Why Young People Don't Have 'The Hunger' for Work (And What Leaders Need to Hear) | Dr. Eliza Filby

Young people will come into your office and be like, give me a raise and you'll see what I can do.

Yeah.

And older generations are like, pay you before you do it? What? But I think they have it right because there's no guarantee that they're going to have a job by the end of the year because of layoffs.

The biggest question that leaders need to ask themselves is, what am I offering in the age of uncertainty? If I can't offer stability, If I can't offer you that life script, what is it that leaders are offering their people?

Are you a boomer? Millennial? Gen Z? Wait, where's Gen X? Why did you leave out Gen X? Gen X always gets left out. Regardless of which generation you're from, we all complain about each other. I mean, they really are entitled. Or are they?

Do you think we live in an inheritocracy?

My guest, Dr. Eliza Philby, encourages us before we complain to consider through what lens does each generation see the world. Eliza is a generational historian in a world that has more generations working alongside each other than at any other point in history. In her bestselling book, Inheritocracy, Eliza challenges the idea that we even live in a meritocracy anymore and what that means for every generation trying to get ahead. Eliza helped me see connections I never saw before.

What?

And realize just how much more difficult the world will be for our younger generations, and how the rest of us are going to get ahead too. Maybe, just maybe, we have to learn to win together. This is a bit of optimism. I was forced to be interested in generations. Like, I started talking about generations and generational differences at work, not because I had a particular hankering, but because the single most common question I used to get, literally any size audience, whether it was public or private, was, how do we lead millennials?

Yes.

And this was a bunch of years ago. You have sort of made a career out of understanding generations. How does somebody like wake up in the morning and be like, you know, I want to be a fireman, I want to be, you know, I want to be a generational expert. Like, how did you— like, where did that come from?

So, so I've invented a job title that didn't previously exist, and I have always been interested in change and how one is defined by time. There's lots of things that make us us, you know, it's gender, it's, you know, racial identity, it's sexuality, it's hobbies. There's all sorts of things that make up our identity. But the time at which you enter the world is really important too. And I, you know, was an academic and studied history, became a historian, taught at universities across the world, and found that there was a real disconnect between academic history, right, the study of time and kings and queens and all those wonderful things, and actually sort of how people experience time. It was sort of me understanding my own family and how when we talk about generations, that being a category of analysis that actually historians really poo-poo and attack, but actually within the family makes total sense. Well, it is the unit of time.

It's clearly defined, grandparents, parents, me.

Exactly. So actually, generational analysis was something that, as someone who came from a family who lived in, grew up in a multi-generational household, my father and his family had lived in the same house for 100 years. My family was from the same area for over 250 years. The sense of generational identity was so strong within me, and I was like, actually, I think there's some real sort of gaps missing in the analysis within the academic study of generations. But then on the societal level as well, it's full of stereotypes, it's full of generalizations, it's sort of lazy labels you know, Gen Z are entitled, you know, millennials used to be entitled and then we had Gen Z. Gen X used to be entitled. They were called slackers. You know, boomers were sort of defined as the first me-me generation. So there's lots of lazy generalizations. But actually what I'm really sort of interested in is how we're shaped by time.

So let's, let's back up here. Let's put a few ground rules in. When I studied social anthropology, We were taught that generations were about 20 years, and they're fuzzy, right? And so it was relatively clearly defined, you know, if you start with the Greatest Generation, the generation that lived through the Second World War, then they came back from war and all got busy, and there was the baby boom.

They got seriously busy.

So a generation starting to be born around 1945-ish.

Yep.

And so that lasted about 20 years. And then mid-1960s-ish.

Gen X.

You get Gen X. That's another 20 years. Then you get Gen Y or millennials. But what I'm struggling with, and this is where I need your help, which is that clear definition of approximately 20 years marked by significant events. I don't know what happens before the Greatest Generation, quite frankly. We sort of start generations, you know, after World War II.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And again, You could be leading edge, trailing edge, in the middle. But it bracketed us. And it doesn't mean that everybody's personality is the same. But for some reason now, generations are becoming like 5 years long, which as an anthropologist, that doesn't sound right to me, that every time that something happens in the world, you don't suddenly have a new generation. There's starting to be too many of them.

Right, because you've got Gen Z, and now you've got Gen Alpha. And actually, you've got Gen Beta. You know, it's endless. And they're truncating. Getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Getting smaller and smaller. I think the key here is that it's, it's an art, not a science. We can't even agree when, you know, millennials start. But let me be very clear about what I think it is.

Okay.

Right.

Yeah.

