previous two as well. A friend of mine has to constantly babysit millennials at a car dealership because some will become angry if the customer has a trump bumper sticker. One allegedly was kicking chairs around the break room because his customer had trump stickers.

It's been literally every generation. Kids grow up being spoon-fed a bunch of transparently stupid bullshit. Credulous kids eat it up. The smart ones realize that something stinks, find out it's all bullshit, and throw themselves into some totalizing ideology that promises to explain the whole world to them. This is why libertarians, communists, and fascists tend to be either young bright kids, old losers, or feds. The smart kids grow out of this stuff because life is constantly beating on the door of any totalizing ideology, reminding you that everything's much more complicated and situational. Way too complex for one neat, clean set of answers. Despite religion's reputation for dogmatism, it's not nearly as overbearing as these political ideologies, hence its longevity. Even Catholicism carves out a huge amount of ground for mystery and nuance within itself that gives it flexibility and allows many people to remain religious from cradle to grave. If you're a young kid sperging out about politics you have two choices: either grow up and mature, or become an isolated bitter loser.

I think if anything has changed, it's the internet 'freezing' more older people into the isolate bitter loser camp by replacing the real world interactions that used to force maturity with simulacra - like social media echo chambers or parasocial relationships with content creators.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

Everyone acts like this is about having political debates at work.

It isn't.

It's about having a discussion where one person thinks the company's strategy in x area should be y, and the other person thinks it should be z. They're both sane, normal ideas reasonable people could disagree on. In a ten person meeting, several people start talking about the pros and cons of each idea. And when it comes time for Gen Z to be in the discussion, they will, variously:

A) Just blush and bow out without contributing and then say they found the entire exchange uncomfortable and evidence of bad company culture.
B) Clearly have no idea how to follow the actual arguments being made, and go with whoever is speaking more strongly on the topic and seems to feel more about it.
C) Take whichever side initially appeals to them, and claim the other side is somehow bad for DEI goals or some other bullshit.

They don't know how to follow arguments through to their premises, or to break down dependencies in an opinion to understand what conditions would lead to it changing. They change opinions when enough powerful people tell them to, and not one moment before.

 

[Cuckoman]

They don't know how to follow arguments through to their premises, or to break down dependencies in an opinion to understand what conditions would lead to it changing. They change opinions when enough powerful people tell them to, and not one moment before.

Well said.
I think they completely lack logical reasoning skills. They have opinions they have have acquired from some other authority but they lack the skills to understand what their opinion actually means.
And when asked to clarify their position they immediately become very angered and emotional and lash out, because it is dogma and it is because they do not know how to argue their position.
They take any criticism, disagreement or questions on their opinion or idea as personal attack.

But I think this also manifests in how they often are surprised with the outcome of actions. They can literally not predict the outcome of their actions. What happens next if you do x is an unpredictable mystery.

They are truly dysfunctional. They are literally incapable of higher order logical reasoning.

 

[bliblblblbbllb]

Local zoomer reporting in.
Almost all of the people of the generations before me gave me advice about the workplace, on how to negotiate for better hours and pay and positions, figure out your footing and responsibilities in your job, and deal with the criticism from your supervisors or whoever.

Almost everyone that's my same age has told me things like "fuck 'em" and "I'd just walk out" and "idgaf I'll just not go to work today." Many people I know around my age have no-called no-showed quit a job, and we're not talking just "baby's first McDonald's job", we're talking "my first real job with my 4 year degree." We're talking, get a job with a 100k salary, get your first performance review and it's sub-par, and instead of having any sort of meeting with anyone, you bitch loudly in an email chain and never go back.

The pandemic really had a negative effect socially and in my area, something like 1 in 5 at the high school basically just gave up on classes entirely for an entire year if not two. The school district passed special measures so that they didn't have to make hundreds of people repeat grades. 1 in 5.

I know "younger generation is stupid" is the easiest argument to make, but I think there really is something to be said here. I would absolutely agree that most people my age will take any and all disagreement as a personal attack. It's not exclusive to zoomers, but it's disproportionate to a worrisome degree. It's not "just because they're young" in the same way 40% of zoomer girls aren't LGBT now "just because they're young." It's a cultural change. (that percentage is probably wrong.)

