English Listening-London Life With Gen Z Trends Ep 809
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Hi there and welcome to this Adept English podcast. This week, a newsy podcast, but let's call it non-Trump news. In recent weeks, every time I've tuned into the news, it has begun President Trump, blah, blah, blah. Let's

Let's find some different news items to talk about today so that you can practice your English. One rich source of news about cultural and social trends, especially in London, which I enjoy, is the Metro. The Metro newspaper is the one that is distributed for free on the London Underground on the Tube. You might pick up a copy when you're travelling on the Tube.

So let's have a look at a couple of articles I saw last week, which I think speak of what London life is really like, especially if you're a young person in the capital. This podcast will give you lots of practice at understanding up-to-date English terms and vocabulary and topics.

Hello, I'm Hilary and you're listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.

And it puts interesting news articles into language you can understand, while at the same time teaching you the original language used. What better way could there be to extend your English language capability? And if you keep listening, I also talk about my personal experience.

So how about this one to start off? This article appeared in the Metro on the 2nd of April 2025 with the headline, Work wasn't for me. Gen Z travellers ditch the 9 to 5 for a permanent holiday. What does this mean? Well, Gen Z is one of the names we use in English often

for the different generations of people, different ages. So Gen Z or Gen Z, as Americans would say, they were born between the very late 90s or the year 2000 and about 2012. After that, it's Gen Alpha. And writers who observe social and cultural trends say

tend to write about people in terms of these generational labels, these generation names. There are quite a few of them. And if you want to understand better, then Adept English Podcast 743 is still available.

and takes you through all these different names for the generations and what they mean and talks about how each generation are seen. Very useful if you're an English language learner and you haven't come across these terms before. So Gen Z are aged currently somewhere between their mid-teens

and their late 20s. So the article headline again, Gen Z travellers ditch the nine to five for a permanent holiday. So the verb to ditch, D-I-T-C-H, it means to get rid of, probably after the noun ditch, which refers to a channel at the side of the road or path.

sometimes with water in it. So if you throw things into the ditch, you ditch them, you throw them away. So they're ditching the nine to five. What does that mean? Well, if you know the very old Dolly Parton song,

9 to 5. There was a film to go with it. She's talking there about 9am in the morning and 5pm in the afternoon, the traditional working day. If you don't know the song, there's a link in the transcript to the YouTube video. And

and some lovely 1980s hairstyles to look at and enjoy. Nine to five, says the song, but in my experience, the modern workplace tends to expect people to work longer than that, perhaps 8am in the morning until 6 or 7pm in the evening. It's become a longer working day.

and Gen Z are ditching the nine to five for a permanent holiday. The article talks about the common choice that many of the Gen Z age group make to go travelling. People often take a gap year, GAP, between school and university or between finishing university and starting work

Or they save their first few salary payments and fund an even longer trip abroad. And the problem they're finding, they don't want to come back. The Metro quotes research done by the Times newspaper, which says...

Unlike previous generations, many Gen Zers simply aren't satisfied with the working world in 2025. Just one in 10 want to work in an office and more than half say that they're lazier than their parents' generation.

I'm not sure that's true. But what the article also observes is that property prices, house prices and pensions, that's the money you live off when you retire from work. Well, both are becoming increasingly unaffordable. Gen Z won't be able to have those things. When I was young, buying

a house was an immediate goal when you started work and it was possible. And then you spent your time and money doing the house up, making it nice.

Now, this is so far out of reach for many Gen Zers that experiences, especially travel experiences, become even more important. And if you're in a job where you only get 25 days annual leave, 25 days holiday a year, you're not going to be able to travel very much. So Gen Zers are finding this working world unacceptable. Gen Zers often go back

This is when you travel around the world for quite a long period of time with nothing but a backpack or rucksack. If you've done this, it can be really hard to come back and meet the expectations, especially in a normal office job in London. Certainly my experience working with clients in financial services jobs

in London. If they want to progress their career, they must give their all and that includes all their time every day and not taking much holiday. Prolonged times away from work would be frowned upon in these jobs. I don't agree that those should be the values and I have sympathy with Gen Z.

Life isn't about working. If no matter how hard you work, it's still going to be nearly impossible to own your own home or do those normal things in life. No wonder they want to go on holiday. One traveller quoted in the Metro article said about her return from travelling.

For me, it was just the loss of freedom that hit me. I really struggled with the monotony of life and working five days a week, eight or nine hours a day, then to live for the weekend and get just two days off. They were gone so quickly and you had to do it all again. It was just a cycle.