As a woman who's, you know, a mother, what we're talking about is essentially how generations tend to form within families, actually, and mirroring that within sort of the categorization within society. And by and large, actually, women are having babies later. So actually we're seeing the generation generations actually, they should be becoming longer and longer. But what you're talking about is trying to categorize society by putting these kind of fixed sort of date points.

I'm okay with fuzzy points, but it feels like it's starting to get to the point where generation, quote unquote, as a label, right, that is starting to be used as How do I put it nicely?

Uh, you can put it—

it's becoming part of identity politics where the people are adding nuances to their generations, their generational names, how many generations there are, that they're becoming more and more and more of them in smaller and smaller periods of time. And it seems to be part of me standing out from everybody else, where that's not what the original tension was. The intention was to try and understand the personalities shaped by people who went through significant major events together?

Yes, and there's lots I could say. The first thing I would say is that it's a response to the fear of change. I think we—

by the way, adding more things, you mean?

No, sort of fragmenting those big generational cohorts and say, actually, uh, I'm, I'm a geriatric millennial, I, I— or I'm a xennial. There's so many kind of like subcultures within the generations. I think it's partly a fear of like, we're living in this period of accelerated change. I'd contest that, by the way, but people certainly feel it. I think we also are living in an era of hyper-individualism. So this idea of, you can't just bracket me by age, no, no, no, no, I'm a subgroup within that big group defined by age, like, and I think that, that is certainly there. I think also tech is now so defining in our lives is did you grow up with an landline phone?

Yeah.

Did you grow up with a flip phone? Yeah. At what age did you, did you get your first social media?

Instead of war or famine, right, or depression, or major political, major political events, it's like where were you at with that when that technology went into the world, right? Was that your— but by the way, that's fair.

And no, but the problem is because technology is changing so fast you're getting these micro-generations within a bigger generational cohort, right? You talked about the Greatest Generation and they're all, you know, going through that shared collective experience of war. I think one of the things that we don't talk about enough is the fragmentation of shared collective experiences. There's no shared media anymore, there's no shared political culture anymore, there's no shared music culture anymore in the same way that there was, particularly for Boomers, Xers, and Millennials. Okay, even when we, we talk about those labels— Baby Boom— there wasn't a global baby boom. You know, there's not a global baby boom culture. But actually, Gen Z, you can start to talk about this generation that's had this hyper-individualized internet, but also these key global events. So you've got this kind of slight tension between Gen Z having COVID as a global experience, climate change as a global cause, but actually not having shared moments shared political culture in the same way that boomers—

this is very, very interesting because we quote unquote went through something together. You know, my grandparents and their friends and their, you know, right, they were always talking about the war.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And because it was defining of their youth, you know, my grandmother's 20s were defined by the war.

Yep.

You know, my grandfather got married in his uniform.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and their friends would come over and they would the war invariably would come up. How can it not?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then, as you said, the shared experience of the Boomers, the shared experience of the Gen Xers. And so it makes sense why there's going to be these fragmented generational delineations, because the experiences aren't universally shared.

Yeah.

And so we're looking for anything that combines us or makes us have some sort of shared experience. But it's, it's both, it's both understandable but also quite tragic at the same time. You know, because there seems to be a detribification of us as a people.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, what does national identity mean anymore if the nation didn't go through something? What is national identity anymore if we're not all watching the same things on television? We don't have all the same cultural references. Whether you like them or not, the cultural references are the same, right?

And Benedict Anderson's book called Imagined Communities, why he emphasizes the rise of the newspaper as so formative, um, in the alignment of the rise of nationhood was that sense of shared information generates a shared identity and a shared sort of unity over what the nation is, what it stands for, and what we seek to protect. And so one of the things that you are seeing with a fragmentation of information— and we're about to see that accelerated with AI— is no one has a shared truth for sure. No one has a shared understanding of what the nation even is.

This is so good.

So you're saying the decline of shared values, shared definitions, shared sense of trust and truth, but also the disintegration of trust at an institutional level. And as I say, um, in various sort of arenas, whether it's the church, whether it's the workplace, whether it's, you know, any form of association or culture, there's all sorts of ways in which trust has been eroded.

This idea of access into information and shared information is part of what creates our national identity. But if the media landscape is fragmented and diffused and now hyper-politicized for financial gain, for political— not even for political reasons, it's politically fractured for commercial reasons, which is the, you know, let's be honest, if all of the newspapers were conservative, Rupert Murdoch would've started a liberal TV station. Like, it was purely commercial. And so what we end up having is fractured identity because of fractured media. Is that a fair statement?

