Suzy Welch says Gen Z and millennials are burnt out because older generations worked just as hard, but they ‘had hope’
Posted by Sine_Fine_Belli
Suzy Welch says Gen Z and millennials are burnt out because older generations worked just as hard, but they ‘had hope’
Posted by Sine_Fine_Belli
9 Comments
Why do people keep talking about millennials like we’re children? We’re in our 30s and 40s lol.
One thing I have noticed through my work experience is that Millenials and Gen Z are the only people in certain workforces tech savvy enough to have the ability to actually do the work. The older generations couldn’t do the work themselves even if they wanted to because they literally do not know how to do it. That means everything falls on Millenials and Gen Z to get the jobs done while the older generations reap nearly all of the rewards. A lot of the work falling on the more junior and less experienced people is the name of the game, but when the boomers refuse to retire and hand over the reins to the younger generations when they don’t have the ability or the capacity to even do the job anymore, it can get very disheartening.
>they ‘had ~~hope~~ no social media’
Sometimes I think we should just stop trying to relate people’s political sentiments to economic policy entirely.
People’s feeling are affected by psychology, the spirit of the day, social media and suchlike. Economic growth, cost of living and even unemployment rates are of secondary importance.
This is a consequence of an aging population. When the median age of your civilization is 22, you, as a society, are much more forward looking than when its 45 or 55.
It’s interesting how much people in 1900 wondered with intense curiosity what 2000 might look like, and it permeated media and literature. I see very few people intensely curious about what 2100 will look like, and inasmuch as that look that far ahead, it’s just to doom about climate change or whatever.
No we’re just sad fidget spinners went out of fashion.
There are a lot of ways in which things really are harder (the young new hires at my job had a hell of a time getting “real” jobs before we brought them on, and they’re great hires!)
But another piece of it is that people are aspiring to levels of wealth that they see on social media. And even a lot of the influencers they’re comparing themselves to are faking it or at least rounding up! It’s trivially easy to make yourself feel deprived these days, almost no matter your income level.
As a specific example, [this photo of Kirsten Dunst’s teenage bedroom](https://www.reddit.com/r/GuitarAmps/comments/1ba7l4d/kirsten_dunst_in_her_bedroom_1997/) makes the reddit rounds pretty frequently. By 1997, she had already been in a number of movies, some of which were huge. But it looks like a normal kid’s bedroom, maybe with more expensive stuff for the era.
Yes, this is the heart of it to me — its not just that people are struggling (that’s not new), its that there is a sense of bleakness among the youth that creates its own problems.
I cant tell if the sense of bleakness is fair — on one hand, we do legit see signs of things like AI really crushing specifically job for new entrants. On the other hand, I think things like online gambling and social media have amplified hostility and anxiety to enormous degrees
[Millennials stand to become the richest generation in history, after $90 trillion wealth transfer](https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/01/economy/millennials-richest-generation-in-history)
Give it time. I’m certainly not inheriting anything from my parents (Immigrants who had 4 freakin kids) but I definitely had a lot more exposure to positive personal finance lessons in my life than my “get a raise, buy everything flashy, immediately go into debt” GenX cousins did.