Shadowing Practice: Why Gen Z Doesn't Want To Work - Learn English Speaking with Video

Take a look at this picture.

It's the Ford assembly line in 1913.

These workers, lined up in rows, placing nuts and bolts on wheels, were working 12 hours a day.

12 hours a day standing in the same spot, repeating the same monotonous task.

Who wouldn't lose their mind doing that?

Well it turns out a lot of them actually did.

Before 1926, reports of Ford assembly line workers getting injured and in the most severe cases, dying, were not uncommon.

Henry Ford needed a way to keep his workers productive without killing them.

After all, dead people can't build cars.

So that year he introduced the 40 hour work week, an 8 hours a day,

5 days a week schedule designed to give his employees enough time to recover and keep their cognitive faculties on the job.

For a century, the 40 hour work week has remained the norm in many developed countries across the globe.

All based on the idea of a single CEO of a car manufacturing company.

And even though technology has continued to make our work ever more efficient, we've only added more hours.

To let the 40 hour workweek persist in the present day is a recipe for angry workers, and for business owners, less profit.

Yes, that's right, not more profit, less.

So why are we still following this outdated protocol?

Why aren't we working 30 or even 20 hours a week like some economists predicted over a century ago?

And what are the better alternatives we need to start establishing?

Ah, the industrial revolution.

The end of many ancient problems, but the start of just about every modern one.

Around 1870, at the dawn of the second industrial revolution, a new household standard was growing.

One income, one homemaker.

We've all heard the story before.

The husband goes into the office for 8 hours, while the wife stays home and cooks, cleans, and runs other necessary errands to keep everything running like a well-oiled machine.

The 40-hour workweek was established during a time when this was the norm, but the world we live in today follows a much different standard.

Among employed US adults aged 25-64 who are married, the total amount of paid work between both partners amounts to 83 hours.

That leaves 12 hours per week for caregiving and only 7 hours for housework, which women still do the majority of.

Now, common sense would tell you

that this surge in paid work among married couples would result

in an economy where everyone has more than enough money to have their basic needs met.

But that has been anything but the case.

Families now contribute far more paid labor than the households the 40 hour work week was originally designed around, yet instead of translating into a ton of more leisure,

much of the financial advantage of that second income has been offset by rising costs in housing, childcare, healthcare, and education.

This seems totally backwards.

If we're producing more than ever before

and families are putting in more paid work than when the 40 hour work week was built around, shouldn't we have eventually gotten to the point where we needed to work less?

Well, there was actually a time when the United States tried to make that happen.

In 1933, Senator Hugo Black and Representative William Connery introduced the Black Connery Bill,

proposing a mandated 30-hour workweek to combat Great Depression-era unemployment.

The Senate passed Black's 30-hour workweek bill 53-30 in a bipartisan vote.

Supporters claimed it would create 6 million jobs.

It was expected to pass the House and Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins was publicly supportive, but business leaders were not.

According to historian Benjamin Hunnicutt in his book Work Without End, instead of looking at the increase in leisure as inevitable or as potentially beneficial,

they feared that if workers got a taste of a 30 hour workweek, they would never want to go back and the law would become permanent.

The wealthiest business owners held emergency meetings in Chicago and Philadelphia, and Perkins, who also supported a federal minimum wage, was flooded with messages of opposition.

This eventually led to President Roosevelt changing his mind about the proposed bill, and support from others for the 30 hour work week collapsed.

Roosevelt was more interested in building out a recovery plan using public works like dams, bridges, hospitals, and schools to supply employment,

stabilize buying power, and help revive the economy.

So what did he do?

He basically said, hey guys, I know you don't want a federally mandated 30 hour work week, so let's compromise.

That compromise eventually became the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which banned most child labor, established a federal minimum wage, and made 40 hours the national benchmark.

Now here's what's really fascinating.

40 hours isn't even a scientifically optimal number.

Research consistently shows that humans can maintain 3 to 4 hours of cognitive focus per day.