Yes, but I also think let's not rose tint the past and that there was this wonderful time when we all believed the truth and we all had this shared truth and shared identity and shared moment. You know, there was a lot of conspiracy culture before the internet. The internet didn't invent conspiracy, nor did it invent cynicism and distrust in institutions. I think that there's an element here in what you say that's also slightly missing— the idea of the individual seeking out the truth, or seeking out their own community, their micro-community, or their own sort of narrative or worldview. One of the things that's really sort of Typical of Gen Z, if we're gonna go into the generations, uh, generalizations here, is that desire to seek out the information rather than just be passive consumers of information. It's really interesting if you look at the data around which generation is most likely to spread fake news, it's baby boomers. Now they grew up with verified media, they trust it.

So if it comes in, it must be true.

With, you know, 3 TV channels. Gen Z grew up with their own TV channel, but also deepfakes, the ability to edit, airbrushing, and they know how to do it too. Yeah, right. So this, this idea of, okay, I'm gonna seek out the truth. Yeah, whatever that means to me and however that aligns with me. We know we're living in an era where my truth is essentially the truth, right? And there's an empowerment to that. But then it also is often combined with a cynicism around official sources of truth, official media, and also a, um, I think a sort of unwillingness to maybe hear things that the algorithm tells you you don't believe in. I mean, you're seeing that play out in the workplace if you want to go there. The conspiracy culture you're seeing in politics is infiltrating corporations.

Say more.

So if you go on Fishbowl, or if you go on TikTok, or if you go frankly any sort of forum where people are talking about their lives, you will find, okay, if you're in this job, are you earning this? Because I'm earning this. And if you're in this job, if they let you go because they, they let these people go, or you want to hear what's happening in Australia, you know, and that's impacting what's happening in the US. What I'm saying is that conspiracy culture that's in politics is infiltrating the workplace when things go wrong. Internal communications is massively problematic because Gen Z are having those conversations not down the pub or in the cafe, they're having them online. And that is a sort of contagious culture where people go, well, do you know what, I'm not going to trust a word the CEO says, I'm not going to trust a word HR are saying because those people have laid off and 'You should see what they're saying on LinkedIn or Fishbowl.' I think there's this sort of empowering nature to that sort of fragmentation of information and owning the narrative and finding out your truth. But there's also a conspiratorial sort of culture that's very corrosive to our politics. We know that. And very corrosive to other areas of people's lives.

But don't conspiracy theories come out of uncertainty, fear? You know, I mean, there's always conspiracy theories, of course. I'm not romanticising that the past doesn't have them. And they can spread a lot more easily now. It's, it's seeds of doubt. And we are living in times— and forget about political uncertainty, all that stuff— I'm talking about just the workplace, where work used to be a safe place. Used to work your whole career in one company, and, and then that would be it. And then public companies started embracing redundancies and mass layoffs as a means of balancing the books at the end of the year. And so work no longer became stable, which it didn't matter how hard you worked It wasn't a meritocracy. We missed our arbitrary projections. Sorry, you get to lose your job. And it was always considered, okay, well, public companies are unsafe, but private companies are safe. And then the rise of venture capital and the pressures from another investor class now creates, you know, cost cutting as a mechanism to protect the investor's investment, not the company's well-being. And so now you're not safe in a public company. You're not safe in a private company. And I see younger people now who are fashioning their own careers with multiple kinds of gig experiences. Like, I know one woman, she's a comedian, she's a tour guide, she's a something else. Like, she's got 3 or 4 things going on, and they all pay a little bit, and she can put together an income through all of it. But she's doing it her way, and it's not because she's like dreamed of being her own boss one day.

Right.

And I'm seeing more and more of young people being very, very open to the uncertainty and the craziness of an entrepreneurial or solopreneur life, but they've got a little bit here and a little bit there. It's not like, "I'm gonna start a business to do this," or I'm—

Yeah.

It's got— they got a little bit of everything going on.

Right.

And I think it's in response to the total lack of security that is offered by any company now, it makes sense to me why we would see a rise of conspiracy theories, not just because media spreads it more easily, which is definitely a factor, but also that there is just more insecurity in the system.

And, you know, amen to all of that. And I, and I think the biggest question that leaders need to ask themselves is what am I offering in the age of uncertainty? If I can't offer stability, if I can't offer you that life script, what am I offering?

Exactly.