One question you may be asking, and I was too, how do you fund? How do you pay for a permanent holiday? Well, the person quoted here set up her own business online, her own travel company for women, which allows her to fund her nomadic lifestyle alongside travel writing and content creation on social media. Great. Very flexible as your own boss. I think

many people's experience of being able to work online during the pandemic.

has changed everything. We're not as content to submit to the expectations around a 9-5 or possibly 8-6 job as we once were. If you watch the video of that Dolly Parton song, not only will you see some great 1980s hairstyles, but I think Dolly was ahead of the game. Her lyrics, the words to her song, say exactly what Gen Z are complaining about.

My own experience? Well, I'm Gen X, so I submitted more to that expectation of work hard at your career and you'll be rewarded financially. For me, though, the problem came when I had children. I was lecturing at a college when my first daughter was born and found that I didn't want to be teaching until 9pm at night.

which was the expectation at least two days a week. I also didn't want all that marking at the weekends. So I went back to working as a programmer in an insurance company, what I'd been doing before. And this enabled me to have flexible working.

But even here, my 25 days annual leave a year didn't cover the school holidays, which are around 13 weeks in the UK. And this is a problem faced by many working parents. That's what led to my decision to set up my own business and work for myself instead.

Another article I found in the Stylist magazine had the headline, Annual Leave 2025. How to get two months off work with only 27 days leave. So in the same spirit, how to maximise your time off work. The article advises on how you can use your 27

seven days of annual leave alongside the UK's bank holidays and public holidays like the Easter weekend or the bank holidays in May and August.

to give you a whole two months holiday. Quite clever, and I think captures something of the spirit of the times. Another article in the Metro on a different topic, but which made me smile, was published 31st of March 2025, and I think this also says something about Gen Z and London life. The headline was, Barebackers, are the commuters plaguing the London Tube network?

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Barebackers was not a term I knew either and one I think the writer has invented to make us smile. The writer, Alice Giddings, is referring to the fact that on the London Underground, on the Tube,

When it's busy at rush hour, everyone is packed in like sardines in a tin, so close to one another that eye contact, looking at someone, is very uncomfortable. And therefore, the rule on the tube when it's busy is that no one speaks to anyone else or acknowledges one another.

Everyone is politely on their phone. In fact, whatever goes on in the carriage of a tube train, the rule is that you politely ignore it and keep looking at your phone. Reading a book is also permissible, but a bit more unusual. So barebackers, the people that the writer is complaining about, well, they're people who aren't on their phones.

and who are actually looking around at people nearby. This is seen as very unwelcome and antisocial. The writer says, there are plenty of irritating commuter types out there who disrupt the almost zombie-like journey to our death.

But one subset of London Underground passengers have been labelled worst of them all, barebackers. The article explains, essentially, barebackers are people who sit without any form of entertainment and people watch, staring at other passengers to pass the time. This behaviour is seen as antisocial. The headline says plaguing.

the London Tube network. Like a plague, P-L-A-G-U-E, in other words. This is an unfair judgment in my opinion, but perhaps it's also part of the reason why the Metro newspaper is freely distributed. You can pick up a copy on most trains. So if your phone battery is flat, there's still some free entertainment to rescue you. One podcaster on TikTok, Curtis Morton, commented, I think it's

completely reasonable to ask. Pull out your phone, buy a book, God, even fall asleep. Just leave the barebacking to the privacy of your own home and don't be making eye contact with me on the 748 to London Bridge.

Far more creepy, that's a real Gen Z word, and concerning to me though, the Metro run a Rush Hour Crush feature. A crush in this context, C-R-U-C-H, is a sudden romantic attachment to someone you see that you don't really know.

That's a crush. You have a crush on someone. Or you might even say, oh, my current crush is, substitute the person's name. So Rush Hour Crush is a page on the Metro website where people can enter the details of a person they saw or talked to.

on their journey to work, and this is someone they'd like to date. They leave their email address just in case the other person is reading and wants to get in contact. So it's things like this post addressed to girl with red hair, it says. Highbury and Islington.

Platform 2 to 3. The coffee run on Friday around 9am. We reached for the same bin and coffee spot on the platform. You politely offered to let me go first and then asked me whether I'd like a coffee, but I was too shy to accept. Thanks for making my morning. Would love to offer you a pint in return.

I wonder if the girl with red hair read this post and got in touch. You never know. But to me, that seems far more questionable, perhaps, open to abuse, than someone who merely looks around the tube carriage and isn't on their phone. But maybe lots of romances happen this way, through the Metro's Rush Hour Crush feature.

So that's my Metro-driven update on London life, especially for Gen Z. Let me know what you think. I hope that gave you some entertaining insight into London life and some superb English vocabulary that you didn't already know. Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.