After that, our cognitive faculties start getting progressively worse.

So how did this arbitrary number stay unquestioned for so damn long?

The answer has everything to do with what is called the leisure scare.

Finding a job that actually respects your time and aligns with the impact you want to make can feel daunting right now.

Whether it's ghost jobs or 50 plus hours a week, it's as if these companies hate the idea of you having a life outside work.

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The dominant cultural narrative of work in America revolves around the Puritan or Protestant work ethic.

Emerging from the teachings of reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, this philosophy held that work was a moral and even spiritual obligation.

Labor was seen as a way of honoring God, while discipline, diligence, and careful stewardship of one's earning were viewed as a virtuous way of living.

These beliefs were especially influential among the Puritans who settled in North America and helped shape early American attitudes towards work.

In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber argued that this cultural mindset played a major role in the rise of modern capitalism.

So rather than treating work as something to minimize, Protestant societies came to regard hard work as a virtue in itself.

And when economists started to predict a future in

which Americans could no longer exercise this virtue with as many hours in a day, business owners and political scientists started to panic.

Most famously, in 1930, British economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture in Madrid about the future of work.

John Keynes believed that, by 2030, humanity's greatest challenge would no longer be producing enough wealth, but figuring out how to spend an abundance of free time.

Man, if only.

Assuming governments avoided major policy failures, he predicted that living standards in the west would rise to at least four times their 1930 level within a century.

With technological progress driving extraordinary gains in productivity, Keynes expected the average person to need only about 15 hours of work each week to maintain a comfortable standard of living.

But once we got to 1960, optimism about a future filled with leisure began to give way to unease.

Some scholars started wondering whether people would know what to do with so much unstructured time.

Pulitzer Prize winning political scientist Sebastian de Grazia expressed that concern in an interview with the Associated Press,

warning quote, there is reason to fear that free time, forced free time, will bring on the restless tick of boredom,

idleness, immorality, and increased personal violence.

A decade later the US Interior Department echoed a similar sentiment, stating in a 1974 report that leisure, thought by many to be the epitome of paradise,

may well become the most perplexing problem of the future.

That was the leisure scare, the mid-20th century anxiety that automation would give Americans too much free time.

As I was doing this research, I kept wondering why.

Like, what's the real reason why political scientists and economists would be scared if people had more free time?

You can disagree with me here, but I believe they subconsciously knew deep down that more free time would lead to Americans becoming more than just consumers.

And it turns out some economists and sociologists thought the same thing.

In her book, The Overspent American, Juliette B.

Shore writes about the insidious cycle of work and spend in America.

Here's what it looks like.

Businesses continue producing an endless stream of goods that depend on people buying them.

Advertising fuels demand by promising that each new purchase will bring greater satisfaction or fulfillment.

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Many households take on debt to afford things that quickly become ordinary, leaving them with larger monthly payments and a greater need to keep working.

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As the excitement of each purchase fades, another product promises to fill the gap, and the cycle begins all over again.

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Additionally, Shore writes, Many potentially satisfying leisure skills are off-limits because they take too much time.

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Participating in community theater, seriously taking up a sport or a musical instrument, or getting involved with a church or community organization.

104

This is something I touched upon in my video about why Gen Z doesn't have any hobbies.

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There is a serious time commitment required to actually become skillful in a certain hobby, or spend enough time around people doing something in order to develop relationships with them.

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Filling every ounce of free time with a consumerist activity is the easiest, most frictionless way to make sure you are never bored,

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which a lot of us are subconsciously afraid to do partly because that's what this Protestant culture ingrained into our thinking,

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but also partly because being alone with yourself and facing the looming certainty

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that you actually have no idea who you are or what you want to do outside of work is terrifying.

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So what do we do to hide from this fact?

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We talk about leisure as a waste of time.

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Stop wasting time!

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Urgency kills!

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That's how you'll get paid!

