'Unhelpful' Michelle Obama Slammed for Lecturing Gen Z About Resilience

Is Michelle Obama is out of touch with the modern workplace?

The Guardian opinion columnist Emma Beddington recently criticized the former first lady for "lecturing Gen Z about resilience" given that her comments were based on a corporate world that no longer exists.

“It’s decades since the former US first lady was an employee. The world of work she grew up in has long gone,” read the subhead of Beddington’s Monday, June 8, column.

Beddington responded to Obama's recent comments advising young workers to learn how to do things they dislike, tolerate "bad bosses" and push through unappreciated roles to build resilience.

“One thing that’s important is to learn how to do something you don’t like to do and be good at it,” the 62-year-old former FLOTUS told the audience at a podcast recording in London.

“Every experience – the bad boss, the boring assistant job, the job you thought that you weren’t appreciated, the one that didn’t give you the assignment you wanted when you wanted it – all of that is learning to be resilient," she said.

Beddington countered that Obama's view of professional resilience is out of touch with the realities of the current job market, emphasizing that the corporate environment the attorney navigated decades ago has completely changed.

“Obama has navigated exceptionally tricky circumstances and put up with endless unjustified flak – she has plenty to teach everyone about grace under pressure. But there’s an implicit criticism of Gen Z workers in her words. You see that a lot (they’re undisciplined! They won’t use the phone! They want mental health days!) and it feels unfair and unhelpful,” she wrote.

Beddington argued that Gen Z's pushback against toxic work environments, lack of boundaries and poor compensation is justified, making "grinding through" bad experiences an outdated and unhelpful expectation.

“Obama is 62, and her career as an employee ended decades ago. She, I, and everyone over 40 came of age in an entirely different world of work. The few gen Zers lucky enough to find a ‘boring assistant job’ in this atrocious market start out in echoingly empty, silent offices or their bedrooms, and AI is coming not just for their prospects, but for their support systems too,” she wrote.

Michelle and Barack Obama have two Gen Z daughters: Malia (born in 1998) and Sasha (born in 2001). Both women are actively navigating their post-college lives in Los Angeles.

While she described the ex-FLOTUS' advice as out of touch, the journalist wondered where Gen Z could find inspiration.

“Their social lives and educations were ripped apart by Covid; they’ve been neglected and let down by successive governments, and their professional and economic futures look beyond murky. Advising gen Z on resilience based on our experiences is about as much use as telling them how to replace a typewriter ribbon. Surely the only sensible advice to offer a generation whose challenges are unrecognizable from the ones we faced is advice they actually ask for?” she wondered.