You need discussion and debate skills for any job that involves your brain and communication. Even McDonalds and Walmart. Taking and learning from criticism is a big deal. If you're a shelf stocker, you need to learn how to not fuck it up and crush items. I've seen zoomers quit in positions like this because a supervisor said "Do it this way, don't do it that way" and then they cry that it's mean and don't come back after the first week. Again I know it's the easiest argument to go "young people, weak and lazy and stoopid" but I feel like things are much much worse than previous generations and I think it is cultural, not just an age thing.

 

[Roland TB-303]

The Channel 4 boss cited the time youngsters had spent 'being out of colleges' during the pandemic, meaning they had not been exposed as much to 'people with a difference of opinion'.

Bullshit, it’s because anyone with a spicy take gets bullied, cancelled and their livelihoods ruined by globohomo and their henchmen.

 

[Overwritten Tapes]

Only normal zoomers are country kids or foreigners who aren't Indian or somalian

 

[Peaches the Wonder Cat]

I assume any obvious minority claiming grievance and oppression status (niggers, trannies, fags, women) are going to be like this in the workplace. So far I have been pleasantly surprised once. The rest of them are argumentative and lazy. They don't just argue about politics. They argue about shit I've been doing for a decade.

 

[quackrock]

Reminds me of a time where I was listening on this like Gen Z Asian college career panel on Zoom during lockdowns, and one of the panelists literally would not stop going into tangents about white people stereotypes during every question as if he had some sort of massive hate-boner for whitey and just needed validation on how much he was right. He was so goddamn insufferable, if I ever saw this guy apply for an job at my company I would've personally rejected him at the resume stage.

Lots of pseudo-elite, upper-middle-class US-born Asians fucking despise white people. They soaked in permission to trash whitey from their Jewish and self-deprecating WASP classmates in college. It's a pure enmity untempered by self-preservation or love of kin. Asian guys especially seem envious of WMAF. Asian women love to shit on white men while sleeping with them.

Not everyone obviously. Certainly not most US-born Asians based on my personal experience. But I've attended class and worked alongside a lot of people cast from this mold.

 

[Otterly]

Lol it’s not that they don’t want an argument, it’s that they can’t argue for shit and they have an homogenous set of (incorrect) opinions.
They don’t want to ‘debate.’ They want what they see on YouTube as debate, which isn’t debate at all, it’s just catty snappy takedowns and ‘owning’ people. They want to destroy people, not argue genuinely with them
This generation aren’t like this because of covid. They’ve been trained like dogs by the media and social media to have One Opinion. Those who went to college get one opinion instilled in them and told any deviation from it is a violation of their safety and actual violence.
Work isn’t the place for such arguments anyway, but this generation can’t argue well as they’ve never been properly exposed to other viewpoints except as bogeymen. They are a weird mix of fragility and extreme belligerence

 

[Jason Wynn]

Piece of advice my dad gave me when I first entered the work force was never discuss religion and never discuss politics. Been pretty sound advice so far and I’ve managed to avoid any petty drama.

Zoomfags have no mental or verbal filter, just blurt out whatever banality is in their mind, expecting every one else to be in agreement and have a pants-shitting meltdown if someone disagrees or tells them to fuck off. Seen it firsthand a few times, the one I laugh about the most being this pink haired, Buddy Holly glasses wearing cuntbag who got fired after a little over a week with the company for telling a conservative she hoped his children died of cancer after finding out he voted conservative.

 

[Male Idiot]

Honestly this is big corpo and pc culture and participation trophies.

Slavsquatting land, you agree on politics and lend a sympathetic ear or you disagree and talk about something else.

I even smoke break talked to muslims about pork at work, and it was a relatively benign discussion about some theology.

In meetings, you let the boss tell you what to do. If you got an idea, you politely tell it. Either he says you are mistaken for X reason, and you let it go, or he'll make some small adjustment with "I missed that" and that's the end of it. With a big western corpo it often is "Yeah, I know its retarded but that's what HQ wants at Berlin" .

Which are usually the worst work option. You are way better off working for a smaller company, even if it is run by chinks or even (der Juden) because they may think raises are a curse word, but at least they are mostly pragmatic.

 

[The Auditor]

I have two of these Yips shadowing me at work, and i feel like im a tard wrangler working at a school with special needs kids, they have no attention span and zero work ethic, they look at their phones everytime it vibrates, even as im trying to explaining complex things to them..

