Dear Boomers, This is Why Millennials Don't Feel Motivated to Work Anymore

A Uniquely Distressed Life

Dear Friends, I have not posted in quite a while, due to moving house and catching up on many deadlines. Apologies for the radio silence!

Please note that this is not a commentary of my current workplace situation - I am actually very happy with my job! This is a reflection on broad trends I have noticed about my generation.

As always, please comment if you think I’ve missed anything. I’d love to keep the conversation going.

x

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Over the last few months, I have found myself repeatedly having the same conversation with Baby Boomers about the Millennial work ethic (or lack thereof, as they perceive it).

The key points I hear from Boomers are roughly the same:

• “I don’t understand the quiet-quitting thing.”

• “I don’t understand the four-day-work-week thing.”

• “Why are Millennials burning out more than Boomers?” (Or, “Are we sure Millennials are really burning out at all? Aren’t they just tired like the rest of us?”)

• “When I was younger, the workplace culture was far worse. Why can’t you guys just tough it out like we did?”

I think these are mostly fair questions. Few people in my circles are actively condemning the younger generations. Most are simply confused and curious.

So, this is my response to the Boomer trope that Millennials aren’t motivated to work. As I will argue throughout this essay, we’re not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

A Changing World

I think it is fair to say that every generation has been through some kind of suffering. It would be futile to argue who had it “better” or “worse.”

However, there have been some pretty monumental culture shifts over the last half-century, and this has radically altered the way people in the West experience life and pursue flourishing.

I am not here to say that Boomers had an easy life while Millennials had only hardship. On the contrary, I know many Boomers who have overcome serious adversity.

However, I do believe that there are some specific hardships that are unique to Millennials (many of which have carried over to Gen Z), and I think it is important for Boomers to understand these before we get into a conversation about work.

As you will see, the Millennial life is one governed by heavy existential burden coupled with a lack of hope. It’s pretty hard to motivate a generation to work when we inhabit a world that was not designed with our best interest at heart.

It is my view that Millennials and the generations below us are living a uniquely distressed life.

Here’s why:

1. Millennials and Gen Z have the largest critical mass in human history to have been raised by separated, divorced or single parents

One third of Millennials were raised with either separated, divorced, or single parents, and for Gen Z, it is now almost half.

As a result, attachment disorders - which used to be fringe - are now so pervasive we quietly renamed them attachment ‘styles’. We learn about them through online quizzes as though they are personality types, rather than in the therapist’s office because we think it is normal.

This has huge ramifications on how we experience love and relationships. To make matters worse, those who are securely attached are still affected because they are in a mating pool where the largest critical mass in human history are insecurely attached. This means that they have to put up with widespread appalling behaviour whenever they try dating.

Freya India, a Gen Z blogger and influencer gives a raw, angry account about how our generations were gaslit into thinking that parental abandonment was normal:

“Ours is a culture choking on its own compassion yet offering next to none for children of divorce. We are the first generation to grow up without stigma around family breakdown, but near total normalisation of it. And when you normalise something, you stigmatise the reaction. So many marriages end; what did you expect? Your friends’ families are the same; what’s wrong with you? It’s just a contract anyway. Kids are resilient. All this tells us that abandonment is trivial. That if you feel deeply affected by it you might be the problem.”

It’s weird that I have to say this, but a parental divorce is deeply distressing to a child. Yet we’re told that if we openly admit to our distress, then we are the bad guys. We’re too judgmental. How dare we have feelings. Or needs.

Imagine doing this to a third of an entire generation, and then being surprised that they’re not flourishing as adults?

In many ways, Millennials and Gen Z feel like we were the guinea pigs in a social experiment that ultimately failed. How can we look forward to a future when so many of us don’t even know how to trust a partner?

We are not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

2. Millennials are the first generation to be raised under an apocalyptic narrative regarding climate change

I think I was 11 years old when I first watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth at school. Soon after, The Day After Tomorrow was released, and although it was fiction, many of us grew up genuinely believing that we might actually see these apocalyptic images within our lifetimes.

