A Confession From the Generation in the Middle

I was born in 1971. I grew up with rotary phones, Saturday morning cartoons, and the implicit understanding that your parents' rules were the rules, full stop. I came of age in the eighties, went to college in the early nineties, and entered the workforce before anyone had heard of work-life balance as a phrase anyone took seriously. I watch Gen Z from my current vantage point — mid-fifties, two decades into a career, with a kid who is twenty-two — and I notice that I have to fight a very specific reflex. The reflex is to explain to them why things work the way they do. Why you have to pay your dues. Why you cannot expect everything to be accommodating. Why learning to tolerate discomfort is essential. The reflex is not wrong, exactly. It is just that it is covering over something I have had to work to see: that some of what we built, and what we normalized, and what we passed on to the next generation as essential truths, was not wisdom. It was the accumulated scar tissue of a culture that confused endurance with virtue.

What We Got Wrong About Work

The forty-plus-hour work week as a marker of commitment, the performance of availability, the idea that boundaries are primarily a sign of ambition failure — these were not eternal truths. They were habits of a specific economic moment that happened to coincide with our formative years, during which the labor market was sufficiently tilted toward employers that the habits calcified into norms. Gen Z employees who ask for clear scope on their role, who leave at five o'clock when their work is done, who decline to check email on weekends — they are not being lazy. They are applying a cost-benefit analysis to a system that my generation participated in mostly because we did not know we had a choice. Research from the London School of Economics on generational differences in workplace expectations found that younger workers are not less committed to quality or outcomes than their older counterparts — they are less committed to performing busyness as a proxy for quality. The distinction matters, and collapsing it into a complaint about work ethic is analytically sloppy.

What We Got Wrong About Mental Health

This one is harder to write. My generation did a lot of damage in this area, and it was mostly damage by omission. We did not talk about depression or anxiety or the ways that stress accumulates over time into something pathological. We treated psychological distress as a character test to be passed, not a medical reality to be addressed. The rates of anxiety and depression in Gen Z are genuinely higher than they were in our cohort at the same age. That is not, as some of my peers seem to believe, evidence that they are weaker. It is partly evidence that they are more honest, and partly evidence that the world they inherited is more stressful in specific ways — economically, climatically, socially — than the world we entered. A tangent I cannot avoid: when I hear people my age say kids today cannot handle anything, I want to ask which things specifically we think they should be able to handle without comment. Because the list sometimes includes things that we ourselves never successfully handled — we just did not name it.

What We Got Right That Is Worth Passing On

I do not want to perform a generational self-flagellation that is as dishonest as generational pride. Some things we learned through difficulty are genuinely worth knowing. Commitment that outlasts enthusiasm. The ability to do something you do not feel like doing because it matters and you said you would. The specific competence that comes only from working through something hard without a clear endpoint. The knowledge that most things take longer than you think and fail more times than the eventual success makes visible. These are real. I want to find a way to pass them on that does not also pass on the damage. That is the work I am still figuring out.

The Thing About My Kid

My twenty-two-year-old has a therapist, talks openly about mental health with their friends, and left a job after eight months because the culture was undermining their sense of self. I had complicated feelings about the last one. Research from the American Psychological Association's longitudinal work on emerging adult decision-making suggests that early career exits driven by values misalignment — rather than laziness or entitlement — are actually associated with better long-term career outcomes and higher reported job satisfaction at thirty-five and forty. My kid probably knew something I did not, when I was twenty-two and staying somewhere I should have left. I am trying to update accordingly.