Am I offering you a place to learn? Am I offering you a place to belong? Am I offering you a place that'll be one step before you make the big step? What is it that leaders are offering their people? Because you're absolutely right, what we have seen is the gradual— and it's not sudden, it's gradual erosion of the narrative we were told. And I'm a millennial, right? I was told, go to university, do well in school, get to university, get on a professional track, and access to financial stability, homeownership, and that pathway, just like the previous generation, will be there. Yeah, we'll be there. Okay. My mom worked for the same company her entire working life. Okay. And she retired at 60. I know my life is very different. I've had 3 different careers and I've owned 2 different businesses before I'm 45. This sort of life script that we were told, but defined the late 20th century, let's be clear, it's not always been there, has eroded and it started to erode in the '80s and it's been further and further eroded ever since. And you're seeing the disruption of pensions and pension provision and pension security. You're seeing the, obviously, the disruption of loyalty of the company to the individual. You're also seeing, and people don't talk about this enough in the context of stability, is the dehumanization of work. You know, the over-digitalization of process, the expectation of always that you're on and available. And so it's not just that work doesn't buy you what it bought your parents. It's also work isn't bringing the same social rewards and connection points as it did your parents. My mum has work friendships that she has cultivated at work and then post-work, you know, have lasted 50 years. That is now an anomaly.

Yeah.

And I think just to sort of reinforce what you're saying there, is if we're saying that that narrative has broken, what's replacing it?

What's replacing it, right?

And I think, I think you're absolutely right. I would say number one, the family now offers the stability that work used to. You are—

which is why young people, there's no shame in moving back home in your 20s, even 30s. Like, my generation looks at that and be like, what?

Well, let's, let's put it a different way, because you're absolutely right. The bank of mom and dad is offering the stability that the corporation never used to, right? So I say to leaders all the time, you know, you do realise that your employees are more likely to get on the housing ladder by being loyal to their parents than being loyal to you. So how then do you adapt your leadership, your company culture, your raison d'être as an organisation in that economy, right? Number 1. Number 2, you are seeing the rise not just of family support, But as you've alluded to, solopreneurship. And I think there's a real distinction. I think we casually say we're in this culture of entrepreneurship and the gig economy. I think we're actually seeing squiggly careers that are nonlinear, but also solopreneurship. Because that comedian that you talked about doesn't want to employ a team.

Nope.

Zero.

I'm thinking of literally 3 or 4 people off the top of my head who have gone the solopreneur way, have no desire to have employees, but they are making their own way.

And, and that was me 5 years ago. I now have a team. I call myself a reluctant entrepreneur because I'm learning. I'm so learning. I'm learning every day how to be a leader, but I'm, I'm learning how to be a good— oh my goodness, it's so hard. It's so hard. And part of me is just like, this is not what I was born to do. But there's a real difference, right? And, and solopreneurship comes with the instability that people talk about, you know, when's my next paycheck, can I afford healthcare, can I afford to put my kids through university because I'm still paying my own college debt. It comes with the instability that actually now in the age of AI, people that have the linear career are beginning to feel. Yeah, I think for a long time we talked about those in the gig economy have this instability that we kind of like, kind of, hey, you have freedom but you have instability. Now I think people who have that agility to be this and be fluid and do this and have multiple streams of revenue have greater stability in the age of AI than people that are on a one track.

I think there's also an accountability component, right? Which is I think when, when we live in a world where companies offer us little to no loyalty, the idea of waiting for someone else to decide if I have a job, just waiting, hoping I'm not on the list, right? And 1,000 of my friends got laid off. You know, you hear these companies make the announcements, go, we're going to be laying off 10,000 people over the course of the next 6 months. The stupidity anyway of that strategy. But the point is, is there's this younger generation that is, and they're all kind of the same age, by the way. They're all kind of the ones that I'm seeing are in their early to mid-30s.

Yeah.

And maybe they've had a few rounds doing the work thing. They've tried a few things. They've all had jobs.

Right.

And I think they got fed up waiting and being on edge. And whether they're making a lot of money or a little money, it's entirely on their shoulders. And I think for some of them, they like those odds. And I also want to double-click on something else you said before, which is if companies aren't going to offer stability, what are they offering us? Right? Even the paycheck isn't enough.

Right.

And you touched on it, which is the idea, are you going to offer me belonging? And I think if you're not going to offer me belonging, And this is so essential for every human animal to have a sense of belonging. Like, we need it as tribal animals. We need to know where we belong because we need to know where to feel safe and where to— and where to sacrifice for the good of others. And the idea of the generations becoming more and more sort of slim and nuanced and dissected kind of makes sense because I'm looking for belonging where I can't find it. So maybe that will give me an answer. Identity politics is looking for belonging because I can't seem to find it anywhere else. And it totally makes sense now the way you explain it, which is instead of me going off and making myself as a dot, dot, dot, this is my identity. My identity is I'm a son, I'm a daughter, I'm a member of this family, and I contribute to the household. And I have the security that the company should be giving me. I should be having the coaching my bosses should be giving me. Right. Whether it's healthy or not is a different conversation. Whether it's good or not, you know, it's probably up for a matter of debate. But the fact of the matter, in a world in which stability is very hard to find, the one place I hope I can bank on is home, right? And, and family. It makes sense, right? And it's not about money. No, because a lot of them spend all their money, which I don't understand. Like, you're making a good living, you're not paying rent, Or maybe you're paying minimal rent to contribute to the household. Where's all your money? They're having, they're living great lives.

