Posted on 09/20/2025 5:44:02 AM PDT by TigerClaws
A generational divide over workplace burnout has less to do with work intensity and more to do with diminished expectations for career rewards, according to business author and New York University professor Suzy Welch. The 66-year-old from Portland earned her MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and spent seven years as a management consultant at Bain & Co. before joining Harvard Business Review in 2001, serving as editor-in-chief. Speaking on the July 24 episode of the Masters of Scale podcast, Welch argued younger workers face the same demanding schedules as previous generations, but lack the fundamental belief that hard work will lead to meaningful advancement.
Welch said this insight emerged from a conversation she had with a 25-year-old freelance worker who asked Welch to create more content about worker fatigue among young people because her friends were “just so burnt out.” When Welch told this worker she used to work “seven days a week” at that age and loved the work—and would’ve done more of it if she could—the young woman offered a striking rebuttal: “But you had hope.”
“And I did have hope. We all did have hope,” Welch told Masters of Scale host Jeff Berman. “We believed that if if you worked hard you were rewarded for it. And so this is the disconnect.”
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
Well Marxism doesn’t work. Here’s proof
I was taught that the world owes you NOTHING and that you make your own ‘luck’ in this world through hard work and preparation.
I was never told I needed ‘Hope!’
This realization is a hard part of life and it provides motivation to male something of one's self.
Seems this generation is having difficulty adjusting to that fact of life.
That IS hope. That type of hope entertains the possibility of success because it is based on the freedom to succeed by virtue of one’s own merits.
I think the article falsely equates “hope” with “guarantee”. The young person that answered the author in the way she did wants more than hope.
Well it’s time GenZ put on their big boy pants, spit on their hands and get to work. No more participation trophies.
CC
GenZ better get serious. Quick like or those trophies will look real cute adorning a closed casket.
Buy $7 coffees every day and take out a $100,000 loan to study trans art. That will make everything better.
They are overwhelmed and burnt out because they heard about it on Tik-Tok.
That may be true, but back in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of ways to make it.
I’ve heard from Genzers and Millennials that hiring managers aren’t calling the shots. Even for dishwasher or table runner jobs. The kids have to log on to a Workday website, upload a resume (and enter their job data again!), answer a bunch of questions, and hope they get a call.
For what it’s worth, Workday is getting sued by older workers claiming there is bias built into their algorithm: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/tech/workday-ai-hiring-discrimination-lawsuit. If it’s biased against one class of people…
More often than not, they get an auto-reject email. Or they get ghosted. If they go to the business to talk to a human, the manager says “it wasn’t my call. I don’t know why they rejected you.”
The pandemic fueled this apply online/shield the manager methodology. Further compounding problems are firm rules that jobs must be posted externally even if you have a candidate internally; that just causes dozens of external candidates to work for a job they have about zero chance of getting.
Now, the kids today that I know are pretty relentless. But we have to be honest, us older folks: it is way worse nowadays than it wuz then. And while I was unhappy when I was rejected after an interview, they told me WHY so I could improve myself.
There is no feedback today.
So yeah…the youths’ gripes are legit.
My daughter has an Art degree and makes as much as I did.
The left will cure SS insolvency. One future collector at a time if necessary. It will be like Utopia they sing. From the mountains to the shores.
By the way, Suzy Welch is the wife of ex-GE CEO Jack Welch. In early 2002, Welch was forced to resign from the Harvard Business Review after admitting to an affair with the then-married Jack Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric, while preparing an interview with him for the magazine. The affair was brought to the attention of the Review by Jane Welch, Welch’s wife at the time. Jack Welch and Jane Welch divorced and he then married Suzy. Suzy had the interview pulled before it appeared in the Business Review.
She didn’t need hope.
The culture has changed. And we are dealing with Communists. Socialism is creeping in the U.S.
Thats not typical.
Working normal hours as a taxi driver and waiter in the 90s I could afford my own used car almost immediately and bought a townhome in NYC after 7 years. While going on vacation every year and studying part time to be an engineer.
People with degrees could afford several nice homes in the mountains and florida. And several new cars. So there was great incentive to study and work.
Tell that to young people today who never had a car and cannot afford a 1BR apartment working 12 hour days with an engineering degree and they all think we lived in an alternate universe...
And AI will make this so much worse. I'm betting in a matter of decades we will be assigned an occupation and a corporation at birth by AI. I'm not joking, I wish I was.
Gen Z whiners don’t understand that they were huge winners of the biggest lottery on earth when they were born in America and were granted citizenship by the luck of the draw.
They should be sent to live in someplace like Somalia for a few years until they develop an appreciation for what they had handed to them in America.
Amen. This is just a continuation of the “wussification” of the US. I was born in 1966 and my parents always stressed working, being honest, and being kind to others. If we all did that, we’d have an amazing country.
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