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We promote hustling 24-7.

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Let me tell you what, when you work for yourself, there's no Christmas, there's no Easter, there's none of that you work for yourself.

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We make ridiculous claims like this.

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Slaves worked all the hours they were awake for their entire lives.

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in American history, in Egyptian history, in the rest of the world that had slaves, which is most of the world at some given point.

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I think, like, if they can do it, so can I.

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And all a lot of Gen Z can do by now is just roll their eyes at this type of shit, because by now, we understand how insane it is to be living in a system like this.

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To have basic tasks done so quickly in a modern office setting

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that most people just sit around for several hours towards the end of the day, but to have your boss still insist you need to be there for

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that many hours because it looks good on a timesheet is absurd.

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According to Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index, the average knowledge worker now spends 60% of their time communicating through meetings,

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email, and chat, and only 40% creating, with 68% saying they don't have enough uninterrupted focus to do meaningful work.

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To think we will all become immoral, ill-behaved degenerates if we have more leisure time is statistically false,

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and to prove it, we can now propose what the future could look like if we break away from this flawed system.

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Imagine if you were able to design your own schedule with certain restrictions that your organization sets.

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That's the idea of flex time, a flexible hour schedule where employees choose their start and end times,

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work remotely, or structure their days around their own peak performance hours rather than an arbitrary organizational norm.

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Everyone has different hours during the day when they work best, and everyone has different responsibilities outside of work that take place at different points during the day.

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FlexTime allows them the freedom that leads to the employee making their best contribution, making both them and their employer happier.

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Research consistently links flexible scheduling to higher engagement, lower absenteeism, and improved retention.

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However, I will say that flex time can cause coordination issues, and in jobs that require mutual decision making and collaboration,

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this type of system could get very bad very quick.

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So that is why in most cases the best option is to just simply reduce hours to a 32 hour workweek.

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A 32 hour workweek involves the same 8 hour a day structure, but with an entire day taken out of it, so workers would get a 3 day weekend instead of just 2.

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And the evidence for the effectiveness of something like this is overwhelming.

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Across 245 organizations that adopted a 32 hour, 4 day schedule without reducing pay, companies saw higher profits, lower employee turnover,

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and significant improvements in burnout, stress, anxiety, and overall physical and mental well-being.

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Microsoft Japan observed similar results, reporting a 40% jump in productivity after moving roughly 2,300 employees to a 4-day workweek with no reduction in salary.

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Another anecdote comes from Iceland.

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Iceland moved a significant portion of its entire workforce into short

145

and weak pilots and found that productivity and service provision either maintained or improved.

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Roughly 86% of Iceland's working population has since either moved to shorter hours or gained the right to do so.

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These findings suggest that shorter work weeks succeed because they strip away much of the unnecessary busywork that consumes the modern workday, while giving employees enough time to recover,

148

think more clearly, and ultimately produce higher quality work.

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But I think that in America, it would take more than just a change in sheer hours

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employees work per week to start feeling the difference of less work.

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We would have to entirely restructure the way our culture views work.

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We would have to see leisure as a necessary condition of culture, rather than a barrier to it.

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And that's exactly what Josef Pieper argues in his book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

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In his book, Pieper posits that the real purpose of work is leisure.

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If he were alive today, Pieper would believe that our total work culture, that is, working just to work more and working even when we're not working through some other devices,

156

is a form of spiritual death.

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He believes that this whole idea in our culture that knowledge

158

and wisdom can only be gained through taxing hard work is false.

159

He writes, the inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this, man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless.

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He can only enjoy with a good conscience what he has acquired with toil and trouble.

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He refused to have anything as a gift.

162

Instead, Pieper thinks that it is precisely in those moments of leisure

163

that we connect to the highest forms of knowledge and go on to produce some of our best cultural works.

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In other words, when we give our minds the space to wander, to ponder, to be bored, that is when we course correct to make sure we're heading towards a future

165

that is beneficial for the most amount of people.