Okay. Okay. Should I tell you why they're spending their money? Okay. Right, right.

I wanna know all of it.

So economically, since 2008, we've had a very clear trajectory, right? The big ticket items in life have become exponentially expensive. So what are the big ticket items in life? Owning a home or even renting a home, right? Education. Okay. Which become ever more important. Maybe not in the future. Healthcare, depending on where you are in the world. Childcare, particularly obviously if you're a working mum. Big ticket items have become ever more expensive really across the world. I would say Europe is probably 10 years ahead of the US, but really across the world we're seeing that since 2008 the big ticket items in life become incredibly expensive, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. What became cheap? Eating out. Eating out became really— it used to— I mean, it's gone up in the last 5 years, but eating out used to be really expensive. Like, I never ate out with my parents in the '80s and '90s. Like, It was just, we couldn't afford it. What else became cheap? Travel. Travel becomes this identity. In the UK, for example, more millennials have passports than driving licenses. And it sort of indicates for the boomers, it was the car that was the access point to adulthood. For millennials, it became the airplane. And then finally tech and the universalization of the smartphone and essentially any kind of technology. So you've got this weird economy where certain luxuries become really cheap and the big-ticket items in life become really expensive. And then you have social media which says, right, well, actually, this is all a comparison culture, so you need to be doing these things. And so you get this performative culture where you're spending lots of money to do, you know, 3 things, which is travel, eat out, and spend lots of money on tech and post all of it online. And who ends up paying for the big-ticket items in life? If you are lucky to have access to the bank of mom and dad, which is why, you know, a quarter of Gen Zers in the US are getting a down payment on a home from their parents. In, in the UK, 25%. Yeah, in the UK, you know, the bank of mom and dad is a top 10 mortgage lender.

No kidding.

Yeah, more than half of first-time buyers in London are buying a house with help from their parents, right? So, so you have this economy, and let's remember, the boomers are extremely rich, okay? They're an exceptional generation. We're never gonna see the likes of them again. God bless 'em. They are an exception, not the rule. And we think, hang on a minute, the contract is, is that we do what they did. And then, you know, financial crisis happens and we can't in the same way. And it's paralleled with this erosion of corporate culture and corporate loyalty. Our jobs don't buy us what it bought our parents. So I'm going on Instagram and I'm showing my travel plans, my holiday. I'm spending all my money on eating out and matcha lattes. And I'm gonna tap my parents for a down payment on a house. So I mean, I'm crudely summarising here. You mentioned something that I just wanna circle back on because the thing I hear most from companies is, why don't young people have the hunger? The hunger, it's always the hunger, okay? And I'm like, how do you treat your kids? How do you parent? How do you parent?

Well, I bought them a house and a car.

Yeah. Did you buy them everything they asked for? We have a generation in Gen Z who've grown up looking at their parents going, you work really hard in a dehumanised workplace, you earn loads of money, and the rewards today aren't the same. And you're also gonna support me if you can.

And I will leverage all of the guilt you have by working so hard and missing all of my school plays.

Right. So the, the thing, the thing that was really, I ran this focus group, fascinating focus group of, um, Gen Z young women who'd had professional mothers. Right? And then we asked Gen X mothers who were still professional women, and the Gen Z daughters of professional mothers were like, do you know what, I don't want to work as hard as my mother. The overriding conversation was not, my mother was a feminist pioneer, she broke that glass ceiling, I want to ape her example. It was, she was really stressed even when she was on holiday. And then you asked— we, we asked the Gen X Gen X mothers. They weren't related, by the way. The Gen X mothers were, my daughter had, my daughters have a point. They all think I work too hard and I think I did. And that, I know it, I feel it, I sense it, I'm a mother, is partly to do with mother's guilt, right? And these strange perceptions we have as mothers that we pretend we don't have a job in front of our kids. But I think actually it's a broader question of the role that work plays in our lives and what it used to play and what it does play now in what I call an inheritance economy. And I think when, going back to the original point, leaders say, why don't people have the hunger that young people, why can't they put up, shut up, work their way up like I did? Is because the economy isn't encouraging that. Actually, you want hunger? You want real hunger in your new recruits? Find the people that are not being supported by the bank of mum and dad. But they themselves are supporting their parents because that's a large percentage of the population. And the real truth is, of course, is we've seen a decline of meritocracy. We've seen the closing of doors and, and increasingly, particularly with AI, the lack of access and the leverage that parents have in getting their kids jobs and opening those doors and the rise of, of greater nepotism. Those people aren't getting through. In a way that they used to.

