Generational pile-ons come around like clockwork

Too many millennials are joining the refrain against Gen Zers, conveniently forgetting that we were all there once

Tue, 23 Sep, 2025 - 01:00

Ross Frenett

My company employs dozens of Gen Z staff, amounting to over a quarter of my workforce.

We work in an incredibly high-stress environment with clients in the national security world, sports, and technology sector making demands of us daily. Short deadlines, high pressure, moving goalposts. And the topics? Terrorism, organised crime, child exploitation. So the most difficult clients, with the most complex, and emotionally draining subject matter.

And the Gen Z staff? Efficient, hard-working, and morally centered. Have I somehow found the only hard-working and driven members of this generation, or is there something structural happening in how we view and talk about Gen Zers?

Most attacks on Gen Zers, a cohort born roughly between the mid-1990s and early 2010s, follow an identical pattern to how every generation has spoken about those coming up behind them.

It feels like only yesterday that millennials were ruining everything

With our avocado toast, our Facebook, and our trendy beer, we were laying waste to all that was good and right in the world. Even mayonnaise wasn’t spared our wrath. (No, really, "How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise" was a real headline.)

Now that the average millennial is approaching 40 with kids, without skipping a beat, the trend of blaming “kids these days” for all of society’s ills has continued apace. The worst part of it is that many millennials are joining in on the pile-on instead of remembering how it felt to arrive in the workforce and the world immediately being told you’re the problem.

This shouldn’t be surprising, it happens every generation like clockwork. In 1993, The Washington Post published an article excoriating Gen Xers as entitled and work-shy, with the punchy title: “Grow up Crybabies."

It wasn’t TikTok that was ruining Gen Xers, it was MTV, but the script was the same. Before MTV, it was comic books melting young people’s brains. Before that, novels.

Confused, disillusioned, and disenchanted

What about the so-called greatest generation? The term is used in the US to refer to those born roughly between 1901 and 1927, who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Their greatness must always have been evident? Nope. They were derided as confused, disillusioned, and disenchanted.

In 1843, Tory politician Anthony Ashley-Cooper complained in a speech to Britain’s House of Commons that “the morals of children are tenfold worse than formerly”.

As far back as 23BC, the Roman poet Horace complained about declining moral standards: "Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; So in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt."

So, there are two possibilities. It’s possible that, after thousands of years of middle-aged commentators, politicians, and poets crying wolf, in Gen Zers we have finally found a generation that is truly lazy and amoral.

Alternatively, the attacks on this generation are just more of the same.

It is true that Gen Z is the first generation to be raised with social media. No previous generation had that

All that TikTok and Instagram must be shortening attention spans? That sounds right, but let’s look at the data.

A large-scale study from the University of Vienna looked at 287 samples, covering 20,000 people in 32 countries across 31 years. Using the D2 test of attention, a standard measure of focus, researchers found not decline but a moderate increase in concentration among adults. Increase.

So if Gen Z workers aren’t having their ability to concentrate ruined by TikTok, and attacks on Gen Z workers are as predictable as clockwork, why is it that people will still swear blind that Gen Z workers are uniquely poorly fitted to today’s workplace?

Two fundamental truths that are as true today as they were in Horace’s time: Young people are annoying; Middle aged people are forgetful.

Young people who join the workforce have always been annoying. They know nothing about how real places operate. They’re impatient. They don’t respect the ways things have always been done. They’re not suitably deferential. That’s always been the case.

Knowledge and experience

However, today’s middle-aged managers are yesterday’s annoying young people. Most millennials, Gen Xers, and baby boomers simply forget that they didn’t arrive in the workforce with a head full of knowledge and experience. They needed to be mentored, corrected, disciplined, and taught just as much as new employees today.

Essentially: You’re the problem. If you resent teaching new staff about how company culture works, if you get annoyed about the fact that people straight out of school or university don’t know how to do basic things, if you take to social media to complain when you’re required to teach rather than rolling up your sleeves, you shouldn’t be managing people.

None of this is to deny that Gen Zers are different in many ways.

They drink less. They had fewer teen pregnancies. They take fewer drugs. They’re the most educated generation in history. In many ways, they make up a model generation. They are also less deferential to authority than previous generations, less likely to just say yes and go along with things.

Recent British survey data showed that Gen Zers are about half as likely as older adults to say unjust laws should still be obeyed.

In a world where strongmen are on the rise everywhere and technology looks set to concentrate power into the hands of ever smaller numbers of plutocrats laying waste to entire industries, a generation willing and able to stand up to power, to draw lines, and enforce them, and to say no when a no is what’s called for might be exactly what we need.

Gen Zers aren’t the problem, in fact, they might just save us all.