For us, the end of the world wasn’t hyperbole. It was reality.

Although many other generations have experienced their own apocalyptic fears (The World Wars and the Cold War come to mind), as far as I know, we were the first to be told that the imminent end of the world was our fault.

While I do believe it is fundamentally important to educate people on the realities of climate change, it is worth remembering that the main perpetrators were the big oil companies who knew about the risks as far back as the 1970s, and covered up the data for as long as they could. Then, in the early 2000’s, when Millennials were teenagers, BP ran a worldwide PR campaign to put responsibility of climate change on the individual, coining the term ‘carbon footprint.’

This placed an enormous burden on the children and young people of that era. The world is on fire, and we were held personally responsible for saving it.

The effects of this are so pervasive today that we now have a new psychological term for this phenomenon: Eco Anxiety.

I know many Millennials and Gen Z who are now so afraid that they can’t do enough to prevent the collapse of civilization that they are crippled by major chronic anxiety. Some can barely get through the day.

Others have chosen to completely block it out and ignore the problem.

We’re not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

3. We are the first generation to experience the digital revolution before our prefrontal cortexes were fully developed

While the Boomers have also been affected by the invention of the smartphone, this came about after they had already matured into adulthood. This would not have had the same effect on your brains as it did ours.

We can all testify to that feeling we get after doom scrolling for too long. We feel like we have zombified our brains. Imagine experiencing this as a young person, with no memory of things ever being different.

The data is unquestionably clear: smartphone use has had enormously damaging effects on young people, especially for women and girls.

I don’t need to tell you that smartphones and social media are bad for productivity within the workplace. The truth of that is plain to see; social media, emails and the like are forever interrupting our flow, and do not enable us to work well.

What you might not have thought of, however, is how using smartphones and social media can still affect work, even if they are only ever used outside of the workplace.

Even after a person has ‘clocked off’ for the day, every scroll on TickTock, every interaction on Instagram, X, or Facebook rewires our brain and affects their memory.

Each day we are eroding our capacity for sustained attention. We sleep less, we wake up feeling ‘foggy’, and we can’t figure out why we don’t feel like working. If this is happening on a population level, you can only imagine what this is doing to workplace morale.

Except that you don’t need to imagine. More and more evidence is showing a direct, causal link between smartphone use and severe mental health effects. We literally invented something more damaging and addictive than smoking, and then we gave it out to young people without much thought about the consequences.

This may sound extreme, but I am starting to believe that the digital revolution is not only responsible for ripping apart relationships, but also for undermining the democratic process and even changing what it means to be a person.

This is a terrifying concept to live with.

We’re not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

4. We are the first generation to grow up with immediate access to free hardcore pornography en masse

When Boomers came of age, porn was mostly softcore, and access involved walking into a shop and purchasing a video tape or a magazine.

But, with the digital revolution coming one generation after the sexual revolution, porn became incredibly easy to access. The industry boomed while many of us were children and adolescents. Now, at least 12% of all websites are solely dedicated to pornography, and many more are infiltrated with it.

Most estimates say that around 75% of males and 30% of females under the age of 40 regularly consume hardcore pornographic content. Some believe this is an underestimate, especially for young women.

Almost all pornographic content consumed by Millennials and Gen Z are what Boomers would consider radical and violent. Anecdotally, most porn-addicted people I have spoken to say that they first became hooked around the ages of 10, 11 and 12.

Now, dear Boomer, I know that you are certain that your children and grandchildren are the exception to the rule. This will be true for some. But even if your son fits into the 25% who doesn’t consume porn regularly, know that at least 75% of his friends do. This socialisation will still impact the way that he views women and relationships.

Likewise, even if your daughter fits into the camp that doesn’t habitually consume porn (the exact number is debated), she will certainly have friends who do, and most of her romantic partners will too, especially if she is straight.