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Then he supports an idea I brought up earlier, elites and business owners would be terrified to lessen working hours

167

because then human beings would have the opportunity to actualize their own unique interests.

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In his most quoted line he states, Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves.

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We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.

170

So like most modern problems, the problem of having an unnecessary 40 hour workweek still persists

171

because the people in power are projecting their fear of having no identity outside of their work onto the general populace.

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What I love about Gen Z is how much we rebuke the outdated ideas of the old world

173

that are leading to the immense inequality we're seeing right now.

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And I truly believe the more that we start to raise awareness on just how broken the work culture is,

175

the more motivated we will be to take action and start implementing the changes we want to see.

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Before you go, I want to leave you with one final question.

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If your job disappeared tomorrow, who would you be?

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you very much for watching this video.

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If you enjoyed this video, you'll probably like my video on the burnout epidemic and why nobody wants to work anymore.

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That goes more into burnout and what we're doing with those hours and why it doesn't make any sense.

181

So check that out right here.

182

And now I'm heading out.

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Thank you for watching till the end.

184

Goodbye.

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92 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Gen Z Doesn't Want To Work”. This video has 184 sentences and 2942 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:59. The speaker talks fast, about 184 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
leisure noun	/ˈlɛʒə(ɹ)/	Freedom provided by the cessation of activities.
workweek noun		The range of days of the week that are normally worked.
economist noun	/iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/	An expert in economics, especially one who studies economic data and extracts higher-level information or proposes theories.
burnout noun	/ˈbɜː(ɹ)naʊt/	The experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest, especially in one's career.
strawberry noun	/ˈstɹɔˌbɛɹi/	The sweet, usually red, edible accessory fruit of certain plants of the genus Fragaria.
norm noun	/nɔːm/	That which is normal or typical.
predict verb	/pɹɪˈdɪkt/	To make a prediction: to forecast, foretell, or estimate a future event on the basis of knowledge and reasoning; to prophesy a future event on the basis of…
cognitive adjective	/ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/	Relating to the part of mental functions that deals with logic, as opposed to affective which deals with emotions.
productivity noun	/ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/	The state of being productive, fertile, or efficient.
subconsciously adverb		Below the level of conscious awareness.
terrify verb	/ˈtɛɹɪfaɪ/	To frighten greatly; to fill with terror.
outdated adjective	/aʊtˈdeɪtɪd/	Out of date, old-fashioned, antiquated.
flex verb	/flɛks/	To bend something.
arbitrary adjective	/ˈɑː.bɪ.tɹə.ɹi/	Based on individual discretion or judgment; not based on any objective distinction, perhaps even made at random.
bore verb	/boɹ/	To inspire boredom in somebody.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
turn out verb	To end up; to result.
bring up verb	To mention.
build out verb	To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.).
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
get off verb	To move from being on top of (something) to not being on top of it.
go back verb	To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time.
head out verb	To leave, depart; to go on ahead.
take up verb	To pick up.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Who wouldn't lose their mind doing that?
We've all heard the story before.
That's how you'll get paid!
If your job disappeared tomorrow, who would you be?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If he were alive today, Pieper would believe · If your job disappeared tomorrow, who would you · If you enjoyed this video, you'll probably
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was established · was built · was expected
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has remained · has continued · has been
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	slaves, which is · value which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 23 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, you're, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: leisure /ˈlɛʒə(ɹ)/, beneficial /ˌbɛn.ɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, restriction /ɹɪˈstɹɪkʃən/, coordination /kəʊˌɔːdɪˈneɪʃən/, conscience /ˈkɑn.ʃəns/
Long words — get the stress right: economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, productivity /ˌpɹɒdʌkˈtɪvəti/, arbitrary /ˈɑː.bɪ.tɹə.ɹi/, beneficial /ˌbɛn.ɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, unnecessary /ʌnˈnɛs.əˌsɛɹ.i/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like leisure, workweek, economist.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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