In the past decade or nearly 5 years, there have been a lot of debate on the life situation of GenZ (the population born after 2000), their encountering with workplace and different attitudes towards life-span development compared with the early generations. In addition, digital literacy and acquaintance is becoming a supportive as well as challenging factor on their growth, employment and identification with the world. Handayani & Purnasiwi (2026) examines how technostress and burnout affect the mental health of Generation Z workers, revealing that excessive technology consumption without control is a significant vulnerability for this generation. Besides, there is comprehensive analysis of Generation Z's psychological and emotional challenges in the digital era, including digital overload, academic and career pressure, and isolation (Matilda et al., 2025). They pinpoint the significance of impact of digital transformation on the mental status of GenZ.
On digital transformation, some scholars rigorously investigated on how digital transformation reshapes the workplace, creating new forms of stress such as technostress and cognitive overload (Akbar et al., 2025). It identifies organizational support, digital literacy, and work-life balance policies as critical mitigating factors for the young generation in workplace. It lays an essential concern on digital turbulence among GenZ populations. Their volatility of resilience is becoming a major factor in encountering such turbulence which is critical to strengthening or weakening their connection with the world. It demonstrates the critical role of psychological resilience in managing emotional demands among social workers during crises, showing that higher resilience correlates with improved coping mechanisms and professional growth (Buzalová et al., 2024).
Handayani and Purnasiwi (2026) studied that among Generation Z workers the most acute form of technostress arises where the pace of technological change exceeds individual capacity to absorb it. The mechanism they identify is enlightening: the pathology is located not in the technology and not in the person, but in the mismatch between the rate of change demanded and the rate of adaptation possibility to digital transformation. It is a structural matter away from the individualised remedies that dominate workplace wellness discourse.
Similarly, the global evidence resists the simple deficit narrative that circulates in popular commentary. Cheng et al. (2021), in a meta-analysis covering thirty-two countries, found that the prevalence of problematic social media use varies significantly with cultural values and with the classification schemes used to measure it. Evidently, the phenomenon is culturally constituted rather than uniformly distributed. Meanwhile, Wong et al. (2023) argued that aggregate correlations between digital media use and mental health conceal considerable heterogeneity, and that person-specific analytic approaches are required if research is to distinguish harm from benefit. Taken together, these findings caution against treating Generation Z as a homogeneous population possessing a shared digital pathology. In a distributional sense, Van Dijk (2020) demonstrates that the digital divide is not a binary condition of access but a layered structure of motivational, material, skills-based, and usage inequalities, each of which reproduces prior forms of social stratification. Young people who are digitally connected but materially in unstable condition experience turbulence differently from those with the resources to insulate themselves or be distant from it. Therefore, the turbulence is not evenly distributed, and any account that treats it as a generational experience rather than a stratified one will misrepresent who is actually being harmed.
Some Asian Experiences
In Asian societies, and particularly across East and Southeast Asia, digital turbulence emerges with a distinctive developmental history. Chang and Song (2010) describe ‘compressed modernity’ as a condition in which economic, technological, and social transformations that unfolded over generations elsewhere are examined into a single lifespan, producing subjects who must reconcile incompatible normative orders simultaneously. Generation Z in the region carries the individualising demands of a global digital economy alongside the cultural obligations of filial duty, family reputation, and high respect to hierarchy from family to society. In the way, digital turbulence is landing on a subject already managing a structural contradiction.
Deng, English, and Li (2025), in a qualitative study of recent Chinese graduates, most of them expressed a desire to balance involution and lying flat in daily living. There is potential relationship among initial resignation, work attitude and work state. It shows that Arnett’s emerging adulthood theory still has applicability on the stage of emerging adulthood nowadays. It uncovered struggles and addressed concerns about emerging adults’ perceptions, attitudes, and career performance during the post-pandemic era and economic challenges in China. It circulate trans-nationally through the same digital platforms that intensify the pressures they name, and comparable formulations have been documented among young people in Chinese populations and elsewhere in the region.