This silent epidemic is now so pervasive it is part of the air we breathe.

I have had heartbreaking conversations with friends who are in long term relationships with porn addicts and recovering addicts. Many say that they can tell when their partner has had a relapse because their eyes glaze over and are unable to see them anymore.

Porn affects Millennial and Gen Z everyday lives in ways that few Boomers can comprehend.

In case you’re not convinced that porn is a terrible thing, know that males who frequently consume porn are more likely to express intent to rape, more likely to support violence against women, more likely to coerce or force a partner into non-consentual sex acts, and more likely to pursue violent sex.

These statistics do not reflect all men, nor do they represent all porn users. However, while there are many male porn users who would never rape anybody, they are still less likely to intervene when witnessing sexual violence, and more likely to blame the victim when hearing about sexual crimes. This is due to the desensitisation which happens over time with frequent use.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many heterosexual women are opting out of romantic relationships altogether. Why take the risk when most men have little-to-no respect for your ‘no’?

The sad truth is, a growing number of Millennials and Gen Z do not know how to love. We have been formed by a culture that tells us that sex is not special, that bodies are meaningless, and other people are simply objects for our personal consumption.

But what has this got to do with the workplace?

Everything.

If we assume the 75% male and 30% female estimate, roughly 55% of the workforce under the age of 40 has rewired their brain to resemble that of a cocaine addict. This will directly affect their levels of concentration, personal motivation, and ability to delay gratification.

Many feel numbed by the whole thing, and don’t know where to turn for help.

We’re not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

5. We are the first generation in living memory to have regressed economically

For the last hundred years or so, each generation has been economically better off than their parents. Until now.

When Millennials were growing up, we were told that all we had to do in life was go to school, work hard, and then homeownership would be possible. It took us years to realise that this was outdated advice. It may have been true for the Boomers, but it certainly is not true for us.

What makes the Millennial economic situation peculiar to Boomers is that we ordinarily consume commodities that used to be considered luxuries when you were young. Late stage capitalism has enabled music streaming services, flat whites, and even furniture and overseas holidays to be incredibly cheap, relative to the average graduate wage. So, many Boomers have understandably argued that Ryan Air, Spotify and IKEA have made it easy for us to quickly access a lifestyle that was once considered extravagant. We should be grateful.

However, the cost of basic living needs - particularly warmth (i.e gas and electricity) and shelter (i.e. rent or mortgage payments) - have outpaced wages so much that few Millennials can comfortably afford them.

This puts us in a very peculiar position: posh coffee and travel are affordable, but living in a house that would have been occupied by very poor people only 50 years ago, isn’t.

Millennials are incredibly bitter towards Boomers (and to some extent, Gen X) who own multiple properties, while most of us are paying two-thirds of our income into your mortgages rather than our own. All the while, you tell us to stop drinking flat whites if we want to get onto the property ladder, when the cost of say, three takeaway coffees per week would never come close to amounting to a housing deposit.

Boomers, please also understand that Millennials entered the workforce with larger amounts of student debt than you ever did. In fact, most of us have not only given up on the prospect of homeownership, but have even given up on the prospect of retirement before 75. This makes it very difficult to motivate oneself to work towards something long-term.

The thing that skews people’s perception here is that there are a small minority of Millennials who are financially better off than their Baby Boomer parents. What often happens is you’ll meet one or two of these people and assume that if they could do it, then why couldn’t everyone else? Unfortunately, they are a very small minority, and all the data is showing that the wealth inequality gap is widening faster than researchers had previously imagined.

I have spent the last 15 years mostly living in the South of England (predominantly based in London and Cambridge, where most of my work has been). While I do know some Millennials who own a home, I haven’t met one who was able to do it by themselves, (i.e. on a single income with no family help), in the way that Boomers previously could.

