What If There’s Just Not Much Left to Employ Gen Z For?

A job is not a natural right. It’s not like air or water. A job exists when someone needs something done and pays another person to do it. That’s it.

So when we talk about “job creation,” what we’re really talking about is creating real needs—problems that can’t be ignored or automated—and matching those needs with human labor. But what if those needs are running out?

Why Governments Can’t ‘Just Create Jobs’ Anymore

People often expect governments to “do something” when unemployment rises. But what exactly is a government supposed to create? It can fund projects, yes. But many of the world’s big physical needs—roads, bridges, buildings—have already been built. Even in developing nations, the bottleneck isn’t always money or manpower. It’s political will, corruption, or broken systems.

And today’s needs don’t always translate into mass employment. Digital infrastructure, automation, and cloud computing are handled by relatively small, specialized teams. One coder can do what used to take 50 clerks. And AI is now eating into white-collar roles. The kind of roles that were supposed to “replace factory work.”

Even when governments want to help, the levers they used to pull don’t work anymore. We’re running out of useful, non-automatable tasks to fund. And as machines start training other machines, the value of human experience is further devalued. There’s no longer a premium on having “been there” or “done that” when models are learning directly from data created by other models. Human intuition is slowly being orphaned from the production process.

Being Human No Longer Means Automatic Economic Value

There was a time when being a person meant you could trade your effort for food, money, housing, something. You could farm, carry, dig, hammer, record, repeat. But that equation is breaking.

In many fields, machines don’t just work faster. They work better. And employers are noticing. They’ve already begun shaping the perception of who is worth hiring. Not based on sentiment or potential, but on efficiency. If a machine does the job, then that’s what gets employed.

Even if new companies emerge in the future, they’ll be born into this same logic. They won’t reverse the trend just to be generous. They’ll build with what works. And what works increasingly looks like machines serving machines—algorithms talking to APIs, logistics software directing robot fleets, customer service agents being replaced by AI agents optimized for emotional mimicry. Humans are quietly being written out of the loop.

Sentiment doesn’t scale. People are already being filtered out of the future before it fully arrives.

What This Means for Gen Z (and Beyond)

This generation isn’t lazy. They’re entering a world that simply doesn’t need them in the same way it used to need new workers.

Starting a business is still tough because many of the obvious needs have already been solved, and AI is competing with them there too. Even network-building and resume-polishing may not be enough when the jobs themselves are vanishing.

It’s not just Gen Z. If there’s little to employ this generation for, what happens with Gen Alpha? Gen Beta? Machines that learn from machines don’t need humans to pass on knowledge or train them into the job. The chain of human economic succession is being slowly erased.

So What Happens Now?

We may be heading toward a future where productivity keeps rising, human employment keeps falling, and survival is no longer tied to usefulness. It becomes tied to something else entirely.

That’s why ideas like Universal Basic Income are gaining ground. Not because they’re trendy, but because they may be inevitable. If there’s nothing left for people to do at scale, then what do you do with all the people?

This isn’t just a policy issue anymore. It’s structural. When the system no longer needs most of us, the challenge becomes not just economic, but existential.

The answer isn’t clear yet. But the signs are.