And it's an entirely new way of evaluating somebody, right? Like evaluating what school you went to because your mum and dad paid or evaluating, you know, the opportunities you had because your mum and dad paid. We're actually potentially looking for the wrong behaviors if you want somebody who's got the grit, the push, whatever you're looking for.

Right.

That's super interesting.

You know, I talk about sort of the rise of the inheritance economy and inheritocracy and the rise of the bank of mum and dad. But there is actually a bigger story story. Because yes, money is cascading down the family tree. But, and this is the subject of my next book and I'm researching it at the moment, is that our life cycle has completely changed. And the fact is governments, financial institutions, educational institutions haven't caught up. So we've delayed adulthood. We now have a slow meandering path into adulthood. And that's partly to do with economic constraint, but it's also freedom. I didn't want kids at 21. Slower adulthood, pressured midlife. No one talks about this when they— we fixate on living longer and longevity, but actually the life course has completely changed. So most people think they become an adult around the age of 30. It used to be 21, it used to be 18, used to be 16, used to be 13 if we're going right back. So this pathway into adulthood has changed. Midlife has become this pressured point. We don't talk about a midlife crisis anymore. That's very much a kind of '80s kind of masculine corporate sort of collapse. But now we talk about midlife crisis as, you know, Gen Xers right now, particularly Gen X women, are going through this midlife where they are squeezed between looking after their children, which is now a 30-year financial commitment, okay? But also caring for the elderly. You know, and elder care now is a— as big a pressure as childcare on people, and actually quite often lasts longer in terms of that direct need to help your parents. And in an aging society, we need to think about not how aging societies impact the elderly, but how it impacts those in midlife. And so we're getting this sort of really pressured midlife point where people were changing their retirement plans to get their kids through college or coming out of work to look after their mum. You know, your mother who had dementia, you could be looking after her for 20 years.

Yeah.

And then, of course, this need to potentially work longer or this desire to work longer. Okay. So this fixed point of retirement is changing. But then also, what does retirement look like? Is it golf courses and cruises anymore? No.

Starting another business.

Starting another business is having a complete flowering of things that you want to do. You know, for millennials, you're not going to want to go to, you know, traveling in the way that boomers have because you kind of did that in your 20s. So what does retirement look like is, I think, super interesting. And then what does life look like when basically our minds and our bodies stop working? Because you're going to need care, you're going to need that community, you're going to need that support, and you become reliant on others. So have you built that infrastructure financially? It's interesting, I was looking at the data on this last week, is that the rise— what you're seeing is the rise of multi-generational houses, homes in the US.

Whose houses is everybody moving into?

So if you look at Gen X, they're building multi-generational homes. With millennials at the moment, you're seeing millennials moving to where the boomers are, quite often the maternal grandparents, and the grandparents are doing childcare, and then obviously that care reversal process that happens in every family. Yeah, you know, and it happened within my own family when my father died.

Your mum moved in.

My mum moved in. We all took time off work to look after my dad. My dad, when he was ill, said two things to me which I reflect upon quite often because he was quite a brutal man, my dad. He kind of spoke the truth harshly, and he was like, I'm glad I had three daughters, not three sons. 'You know, I was like, okay, Dad, slaving away, you know, looking after him.' Well, I get that. And he was right. He was right. And he also said, 'I'm going to make this quick.' Wow. Yeah. And, you know, thinking about it sort of gets me highly emotional. But what he was basically saying is, 'You've got better things to do.' Like, 'Thanks for looking after me, but I got this.' I'm done. I'm done. And we all took time out of work. We were lucky that we had that freedom. Yeah, I know people that have looked after their parents for near on 20 years. You know, I was actually listening to your podcast with Scott Galloway, a man whose work I hugely admire. And I love, I love the way the dynamic between you two and the way you disagreed, but agreeably. But the thing that I don't think he sort of perhaps gives due appreciation for is that millennial couples are working in majority dual income households, right? And they're working twice as hard, quite often to be half as rich as their parents. Dual income households are the norm now, not the exception. And what we're really talking about is— and companies need to be thinking about this as well as, you know, couples themselves— is if women have stepped up financially in the home and contributing to the household finances, men have no choice, literally no choice but to step up on the domestic front. And it's great because millennial dads push more pushchairs, change more nappies, you know, spend more time with their kids than any other generation of fathers before them. It's not because they love their kids more, right? Let's just be clear on that. Than any other generation of fathers. It's because there is a requirement, there is a need in a dual income household for men to step up domestically. What you're not seeing to the same degree is men doing the elder care in the same way that they're doing the childcare. And actually, fundamentally, that's one of the biggest challenges I think that companies need to get their heads around is actually in an ageing society, what's happening to your midlifers with those kinds of responsibilities and are you promoting elder care as much as you're promoting fatherhood in the workplace.