Recently, A survey by Hong Kong Christian Service (2026) of 572 Generation Z young people found that 93.4% used social media, that respondents first opened a personal account at a mean age of 10.3 years, and that daily social-media use averaged 4.1 hours. Although social-media users recorded higher loneliness scores than non-users, the survey attributed youth loneliness primarily to the interaction between negative online experiences and weak offline interpersonal relationships (Hong Kong Christian Service, 2026). In Singapore, the National Youth Mental Health Study found that approximately one in three respondents aged 15–35 reported severe or extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, and/or stress. Cyberbullying, body-shape concerns, and excessive social-media use are identified as factors associated with these symptoms (Ministry of Health Singapore, 2024). The above describe the modal experience of the cohort now entering the social work labour force.
For Generation Z entering social work specifically, three features with regional characteristics compound the general picture. First, the emotional labour of practice is now conducted partly through channels that never close, so that the boundary work on which professional sustainability depends has become harder to maintain profoundly. Second, help-seeking norms in Confucian-heritage or traditional Chinese societies continue to attach stigma to the disclosure of psychological hardship, which is particularly acute for practitioners whose professional identity is organised around competence under relevant cultural backgrounds. Third, the sector itself is under strain: research on the Hong Kong social welfare workforce documents persistent understaffing, high turnover among experienced practitioners, and thin supervisory provision under output-based funding regimes, conditions that transfer disproportionate load onto the least experienced staff. The newly qualified Generation Z practitioner therefore absorbs digital turbulence and organisational turbulence at once.
Towards an Anti-Oppressive Response: Reconsidering Resilience and Sociability
The dominant professional response to these conditions has been to focus on resilience. Anti-oppressive practice, as formulated by Dominelli (2002) and developed by Dalrymple and Burke (2019), requires the practitioner to analyse power at personal, cultural, and structural levels simultaneously, and to refuse explanations that locate solely within the individual. It is straightforward: when a workforce cohort reports elevated exhaustion under conditions of understaffing, constant connectivity, and unstable employment, the appropriate object of intervention is their condition.
For the GenZ social workers, an anti-oppressive response begins by reconstituting technostress as an occupational hazard subject to employer duty rather than a personal deficiency. It imposes concrete implications: negotiated limits on digital availability, workload measurement that counts asynchronous communication as work, and supervision that treats digital-boundary difficulty as a legitimate professional agenda item. It also implies attention to who carries the heaviest load, since junior, contract- based, and frontline social workers are least able to decline the always-available expectation.
Second, an anti-oppressive approach reverses the deficit reading of Generation Z sociability. The current narrative that online relationship is a degraded substitute for face-to-face contact is empirically unstable, given the heterogeneity that Wong et al. (2023) document, and it is professionally costly. Generation Z practitioners hold situated knowledge of digital social worlds that senior colleagues do not possess, and treating that knowledge as expertise rather than as generational deficiency is a straightforward application of the anti-oppressive commitment to redistributing authority on knowledge and skills acquisition. In practical sense, it is wise to involve early-career staff in the design of digitally mediated services rather than only in their delivery of services.
Third, digital exclusion is a matter of advocacy rather than a background condition of practice. Watling (2012) argued that digital exclusion would become a defining concern for a profession committed to empowerment, and Sanders and Scanlon (2021) develop this into an explicit human rights claim, situating connectivity alongside other infrastructures related to social justice. In Asian contexts marked by high aggregate connectivity but sharply unequal quality of access, they call for local specification: the relevant divides concern data affordability, device adequacy, language, and platform governance rather than basic availability.
Finally, for social work education nowadays, if Generation Z practitioners are expected to work critically rather than competently within digital environments, curricula must be transformed to equip them to analyse digital platform architectures as sites of power besides application. The gap identified in the above passages, namely the absence of sustained inquiry into Generation Z social workers as an occupational cohort, is therefore both an empirical and a pedagogical one. What follows takes that gap as its starting point for a sustainable and hopeful future of social work profession.
References
Chang, K.-S., & Song, M.-Y. (2010). The stranded individualizer under compressed modernity: South Korean women in individualization without individualism. The British Journal of Sociology, 61(3), 539–564.
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