Gen Z’s Quiet Rebellion: Why Slow Living Is Replacing Hustle Culture

Olivia Morgan spent a decade chasing a theater career in New York City. By her late 20s, she and her accountant fiancé were done with life in the city.

“The longstanding tradition of actors auditioning while holding a single ‘survival job’ is all but extinct,” Morgan, 30, a Gen Z blogger and content creator, told The Epoch Times. So she and her now-husband packed up and moved back to the Midwest.

Lower costs let them buy a home. His savings freed him to open his own accounting firm. She joined a nonprofit board, found roots she hadn’t planned for, and watched her blood pressure improve.

What Morgan describes is becoming a recognizable pattern. Across social media, workplaces, and therapist offices, a growing number of young Americans are embracing what has come to be called slow living—a broad term for a lifestyle built around intentional rhythms, analog hobbies, lower consumption, and deliberate distance from productivity-at-all-costs culture.

Whether that shift is a wellness choice, an economic adaptation, or something that can’t be separated into either category is a question researchers, counselors, trend forecasters, and Gen Zers themselves are actively working through.

Pew Research Center defines Generation Z as those born from 1997 onward, though researchers note there is no universally agreed-upon boundary—with some frameworks placing the date as early as 1995.

The distinction reflects more of a continuum than a hard threshold, with the youngest Millennials and oldest Gen Zers often sharing more formative experiences than the far ends of their assigned cohorts.

Those born in that gray zone—including some interviewed by The Epoch Times—are sometimes called generational cuspers.

‘AgendaZ’

Hila Harary, a future trend forecaster and founder of Tectonic Shift, a strategic consulting firm focused on societal and cultural trends, says the movement’s roots are traceable.

“The popularity of the cozy and slow living is rooted in economic and societal realities intensified by the pandemic,” Harary told The Epoch Times.

Since the pandemic, she argues, staying in has stopped feeling lazy and started feeling logical. The deeper driver is economic. Gen Z has looked at the traditional milestones—homeownership, a car, a family, eventually a college fund for future kids—and concluded the math doesn’t add up. Harary calls their behavioral response “AgendaZ.”

“Gen Z doesn’t buy into the old promise that hard work automatically delivers the classic milestones—homeownership, car, family and future kids’ education,” she said. “If the math doesn’t add up, GenZ is opting out of the chase and building a slower, lower-cost rhythm that actually supports their mental and physical health.”

The bundle of hobbies that comes with it—gardening, baking, home workouts, herbal teas—is part of what Harary and others online call “Nona Maxxing,” a term riffing on the social media “maxxing” trend of maximum self-optimization, flipped to instead celebrate the unhurried rhythms of a grandmother’s daily life.

Greg Zakowicz, an ecommerce and retail adviser at Omnisend, describes the trend as “an economic reality dressed up as a lifestyle, but it is a lifestyle that has flair and personality.”

He points to the pandemic as a turning point that reshaped the generation’s expectations, as young people watched those around them struggle financially, even after doing everything right.

Pulling back from screens, he noted, turned out to carry less cost than expected. “Many have realized that when they detox from social media, they wind up not missing much of anything,” he said.

The economic backdrop is measurable. Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which polled nearly 23,000 respondents across 44 countries, found that 40 percent of Gen Z respondents feel stressed all or most of the time—with financial concerns ranking as the top driver.

Survey data from tutoring platform Superprof reflects a similar shift. More than 60 percent of U.S.-based tutors surveyed said their students are embracing “quiet ambition”—prioritizing balance and sustainability over competition, according to the data shared with The Epoch Times.

The most commonly reported social or cultural shift among students was prioritizing emotional well-being and balance, at 46.3 percent, followed by seeking more community or real-world connection at 26.7 percent. More than 40 percent of tutors said students were primarily motivated by a desire for stability.

Shanna Weber, CEO of Prima Consulting and a generational strategist with a background in financial services, says she sees the same pattern. Gen Z, she argues, watched older generations embrace hustle culture and pay a steep price.

“What older generations often interpret as a rejection of ambition is actually a recalibration of sustainability,” Weber told The Epoch Times. “Gen Z watched older generations embrace hustle culture and then struggle with burnout, student debt, and housing affordability. As a result, many Gen Z professionals are questioning whether constant optimization actually leads to better outcomes.”

She said that, in her view, slow living is less about Gen Z becoming disengaged and more about control over their own lives and time.

Rejecting Hustle Culture

For Gigi Robinson, 27, founder of Hosts of Influence and author of “A Kids Book About Chronic Illness,” slow living started as a medical necessity. She lives with endometriosis and hypermobile EDS. Her energy is finite and unpredictable.

“Instead of pushing harder, I designed a life and career that worked with my energy instead of against it,” she told The Epoch Times.

Robinson still runs two businesses and produces a high volume of content. She pushes back on the idea that slow living signals disengagement from economic reality.