Every Millennial homeowner that I know in southern England has had one or more of these options available to them:

• They were able to live cheaply or freely with family while saving for a deposit, and/or:

• They had family give a large financial gift towards a deposit, and/or:

• They work in either corporate law, banking or as a C-Suite executive, and/or:

• They share their income with a second full-time earner, usually a romantic partner/spouse.

On that last point, many singles have hit their mid-thirties only to realise that the only way to homeownership is to get married, which is not an easy prospect for a generation that grew up with the normalisation of attachment disorders and regular hardcore pornography use. I know singles living in Cambridge who are consultant doctors, engineers, and lawyers, and they cannot get a mortgage because banks favour two-income households.

As I noted earlier, Women in particular are opting out of marriage because we simply don’t like the way that men treat us anymore. While you may not think this is the problem of the employer, it does affect our motivation towards work.

Millennial women were told that entering the workforce was our ticket to economic freedom so that we could afford to be more choosy with men and hopefully not be stuck in abusive relationships. But, it turns out that the lack of dual income places rewards such as homeownership squarely out of our reach. This in turn affects whether or not we see work as a net-positive that can help us reach our financial goals. Sure, the short-term ones are more accessible, but the long-term ones are literally impossible.

This peculiar situation won’t go away anytime soon. Convincing us to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and “get a better attitude” isn’t quite going to cut it. We were told that if we worked hard we would reap certain economic benefits. Now, we are beginning to realise we were lied to.

We’re not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

Millennials have ultimtely lost any sense of wonder or awe. Photo by NASA on Unsplash

6. We are the first generation in human history to be raised God-less

It is generally understood that Boomers and Gen X marked the grand exodus from organised religion, and Millennials are the first generation in human history to be raised in a world where atheism and agnosticism are more normal than belief in a God or spirituality.

We came of age during the rise of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, who ironically called themselves “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” These men sold millions of books telling us that if you believe in any kind of transcendence, you are not only stupid, but morally abhorent.

The problem is, human beings have been religious for millions of years. Even if the truth claims of the major religions aren’t actually true, you can’t get away from the fact that you are biologically hardwired to believe in some kind of spirituality that is bigger than you.

Now, I must come clean and admit openly that I happen to believe that the central truth claims of Christianity are true. So my particular slant is that God deliberately wired us to desire him so that we would always seek him. I appreciate that not everybody will agree on that point, but you can at least agree that if humans have been religious for a very long time, suddenly removing that for one generation will have socially disruptive consequences.

To make matters worse, the church has been its own worst enemy. With more and more revelations detailing horrific abuses, how can we, as a generation, be asked to trust the very people who claim to represent the divine?

The popularity of New Atheism combined with the loss of trust in the church has left us with two options. Either, become a hedonist, and use your addiction of choice as a means to distract yourself from the emptiness you feel inside. Or, become a nihilist, and learn how to get by with chronic depression. Most Millennials have spent their lives in either one of those camps, and some have even been switching between the two.

This cannot be a recipe for human flourishing or wellbeing.

We are now left with a fundamentally important problem: our society is no longer in agreement on the core aspects of what gives meaning to the human life. This leaves the individual to discover their own forms of meaning for themselves. Although this may sound freeing, I actually think this is incredibly distressing, especially for young people.

For literally all of human history, young people were told that they were part of a wider story that pre-exists them and will outlive them. They were also told how to belong to that story. They had initiation rites. They had elders. They had community. They had symbols, stories and pictures that made up a larger social imaginary. Although it was normal for some to rebel, the overarching meta-narratives remained constant.

Now, religion has been replaced with the True Authentic Self. Although many scholars argue that it has its roots in Christianity (either from Kiekegaard or Augustine, depending on which philosophy teacher you listen to), this phenomenon has very much unhinged itself from its Christian roots and come into its own.

As many cultural commentators have noted, the individual’s self-chosen identity is now sacrosanct. This is a very heavy existential burden to place on a young person. As Millennials came of age, we were the first generation to be told that we have no bigger-than-me story to inhabit.

