What’s Lurking Beneath Our Obsession with Employment Memes?

Words: Charlotte Colombo

They’re everywhere. Lurking in your group chats, watching your Instagram Stories within seconds, and sending you 37 TikToks in a row — all before noon. Being that one unemployed friend is a tough gig, but someone’s got to do it. 

After my freelance era turned into an unemployment era, my pals helpfully took it upon themselves to send me memes about it. A lot.  But what shocked me most about these memes wasn’t just how prolific they are. It's their diversity and ability to encapsulate the good, the bad, and the ugly of the joblessness experience, whether that be censoring the word ‘job,’ or yearning for your unemployment days once you finally get a job. 

The timing of this meme craze couldn’t be more apt. In the UK, as of July, unemployment has hit 4.7% – its highest level in four years. Conversely, the number of job vacancies has now been falling continuously for three years, while UK graduates face the toughest job market since 2018. The TLDR here is that things are bleak, but at times like these, all you can do is laugh. Right?
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For some posters, unemployment is all about serving cunt. Your debit card might decline, but your face card? Never. Ironically, given her viral demand that we “get our ass up and work,” Kim Kardashian’s face pops up a lot. In one post, she can be seen simply sitting at a computer while “unemployment” dances on the screen with girlypop lettering and emojis. In another, she can be seen smiling at the beach alongside an on-screen caption that reads: “I was made to be unemployed and explore the world.”  Other memes romanticise unemployment more generally, while the “that unemployed friend” meme genre usually depicts that lovable rogue getting into all kinds of wild shenanigans, like jumping into a pool with an umbrella or walking an alpaca. 

All in all, these kinds of memes do, to varying extents, glorify unemployment, and Ellen Scott, digital editor at Stylist and author of the book Working On Purpose, isn’t surprised by this. “I think millennials really bore the brunt of the girlboss, hustle culture era, ending up burnt out and completely boundary-less,” she explains. “Gen Z have witnessed this and said 'no, not doing that'. There's mass disillusionment with work as a whole, and it's become the common enemy.

“With this rather sombre underside to these posts, it’s clear that unemployment memes are more than just funny pictures.”

“We've all agreed that work is bad,” she adds. “So of course the opposite of work becomes good. Positioning unemployment as freedom from the confines of emails and Teams calls is the logical next step, because when compared to the worst parts of work, simply not working sounds brilliant.

The modern working world isn’t just, as Scott says, “boundary-less” — it also largely treats its employees as disposable. Dayna Castillo, creator of the ‘Silence Brand’ newsletter, argues that “with this constant news of layoffs and the threat of an AI workforce, the current state of corporate culture has made it clear that employers will prioritise themselves.

“Because of this erosion, Gen Z feels fewer consequences or 'career repercussions' for speaking out or poking fun at work culture,” she adds. “If the company doesn’t care about you, why would you care about the company?” 

Arguably, this disillusionment has extended beyond a feeling of resentment towards corporate companies. After all, when it comes to eating the rich, no one is hungrier than Gen Z. According to a recent Channel 4 poll, nearly half (47%) of young people agree that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution.” They’re also the originators of the likes of ‘quiet quitting,’ QuitTok and the r/antiwork subreddit. Within this context, Scott argues that these memes can indicate an anticapitalist state of mind. 

“We also know that capitalism is bad and is making us miserable, so while once upon a time the dream scenario might have been to earn a tonne of money and retire early, or win the lottery and then never have to work, now the 'cool' thing is to not engage with money at all,” she explains. “Obviously, it's not realistic. We have to eat. We can't just reject work and embrace unemployment. But our constructed internet selves can.”

On the flip side, unemployment itself isn’t really a laughing matter. It can have an impact on not only our ‘constructed internet selves,’ but also our whole human selves.  One 2022 study shows that unemployment is associated with major depressive disorder, while a 2021 survey by The Health Foundation found that 43% of unemployed people have poor mental health. So, it should come as no surprise that more recent unemployment memes present this state of living in a bad light. These memes range from being jumpscared by job applications, to being called a bum outright. The word unemployed has also become synonymous with chronically online with many X posts using it as a derogatory term. 

In these cases, Dr Phoenix Andrews, Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, argues that this may well be the result of people “internalising the rise and grind and striver culture and resenting and stigmatising those who don't engage with that.”

“For younger millennials and Gen Z, there have never been economic good times in their adult lives and working your way up from nothing for a future payoff seems even less realistic than ever,” he adds. “For anyone not all-in on entrepreneurial and influencer culture, work is never going to love you back, and the grownups aren't coming to save us. Things can only get worse. That's the prevailing feeling.”

With this rather sombre underside to these posts, it’s clear that unemployment memes are more than just funny pictures. As cultural theorist and strategist Matt Klein puts it, these memes “aren't just jokes, but a form of collective truth-telling.” But what kinds of truths are these memes trying to convey? Is unemployment inherently bad? Or could it be a blessing in disguise?

The good news is, as Jess Rauchberg, Assistant Professor of Seton Hall University, points out, we don’t have to make up our minds. Instead, we can rely on these memes as an “all-encompassing tool to playfully release uncomfortable or complicated feelings that [we] may feel isn't possible to share in other contexts.” So, unemployment memes can say a lot of things, but what they all have in common is that, in their individual ways, they illuminate just how unstable the current system is. If these memes teach us anything, it’s that we need change. And fast.