What is your prediction for this young generation that's entering work? What is their identity? Where are they going to get their belonging? You know, now they're being battered by messages of AI taking their jobs, whether it's true or not. You know, time will tell. You know, companies are already using AI as a justification to make layoffs, which I think is a bit premature. I don't believe them, but that's a different conversation. The young generations that have been accused of being entitled, and I have my own sort of theories on that, which I can share with you quickly, which is it is an entitlement. That's how it does appear. You know, what I think that the corporate world is missing is that the young generation that enters the workforce and has been for, you know, I'd say probably a good 10 years, if not more, they're playing by the rules that companies set. So just as we were saying before, where in the past you could get a job and you could work there as long as you wanted to work there, they would look after you and you would look to the company. But now with the rise of mass layoffs to balance the books, I can't rely on the fact that I'm going to have a job. So if you're offering me no loyalty, I offer you no loyalty. And you know how when I was coming up through the ranks, I would do the extra work first, do the extra project, go the extra mile. Then I would go to my boss and be like, look what I did. Can I have a raise? And now young people will come into your office and be like, give me a raise and you'll see what I can do.

Yeah.

And And, you know, older generations are like, pay you before you do it? What? But I think they have it right, which is because there's no guarantee that they're gonna have a job by the end of the year because of layoffs, that might as well cash in now because I might not have it later. So why do the extra work? I'm gonna get the money up front. I work hard, I believe in my work, I like accountability, I'm not a slacker, but I'm gonna get the advance.

Yeah, right.

Though it does absolutely read as entitlement, I think it is simply a response to the rules that companies play by. And now the employees are finally catching up and playing by the rules the company set. And so if you want that behavior to change, yeah, treat your people differently. Like maybe not embrace mass layoffs, maybe offer some sort of career path and some sort of security. And I mean, I can only speak from our little company, but we have a lot of young people who work with us and they've been here for— how many years have you been here? 5 years. I mean, and your friends, do they go and work for a place for 5 years? Are they in and out whether they're getting laid off or whether they're quitting? Typically 2 to 3 is more normal for her friends. Yeah, 2 to 3, right? And it's not because we're the world's greatest place to work. We have our issues and we got personality changes and we, and we make stupid decisions. And like, hey, don't be so agreeable. Jesus, they're all nodding. They're all nodding. No, stop nodding. But what we do promise is like, we're gonna do this together and we'll all take care of each other. And there's a sense, I think, of we have good times and bad times, but I hope there's a sense of security, which is one of the reasons they stick around. And if you want behavior to change, change the way you do business. it redresses all the things we're talking about, you know, which is offer stability, offer security, offer belonging, offer cause, offer some reason to come to work other than more than just simply making a paycheck.

Yeah.

Let people socialize, hire people that are going to get along and let them be friends. It's undoing all the nonsense that work did for 30 years to the detriment of work. That's the irony. And we're seeing it play out in these generational themes and these generational tropes. This is what I'm theorizing. I would love to get your feedback, which is that these generational personalities are not predetermined. And yes, they are of course impacted by technology and global events, of course, but they're also impacted by how the world around them reacts. And if you go back to the Greatest Generation, who went through war together and went through rations together and sharing and looking after each other, you had to do it because otherwise the whole thing collapsed. And that, that was cultural.

No, no, no, you're absolutely right. And I'm— the word I want to kind of interrogate is transactional, because I think it's the right word. So in the 1950s in the US, there was this great psychologist that ran this survey, and it was asking people in 1952 Do you think you're an important person? Do you think you're an important person, Simon?

I think— I would be curious.

I do. You're very important.

That's very nice of you.

Very important.

Well, if you said it, who am I to disagree?

Right. Okay.

I mean, you're the PhD, I'm not.

What percentage of people in the US, right?

I think Americans think they're more important.

Right. In 1952, said they were very important.

Yes. I'm going to say it's high above 50%.

No, 12%. What? 12%, right? The survey was run again in 1990. Okay, and let me just be clear, right? Millennials weren't in the group, right? Gen Z weren't even born or conceived. What percentage of people in the US—

go on, I can't even guess.

No, go on.

Well, I'm hoping the number went up.

It did. 80%. 80% of people, nationally representative poll, said they were a very important person in 1990. So let me be clear about here, right?

