They call Gen Z entitled. Maybe they’re just tired

Gen Z job market: The economy this generation are entering is both more open and more fragile — where a person can build a career from a smartphone, but also lose one with an algorithm’s update. (Image credit: Polina Tankilevitch via Pexels)

Every generation has a story it tells itself about the next one. But maybe what we Gen X and millennials are mistaking for a loss of work ethic is really a change in how work itself feels now — and what it means to be “hardworking” in a world that doesn’t reward effort the way it once did.

Because this is not the same India their parents grew up in. Perhaps what my generation mistakes as entitlement of the younger generations, is really exhaustion in a new form. We grew up in a world that offered clearer paths — study hard, work harder, and life would reward the effort.

The world we were trained for has changed; and they — Gen Z and younger — are simply learning how to live and work in the one we left behind. We shouldn’t be judging them by the rules of a workplace and an economy that no longer exist.

GenZ don’t want to be told to “wait their turn” because they know the world might not wait for them. To older generations, this may look like rebellion. To economists and sociologists, it looks like evolution.

For many in India’s Gen Z, work no longer begins with a desk, a job title or a predictable salary. Just look at starting salaries in Indian IT / ITeS sector — it has not changed for nearly two decades. The economy they’re entering is both more open and more fragile — where a person can build a career from a smartphone, but also lose one with an algorithm’s update.

The story of India’s “demographic dividend” sounds like a dream on paper — a vast young workforce ready to power growth. But the truth on the ground is more uneven. Millions fall through the cracks of formality — neither fully educated nor fully employable — while even those with degrees often find themselves circling the gig economy, stitching together livelihoods one project at a time. It has created a generation that is both overeducated and underpaid, trained yet underused. They are figuring out how to stay afloat in an ocean of apps and platforms, each promising opportunity, each demanding endless hustle.

Distance between generations

The tension between generations is not just about attitude — it’s about context.

Older workers entered offices where mentorship was real, where performance was seen and appreciated, and promotions had a human face. Today’s young jobseekers send résumés into digital black holes, hoping to clear a round of AI screening before a human even glances at their name. They are seeing layoffs, disruptions, and the myth of “job security” dissolve in real time.

Employers often mistake this as restlessness or lack of discipline. But it may be something else — a quiet decision not to measure life only by hierarchy. Many Gen Z workers aren’t running from responsibility. They want to matter.

And in a way, they’re right to ask. Because the workplace they’ve entered is far more demanding than the ones older generations began in. Everything is faster, leaner, constantly measured. The space to learn, fail, or reflect has shrunk. So what looks like impatience may be the only rational response to a system that no longer has time to nurture.

Communication, too, has changed its texture. What older generations see as informality or indifference is often just a different rhythm — shorter, faster, more instinctive. The young don’t write long emails or wait for formal meetings; they message, react, voice-note and move on. It can feel abrupt to those who grew up in a slower world, but beneath that speed is the same search for connection and recognition — just in a language shaped by time, not by disrespect.

Generation in search of meaning

Globalisation has made aspiration borderless. An engineer in Bengaluru watches the same YouTube tutorials as a designer in Berlin. A coder in Indore can collaborate with a startup in Toronto. The world feels open — but not equal. The promise of opportunity exists, yet the pathways to reach it are narrow and expensive.

And so, Gen Z in India has learned to improvise. They juggle multiple gigs, side hustles, and small businesses. They don’t want to be told to “wait their turn” because they know the world might not wait for them. To older generations, this may look like rebellion. To economists and sociologists, it looks like evolution.

For many young workers, even getting a job now feels like a form of emotional endurance. Even those who get through the gates often find workplaces where mentorship has vanished, replaced by micromanagement and “productivity tracking” software that monitors every click.

It’s no wonder that mental fatigue and disillusionment are rising among the young. They live in a world that constantly tells them to be grateful for opportunity, yet offers very little empathy in return. They are told to dream big, but warned not to be unrealistic. For all their digital confidence, this generation lives under an invisible weight. The pressure to perform has fused with the pressure to appear fulfilled. Work, once a source of identity, now often feels like an endurance test measured in deliverables and dopamine. Their mental health is fraying not because they lack resilience, but because they are expected to be endlessly adaptable in a world that rarely pauses to care.

For them, permanence feels like illusion, and risk has become a kind of freedom. This shift is not rebellion; it is recalibration. A quiet rewriting of what it means to work, earn, and live with purpose. Perhaps every generation must find its own equilibrium between fear and faith.

The challenge for Gen Alpha won’t be finding opportunity; it will be finding meaning in a world where everything has a machine parallel. (Image credit: Mikhail Nilov via Pexels)

And then came Gen Alpha

If Gen Z grew up in an India that was digital-first but full of contradictions, Gen Alpha are coming of age in something even more complicated. They are born into a world of permanent connectivity, relentless comparison, and shrinking attention spans. They won’t remember a time before algorithms shaped identity or before AI started reshaping jobs.

For them, FOMO begins early — the fear of missing out, not just socially but economically. The very nature of employment may change before they ever enter the workforce. Artificial Intelligence will not just compete for their jobs, but also design and manage them. The challenge for Gen Alpha won’t be finding opportunity; it will be finding meaning in a world where everything, even human creativity, has a machine parallel.

In some ways, Gen Z’s struggle for balance may be the last analog fight in a digital age. Gen Alpha’s challenge will be to stay human in a world that increasingly doesn’t require it.

Artificial Intelligence may not deliver the unqualified promise we like to imagine today. It will create new efficiencies, yes, but it will also erase the comfort of certainty. The coming decades will reward not those who think like machines, but those who remember how not to. Curiosity, empathy, judgment, and moral reasoning — these deeply human skills will matter even more in an age when everything else can be automated.

Every generation is shaped less by what it inherits, and more by what it must survive.

We should ask a harder question — not whether our younger generations are ready for the future, but whether our institutions, workplaces, and mindsets are ready for them.

And perhaps that’s how it has always been. Every generation eventually figures out its own s@#t — as the young might put it — in its own messy, magnificent way.

Perhaps what they need from us isn’t advice or nostalgia, but empathy. And the wisdom to see that what looks like defiance is often just a new language for hope — spoken differently, but driven by the same human need to matter.

Because the next generation is not a problem to be solved. It is the mirror in which a society sees its own unfinished work.