America is famed for its workaholic, career-centered culture where dedication to a job is worn as a badge of honor. However, young professionals have been pushing back against the grind by embracing a softer approach with trends like the “lazy girl” or “snail girl” jobs: white-collar gigs with a favorable work-life balance. Gabrielle Judge, a content creator known as “Ms. Anti Work,” popularized the former term in 2023. And opting for a low-energy gig allowed her to build her own media company.
“Lazy girl jobs came from The Great Resignation era,” Judge recently said onstage at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit. “I’m a huge high achiever, I’m a huge workaholic…and I didn’t have a lot of balance. So what was really hard for me was to get a ‘lazy girl job,’ which was still a really good job.”
What Judge experienced was part of a larger phenomenon. Disillusioned with their jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown, tens of millions of workers voluntarily left their roles in search of greener pastures. And during the pandemic years—when employers went on aggressive hiring sprees—professionals enjoyed a greater sense of power in the labor market. In the “Great Resignation” era, talent knew they could bargain for better wages, benefits, and work-life balance; remote life also meant increased comfort, clocking in from the couch. One year following the wave of professionals ditching their gigs, Judge took her idea of the “lazy girl job” to the internet.
