Gen Z doesn’t want to work themselves to death. But do they still know how to work hard?

I read in Il Sole 24 Ore that, when faced with excessive workloads, more than one in two Gen Zers would rather quit their jobs. My first reaction was almost automatic: good for them. The second, arriving a few seconds later, was less straightforward.

Because I belong to Gen X, the generation raised with a very different relationship to work. During summer vacations, if you wanted to earn something, you went to wait tables, work in a factory, in a shop or, in my case, flipping burgers. We didn’t ask ourselves much whether that little job was aligned with our values, our purpose, or our self-actualization. It was, more simply, aligned with our wallets.

I don’t say this with nostalgia. In fact, I find that “we were the ones who…” repertoire boring. We accepted far too much. We normalized impossible bosses, absurd hours, late-night emails, interrupted vacations, presence at all costs. We mistook permanent availability for professionalism and exhaustion for ambition. Then we were surprised by the burnout.

They watched us. And they took notes

Our children watched us.

They saw parents working hard, often too hard. They saw divorces, stress, companies that during Covid suddenly seemed to remember that behind people there were primarily costs. They saw fifty-year-olds with thirty years of experience quickly become “too senior,” “too expensive,” “no longer consistent with the new organizational structure.”

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that they thought: I don’t want to live like this.

On this, perhaps, they understood something before we did.

The problem is that while they were learning very well what they didn’t want, we parents were trying to spare them everything that had weighed us down. And there, perhaps, we began to get confused.

Because there is a huge difference between avoiding unnecessary suffering and removing every difficulty.

Subsidized autonomy

We who had struggled tried to make sure our children didn’t have to. Don’t like the little job? Quit. Is the boss unpleasant? Don’t let anyone treat you like that. Haven’t found your way yet? Take your time.

And in the meantime, often, gas, gym, phone, pizza, vacations, and sometimes even the rent continue to come from mom and dad.

We have invented a curious form of independence: subsidized autonomy.

And I don’t say this to judge. I understand perfectly where it comes from. It comes from love, from the desire to protect them, from the idea of offering them possibilities that we didn’t have.

The problem is that, sometimes, by removing the obstacle, we also remove the training.

Hard work doesn’t guarantee security. But it trains you to start again

I paid for my own university. This doesn’t make me better than anyone, but it had an interesting side effect: I was very motivated to finish quickly. There were periods when I ate potatoes to spend less, and it didn’t even occur to me to call my parents to tell them about it.

Not because I was heroic, but because that was simply my problem to solve.

And today, looking back, I realize that all that hard work didn’t guarantee me security at all. At fifty, I reinvented myself professionally and became a freelancer.

So no: hard work is not an insurance policy. It doesn’t guarantee a permanent job, it doesn’t protect against layoffs, it doesn’t stop the market from changing the rules.

But perhaps it gave me something more useful: the ability to think that, if one road ends, I can build another.

And this is where the Gen Z theme, in my opinion, stops being a discussion about young people and becomes a discussion about the future.

Saying no is a skill. But so is staying

In the job market that awaits them, the decisive skill will not be finally finding the perfect job and staying there for forty years. It will be knowing how to reinvent oneself many times, learning continuously, accepting being a beginner again, changing tools, roles, professional identities.

And all of this, like it or not, involves hard work.

Not stupid effort. Not the boss who humiliates. Not the work that destroys you. Not burnout turned into a medal of honor.

But that less spectacular and much more important effort that arises when you aren’t good yet, when you receive a no, when you have to do something that doesn’t excite you, when feedback annoys you, when something takes more time than you’d like.

The risk, today, is confusing every discomfort with a signal to flee.

If every conflict becomes toxicity, every heavy week burnout, every demanding boss a narcissist, and every boring task a violation of one’s well-being, then the problem is no longer work-life balance.

It is the ability to stay within complexity.

And here we come to the question that really interests me.

We have raised kids who are much more capable than we were of recognizing their own boundaries. That is a good thing. But have we taught them just as well to understand which boundaries should be defended and which, instead, should be crossed?

Because not all limits are walls to be respected. Some are thresholds.

The rest of the world isn’t waiting

Our children will not enter a local market. They will compete with kids raised in very different contexts, where the relationship with study, work, risk, and social mobility is different.

It would be simplistic to reduce everything to “Chinese discipline” or “Indian hunger,” but it would be equally naive to pretend that starting conditions don’t matter.

Those who know that, if they wait two more years, someone will continue to pay the bills, have a different relationship with time than those who feel they have less margin.

It’s not a moral issue. It’s a matter of incentives.

And here, perhaps, we should stop blaming Gen Z.

It’s too easy to say they have no desire, no discipline, no respect, or no hunger. Someone raised them.

Us.

We were the ones who called the teacher, argued with the coach, challenged the grade, solved the problem, intervened when something wasn’t working. Then they reach twenty-five and we are surprised because autonomy didn’t install itself automatically with the latest software update.

Perhaps the right question is another

Before accusing a generation of not knowing how to work hard, perhaps we should ask ourselves:

how much hard work did we actually allow them to do?

I don’t know what job my son will do in twenty years. Probably some of the jobs he will do today don’t even exist yet. I can’t guarantee him stability, I can’t guarantee him a good boss, I can’t guarantee that he will like everything.

I can, however, try to leave him something more useful: the ability to distinguish.

Understanding when to say no and when to stay. When to protect oneself and when to expose oneself. When an effort is useless and when, instead, it is making him grow.

Because perhaps the greatest privilege we can give our children is not avoiding difficulties for them.

It is making sure that, when they arrive, they know what to do with them.