It’s a compelling argument. But it sent me down a rabbit hole that I think matters just as much as anything in his book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because it turns out, we’ve been here before. Many, many times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Oldest Story In History<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
There was a familiar tone to Alex talking about Gen Z, and to listening to some of the preconceptions about them that came out in our group discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That familiarity was the same tone and critique I’ve been on the receiving end of more times than I care to count. “They’re arrogant.” “They want more than they’ve earnt.” “They lack respect.” “They’re too quick to lose interest.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n All my career I can recall hearing similar things. Sometimes said right to my face, like it was perfectly acceptable. I remember being a thirtysomething man and being told: “Sorry son, you’re just not old or experienced enough for this job. Maybe give it a few more years and try again.”<\/em><\/strong> I had been leading people for around ten years <\/strong>at that point, and had spent over fifteen years in Engineering and moreover, I was bloody good at what I did! <\/strong>The job went to someone a decade my senior who hadn’t managed a person in his life and was previously a semi skilled operator, not an engineer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that moment, time served mattered more than ability or merit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My point is that Alex’s story about Gen Z felt familiar, and it made me wonder how long this perception from the incumbent generation had been dished out on the newcomer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I did some digging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s a question worth sitting with. When was the following written?<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Young people today have no respect for their elders. They are impatient, self-indulgent and lack the discipline of previous generations.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n If you guessed the last ten years, you’d be wrong.<\/strong> Versions of that sentiment appear across centuries and civilisations, almost word for word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 4th century BC, Aristotle wrote that young people “think they know everything and are always quite sure about it.”<\/em><\/strong> He described them as high-minded because they had not yet been humbled by life. This wasn’t affection. It was criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s something in that, of course. However, young people are ambitious, carefree and aim for the impossible precisely because <\/strong>older generations haven’t yet beaten them into being realistic<\/strong>. Whether that’s a flaw <\/strong>or an advantage <\/strong>rather depends on your perspective and open mindedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1624, Thomas Barnes wrote that youth were “never more savagely saucie… the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned.”<\/em><\/strong> In 1790, Reverend Enos Hitchcock warned that young people’s access to novels and plays had “poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth.” <\/em><\/strong>In 1843, the Earl of Shaftesbury told the House of Commons that the morals of children were “tenfold worse than formerly.”<\/em><\/strong> In 1925, the Hull Daily Mail described young people’s attitude as “grossly thoughtless, rude, and utterly selfish.”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n And then it gets closer to home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When the Baby Boomers came of age in the 1960s, the generation before them was horrified. Higher rates of drug use, sexual freedom, protest, counterculture, rejection of the values their parents had fought a world war to protect. The Boomers were written off as :<\/p>\n\n\n\n “self-indulgent, reckless and morally bankrupt”.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n When Generation X entered the workforce in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Boomers returned the favour. The Guardian reported in 1994 that “some worry that this Generation X may be opting out of society.”<\/em><\/strong> Time Magazine in 1990 described a young workforce “considered overly sensitive at best and lazy at worst,”<\/em><\/strong> wanting flexibility, constant feedback and, wait for it, “the sacredness of work-free weekends.” <\/em><\/strong>They were called slackers. Directionless. Cynical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Millennials arrived, Generation X lined up to take their shot. Time ran a now-infamous cover story calling them “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.”<\/em><\/strong> Written, it’s worth noting, by a Gen Xer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now it’s Gen Z’s turn. An employer’s nightmare. Can’t get through an interview. Won’t pick up the phone. Soft. Sensitive. Unrealistic expectations. The most useless generation yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Except that’s exactly what they said last time. And the time before that. And the time before that. Going back, as far as we can find evidence, to ancient Greece.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If this pattern has repeated without interruption for over two thousand years, the rational response isn’t to ask what’s wrong with Gen Z. The more useful question is what’s wrong with the question itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every generation develops social norms, ways of working, communicating, measuring success, defining loyalty and effort. Those norms feel like truth. They feel like standards. And when the next generation arrives with a different set, it reads as decline rather than difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s a failure of perspective, not a failure of the incoming generation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Alex Atherton’s work characterises Gen Z as pragmatic, diligent and apprehensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pragmatic<\/strong>, because 75% of them want to own their own business, partly out of ambition and partly out of a rational