We are spiritually homeless.

The German sociologist Max Weber coined the term ‘disenchantment’ to describe our post-religious age, which I think is very apt. Millennials are a disenchanted generation. We lack wonder, and we lack awe.

While it’s all very well that a certain overhyped Canadian Psychologist wishes to bring back the symbology of religion because of its psycho-social usefulness; the stories, symbols and traditions of religion won’t survive unless a critical mass in society actually believes the stuff.

We’re not looking for handouts; we’re looking for hope.

The Snowball Effect

In short, Millennials came of age with an enormous existential burden on our shoulders. These factors (and more, please comment if you think of any others) each had a snowball effect, cumulating into something that has sapped the life out of my generation.

To be human is to love. But what if you don’t know how to love because you have an attachment disorder or a porn addiction? What if every romantic partner you have ever had is in the same boat? Have you really experienced life in all its fullness?

To be human is to have hope for the future. But what do you do when you believe the world is coming to an apocalyptic end? What if you were told as an adolescent that it’s your personal responsibility to save it, and you know that you’re failing?

To be human is to know your place within a wider story. But what happens when the institutions that gave us those stories get torn down?

In sum, the collective Millennial psyche is one filled with anxiety about the future, anger about the present, and confusion about what it means to be human.

In my view, most are not burning out from work; they are burning out from a strangely distressed life.

We’re not asking for handouts; we’re asking for hope.

Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

How This Affects Work

I suspect Boomers and Gen X are probably right when they say they had worse workplace cultures than us. Even a brief survey on TV workplace dramas in the 80s and 90s show that misogyny was rife, as was general misery in the office.

However, I would argue that most employees could just about (within reason) put up with their Toxic Boss because work was a means to an end. It was never expected to be meaningful or enjoyable in its own right.

Instead, joy and meaning were to be found in community, family, and faith. Work was just a thing that you had to do to pay the bills.

Work was never expected to be The Good Life; it was a means to get there.

The ultimate end for most people was to get married, buy a home and a car, be a good citizen, have 2.3 children, and go to church. But, since the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, and subsequent craziness of the 90s stripped away the stability of these institutions, work gradually became an end in itself.

Careers became an identity.

Then we had the 2008 housing crash followed by 15 years of austerity cuts in Britain. As the market recovered, house prices outpaced wages, making homeownership completely out of reach for every un-partnered Millennial who is not a corporate lawyer and has no access to the Bank of Mum and Dad.

This is what ultimately shifted Millennial (and now also Gen Z) attitudes to work.

Before, you had both the carrot and the stick to motivate you to get up at 7am on a Monday. The carrot was the promise of a secure lifestyle that included homeownership, and the stick was your Toxic Boss.¹

But for most Millennials, we just have the stick.

To make matters worse, this all coincided with the invention of the smartphone. Before, at the end of the day, you would leave your Toxic Boss at work and go home to your family. Now, you take your Toxic Boss with you in your pocket as you go home to your grubby house share.

All in all, I do not believe that Toxic Bosses and crappy workplace culture are the reason for Millennial burnout. I think they are more likely to be the straw that broke the camel’s back after a cumulation of other, heavier, existential factors.

We came into the adult world feeling far more fragile, broken and insecure than generations before, and when society stripped away all the institutions that previously gave humanity meaning, we turned to work to fulfil our neverending emptiness.

The problem is, the workplace cannot bear this kind of weight.

This is why Millennial burnout is real, and is more than general tiredness. It carries with it an element of hopeless, nihilistic angst.

All in all, I do not think this is wholly a work problem. I do not even think of it as a psychological problem.

I actually believe this is a spiritual problem; one that cannot be fixed unless we agree it is there in the first place.

We’re not looking for handouts. We’re looking for hope.

Until next time,

S

1. I would like to clarify that I am speaking in general terms. My current boss is very lovely!