“A lot of us watched that equation break down, especially during COVID,” she said. “We saw people work incredibly hard and still deal with layoffs, student debt, rising costs of living, and careers that don’t provide the security they were once expected to.”

Her read on her generation is direct. “So for many of my peers, ‘slow living’ is not about rejecting ambition; it’s about questioning whether constant overwork actually produces the outcome it promised,” she said. “And trying to figure out if there is a different way to achieve and redefine success.”

Stephanie Malia Krauss, author of the forthcoming “How We Thrive: Caring for Kids and Ourselves in a Changing World,” says the movement was, in some ways, predictable.

Gen Zers in their late 20s were babies in the aftermath of 9/11, and the youngest of the cohort was born after 9/11.

They started and moved through school during the Great Recession. They came of age alongside addictive social media and school shootings, then had their adolescence or early adulthood defined by COVID-19 and forced remote learning.

Throughout, Krauss argues, they were deprived of the human basics—sleep, movement, real connection, unstructured time—that people have historically relied on to endure difficult periods.

“Slow living is a biological and psychological response to a lifetime defined by speed, overwork, volatility, and uncertainty,” Krauss told The Epoch Times.

She calls this process “rehumaning”—a return to what she describes as essential human resources.

“Young people are choosing to better protect and prioritize the human essentials they need to thrive,” she said.

Stephanie O’Dea, host of the “Slow Living” podcast and a New York Times bestselling author, draws a distinction between two terms often used interchangeably.

“Soft living is a retreat,” O’Dea told The Epoch Times. “Slow living helps set you up for success by designing a life you don’t need to escape from.”

Morgan put the broader fatigue plainly. “In an age in which we’re expected to respond, in work and life, at the speed of tech, we’re fatigued,” she said. “We crave the peace that a slower lifestyle purportedly offers.”

Laura, 30, who requested to only use her first name, runs the Instagram account @cozylifediary with nearly 30,000 followers. She traces her shift back to a health scare in her mid-20s.

“I got really upset with myself for missing out on what was important,” she told The Epoch Times in an Instagram message.

The economic reckoning came later. “In the past there was this idea that if you worked harder you would eventually benefit from it, but I don’t really believe that anymore,” she said.

Success, for her, now means something different. “For me it’s not economic achievements anymore but it’s being content with what I have and being present enough to experience it,” she said.

Recalibration or Retreat?

The most common criticism of the movement is that it amounts to a generation opting out. Weber rejects that framing.

Krauss points to a structural argument: Some reports show that Americans already work more hours than people in any other industrialized nation.

With some longevity experts suggesting many Gen Zers could live to be 100 or older, young people may be looking at the prospect of 60- or 70-year careers and pacing themselves accordingly.

“Slow productivity, slow flow, and slow living are necessary conditions of lengthening working lives amid the continued uncertainty and volatility of the world we live in,” Krauss said.

Not everyone reads the trend as straightforwardly healthy. Eileen Borski, a licensed professional counselor and founder of Authentic Brain Solutions in Conroe, Texas, who specializes in trauma-informed, brain-based treatment, raises longer-term questions about cognitive development.

In her clinical work with Gen Z, she notices “a desire to avoid tension, challenges, and conflict.”

When the brain’s prefrontal cortex—the region involved in complex problem-solving and impulse control—goes unchallenged, she says, it doesn’t develop the way it should. “How will a shift like this work out long term, both individually and collectively as a society?” she said.

Borski is careful not to dismiss the movement entirely. “The slow living movement is a reset period that morphs into a more balanced approach to life,” she said. In its current form, though, she sees risks—particularly when it tips into the kind of social isolation that mirrors a symptom of depression rather than a remedy for it.

‘An Adaptive Move’

Krauss is careful about one thing: Slow living is not equally available to everyone.

“Slow living, like rest, may feel inaccessible to some,” she told The Epoch Times. “It carries real risks for people whose economic and employment realities require working at a certain pace or producing at a high volume.”

For those Gen Zers, she describes small adjustments—approved breaks, digital downtime, time with loved ones—as miniature ways to recover without putting income at risk.

Tanushree Srivastava, a communications and media professional who has worked across PR, social media, and editorial roles in London, including at Business Insider, sees the financial and mental health pressures as inseparable. A casual evening out in London, she noted, can easily run 40 to 60 pounds ($53 to $80).

“Slow living isn’t really a trend: it’s a response to reality,” Srivastava told The Epoch Times. “Mental health and financial pressure are deeply interconnected for our generation.”

In cities like London, she said, “slow living becomes both a financial adjustment and a mental health strategy, a way to reclaim calm in environments that can otherwise feel relentless.”

Harary sees the broader picture the same way. The gardening, the matcha, the sourdough—it’s not what it looks like from the outside, she argues.

“This shouldn’t be mistaken for a loss of ambition,” she told The Epoch Times. “It’s an adaptive move to an impossible reality.”