Only upside is that they throw money at me every year to make sure i stay cause my bosses know they will be fucked if i leave..

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

Gen Z are prone to Amygdala hijacks, because they've been conditioned by prosperity and participation trophies to knee-jerk attack anyone who disagrees with them. They literally view disagreement as a direct attack and speech as violence. That's why they can't be reasoned with. Because their very sense of identity is tied to being on the Right Side of History and fighting anyone who's on the Wrong Side.

I had a super liberal manager at work who always supported the Current Thing from BLM to trooning out 8 year olds. I couldn't debate her because I needed my job, and even when I did, she used tactics like Bulverism ("You're a bad person for saying that women can be just as abusive as men!") and Tu quoque ("Why do you hate our government giving free houses to foreigners? YOU'VE relied on government programs yourself so you're a big hypocrite!") to counter me. I realized it was pointless to try to argue with the brainwashed, especially when, even if I'd won, all I'd get was a surly manager who considered me a thought criminal.

 

[6MillionCoofs]

Wait, you mean the people raised on the content you produce aren’t equipped?

I do so love it when those in power see the consiquences of their actions and look on in terror

 

[Osama Bin Laden]

the funny thing about debating politics is that i have no problem doing it with other people on the internet where i don’t have to deal with you if i turn my computer off. however, the last place i would ever want to have a political debate is where i work. i don’t really deal with politics too much outside of the typical customer talking “boo biden, yay trump” which i have developed an excellent strat of just saying “damn that’s crazy” and “i don’t really follow politics” have nearly steered me away from any political debate in real life.

this is a power level but related and one of my more based moments in my life. i already put my 2 weeks in and i was leaving that day. this took place right before i clocked out. there was a troon customer that came in not even joking, looked like a man in a dress. had long spaghetti hair that was colored, little subtle, clean shaven arms with the broad shoulders of an NFL linebacker. he was wearing some faggot shirt with “trans pride” bracelet and a skirt. i made a passing comment to one of my co workers (which to describe this person in simple terms was lefty discord type woman) that i found that man disgusting. she goes “why osama” and i replied with “i really fucking don’t like trannies, i think they are sex pests who rape women and children. they are not women and i don’t agree with any person that claims that those are “real women””. by the time i said this, another co-worker overheard me say this while she was walking over and said “osama, why do you have such a hatred for trans people” the discord lefty says “because he secretly likes them” and they both laugh. i say “and that’s the thing, you want to keep accepting this shit and whenever somebody brings it up, oh you just mad because you want them or i’m just a transphobe for not wanting trannies around children. i don’t care for them, i wish they would stop fucking up every piece of media i enjoy, i wish that hearing about LGBTQ shit wasn’t apart of my daily life. i wish that people would stop assuming that a joke is racist/bigoted because it pushes a line. i have to go now but it was nice having this discussion. “ and said my goodbyes to everyone and left that day.

 

[FILTH Tourist]

I think the real issue isn't debate skills, but how to politely sidestep annoying conversations at work.
I know a boomer with chronic case of TDS and Yellow Fever and every chat in the teacher's lounge is either about how Trump is awful or an idol he saw at an event. We just sandbag him until he gets on-board with what everyone else wants to talk about. A zoomer who is used to debating on reddit would absolutely pull that pin on that grenade which would do nothing but cause drama that gets admins involved.

 

[Equal Rights for Androids]

That's weird. Every gen z-er I've interacted with in college is open to debate and respectable and polite. Two days ago I had a debate with a 19 year old man (who I'm concerned is going to become a tranny because he sits with his legs crossed, has long hair, and has a laptop with a sticker that says "this laptop destroys fascists") about eugenics and he took it like a champ. Didn't sperg out, didn't call me a nazi or whatever. He was respectful and made valid points. Gen Y was the most egregious and horrible. When they were frustrated, they would yell. They carried themselves with arrogance/smugness thinking they were always right and it made me want to punch them in the face. They treated me as though I was a mentally deficient person because I was black.

Gen Z-ers also know when/how to keep their mouth shut when radical topics are being discussed. There's a girl I'm teaching who also has a woman/gender studies class right before mine and she gets very frustrated with the shit the loons are saying in that class.

Cambridge is NOT THE NORM for gen z-ers. Yes, if you do studies on your students, you're going to get heavily biased results. Not all colleges foster the toxic mindset for students that cambridge and other big-name universities do.