‘Hustle culture makes you broke’: This ‘anti-work’ TikToker said that even a $100K salary is ‘lessening in value over time’ — so stop working hard, putting in overtime. Is she right?

The numbers don’t lie

For what it's worth, @gabrielle_judge is aware that many people aren’t making $200,000 — or even $100,000 — a year. However, she also knows that people tend to believe that if they work hard and put in overtime hours they’ll get a promotion and a higher salary.

“That doesn’t work either,” she said. “You are basically just working yourself into a salary that is lessening in value over time.”

She explained that most salaries are deflated in value due to the “productivity-pay gap”. She cited the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) explanation of this phenomenon: simply put, it’s the difference between the growth of the economy (“productivity”) and workers’ wages (“pay”).

EPI discovered that there is indeed a massive productivity-pay gap in the U.S.: hourly pay has increased by 14.8% from 1979 to 2022, whereas productivity has increased by a whopping 64.7% — more than four times as much as hourly pay.

Therefore, @gabrielle_judge is right in that your salary has lessened in value over time in correlation to the country’s economic growth. Just like inflation’s effect on cash, your salary is no longer worth what it once was in 1979.

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Get a ‘lazy girl job'

So, what’s the point of working hard and putting in those overtime hours if your salary hasn’t kept up with productivity?

According to @gabrielle_judge, there is no point. But she referred to a term to game the system: the ‘lazy girl job’.

In 2022, she posted a viral TikTok that explained the concept.

A ‘lazy girl job’ is essentially a remote or hybrid position that has a high salary, yet requires no technical skills and doesn’t have high performance expectations. It’s a straight-forward role without demanding requirements that can be completed in less than eight hours a day. Jobs such as “customer success manager” or “marketing associate” would fall under this category.

Moneywise did the calculations to see if a ‘lazy girl job’ really does net you more money per hour by doing the math on a customer success manager’s annual and hourly wages.

Here’s what we found: according to the job site Indeed, a customer success manager earns an average base salary of $76,408. Some of the position’s tasks include onboarding new customers, following up on renewals and encouraging upsells of the company’s product and services.

If this is truly a ‘lazy girl job’ (and it sounds like it is) then you’re probably only working roughly four hours a day, not eight.

In that case, you’re making $79 per hour — a full $27 more than the hourly wage of somebody working 16 hours a day.

Someone with a ‘lazy girl job’ may make 60% less per year than someone making $200,000; however, they’re making 34% more per hour. So who’s really winning here?

So, it would appear that @gabrielle_judge is right. The ‘lazy girl job’ is one of the best ways to get back at the productivity-pay gap and make your job earn more for you.