assessment that the traditional employment model may not deliver for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diligent<\/strong>, because the proportion achieving first class degrees has more than doubled in fifteen years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apprehensive<\/strong>, because they grew up managing their online reputation from childhood, came of age during a global pandemic, and are the most anxiety-diagnosed generation in recorded history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That last point deserves a moment. The anxiety that gets labelled as weakness was produced by an environment<\/strong>. Social media engineered for addiction<\/strong>. A housing market that shut them out before they even started. A financial crisis they didn’t cause but will spend decades paying for. As a twenty-year-old today, you can’t misjudge a conversation at a bar without it potentially ending up online. You can’t have a bad night without a permanent record of it. Your entire life is being observed and catalogued in real time. Heck, I bet someone reading this is still tracking their 20+ year old’s whereabouts on some kind of location tracker! Is it really surprising they carry more anxiety than we did?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is where I’ll be honest about something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The more I listened to Alex’s presentation, the more I realised I wasn’t hearing a description of a foreign generation. I was hearing a description of values I’ve slowly arrived at myself, after thirty years of professional life, twenty of them in leadership and the last decade in senior executive roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gen Z will work hard, but <\/strong>they expect to be rewarded <\/strong>when they do. If a 25-year-old can run a finance function better than someone twice their age with decades of service, why should they have to wait years to be recognised for it? When I was younger, I was told regularly that I was too young for the positions I was going for. That I needed to slow down. That I didn’t look old enough for the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A significant part of my career was spent fighting the assumption that age equals competence, that years of service equals value, that experience measured in decades is automatically worth more than ability measured in outcomes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, lived experience genuinely is irreplaceable. But sometimes there are too many untested assumptions attached to younger people that we never stop to examine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We look at young talent and project our own framework onto their ambition and call it arrogance. We measure their expectations against norms that served a different economy in a different era and call it entitlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gen Z won’t stay somewhere whose values don’t match their own. Neither would I, eventually. It just took me longer to admit it. They value meaning, purpose and connection. They want to enjoy life the whole way through rather than defer everything in the hope of a comfortable retirement, partly because they understand, more clearly than any generation before them, that retirement as we knew it may not exist by the time they get there!<\/p>\n\n\n\n These aren’t the values of a generation in decline. They’re the values of a generation that looked honestly at what the previous model produced and decided they wanted something different. It’s hard to argue with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex’s practical point, the one that landed hardest in that room, is that none of this is about lowering standards for Gen Z. It’s about recognising that they bring a different and arguably more honest set of expectations about what work should be.<\/strong> Purpose, transparency, the relationship between effort and reward, authenticity in leadership. These aren’t unreasonable demands. They’re what most of us claim to value anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question he leaves you with is a straightforward one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “how well equipped is your organisation to recruit, retain and motivate the youngest generation in your workforce?”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And the honest follow-up, which he didn’t say but I will: if the answer is “not very,” is that a Gen Z problem or a leadership problem?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The pattern is too consistent and too old for the answer to keep being the same one. Every <\/strong>generation has looked at the next and seen chaos, selfishness and decline. Every <\/strong>generation has been wrong. The civilisation is still here. The work still gets done. Progress continues, in most cases driven by the very people who were written off as the worst generation yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe the issue was never them. Maybe it’s the limits of our own perspective, and our willingness to actually challenge it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex Atherton’s book The Snowflake Myth is worth your time if this is a live challenge in your business. The discomfort of his presentation was probably the most useful couple of hours I’ve spent in a long time. Not because it told me what I wanted to hear, but because it challenged me to question a set of assumptions I didn’t realise I was still carrying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s usually where the real work starts.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every generation calls the next one lazy, entitled and soft. Aristotle said it. The Victorians said it. We’re saying it about Gen Z. Two thousand years of the same complaint, and it’s never once been right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":639,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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The Real Question<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The Mirror We Don’t Want To Look In<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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What We Should Actually Do<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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