So what we have—

but what we have is this, this rising individualism, right, that you talk about, you know, throughout this, this, this beautiful podcast. Always you tap—

you come back to this, this rising individualism because those numbers, now that I hear them, make sense to me. Because you have a generation that went through war together and humility and teamwork were the thing, right? So how can I be more important than everybody else? That makes sense.

No, but it's really, it's really basic.

Oh, so good.

No, but it's really basic. It's actually one of the biggest markers is smaller families. If you're one of 12, right, you just fit in and you just carry on. Smaller families, you've also got working parents, and you, you know, the data on this is fascinating. A working mother today spends more time with her child than a non-working stay-at-home mom did in the 1970s. So attentive parenting, smaller families, okay? And then individualized education in which it's always I, not we. We never get rewarded for teamwork at school. It's always individual results. And then we throw in tech, which is an algorithmic now, completely individualized perspective. You ever picked up someone else's phone? Foreign country. It's completely wild. Like, what's the algorithm doing there? You can't even understand what it's throwing at you. You have this ever-closing, you know, atomised individualism. Now, one of the things I think is super interesting is I was looking at data at communal spaces at work, kitchens. So what you've seen post-COVID, and COVID's, I think, a really important demarcation here. Is the decline of people cleaning up after themselves in the communal kitchen. So, the coffee cup you use, you know, cleaning the microwave if your soup goes everywhere. People aren't cleaning up after themselves in the communal spaces at work. Now, it could be that obviously there's workers in there that are, you know, cleaners that are— So what? But it's not, it's not because there's always been office cleaners. It's because people have a much more atomised view of the world, but increasingly transactional view of work. And it's not just because the contract is broken, it's also because of a hyper-individualised culture. Now, COVID created obviously this enforced remote working scenario, many of whom entered the workforce, that was their first experience of work, staring at a green dot 12 hours a day. Those people are now are, you know, managers and some of them are now leaders, right? They were never sort of, you know, baptised in good management and good leadership because they were living through a global crisis. But you have COVID and now we have hybrid and remote working. And so those points of connection, those points of low-stakes socialisation in the workplace have completely gone, which is why, you know, I spend a lot of my time helping companies not just help leaders understand their young people and go, look, you know, stop being scared of them, they're understandably this way, but helping young people understand what does reciprocal relationships and dynamics and responsibilities look like in the workplace. Because you are just thinking about I, you are not thinking about we. And if I, if I just focus on leaders helping them, sure, because it's a combination, sure, of listening to What's your irritations? What are your thoughts? What's your challenges in your daily life? What's your, you know, your needs, wants, and desires? Let's get that out. Let's get out your moans, but then let, let me tell you what your leaders are saying about you. And let me tell you how you can have the confidence to ask the right questions, how you can just in a moment switch people's expectations of you or how they give you feedback, you know? And so we do it in a, a real world way. And help them understand that it's not just I, it's we. I think this is all about power. Now, we have had pretty much throughout history— Marx would concur— a power balance that swings between workers and employers. Right. And post-COVID, that pendulum swung in favour of employees.

Yeah.

And now it's swinging back to employers. You have this new generation in the workplace and they're really keen. They work throughout the night. They sometimes get things wrong, but do you know what they're really praising of you and everything you do? And it's Gen AI, because Gen AI is the next generation in the workforce. Gen AI is the plucky young intern who's doing all the work at double speed. They sometimes get things wrong, but they're always wanting to please you. And so I think a really useful way of thinking about this, all generations in the workplace, is AI is the latest generation in the workplace that needs to be integrated, that needs to be put in its place, that needs to be managed just as previous generations have.

All right, you had me hook, line, and sinker for so long. I completely agree with you in terms of the— and that's what triggers me, like people that don't know that there's other people in the world. It drives me nuts. Yeah, yeah, it drives me absolutely nuts. Yeah, right. And you know, in, in every respect, sitting in a restaurant, I actually talked to a guy who— he's a restaurant owner, and he was telling me that his business is down, his restaurant is full but his business is down because at the end of the meal they've all paid the check, right? And then they all sit there on their phone after the meal and all go through all their texts and start checking their Instagrams and all the things that they've missed for the whatever hour that they were sitting in the restaurant. And he, he'll lose 20 minutes, so he gets fewer turns on his tables. Wow. Not order another drink, nothing.

No.

And so he, he's making less money with a full restaurant. My rule is, and all my friends know this, which is you can stay in the restaurant as long as you want. The minute you pay the check, the contract is complete. There's an exchange of consideration. You leave. That's the deal. You make room for another person. That's the deal. And I find it so arrogant and selfish that you can sit there as long as you want when somebody else is waiting for a table just because you want to check your phone. Right?

Right.

That's my trigger. Because we've become so transactional and so individualistic, I think you can't separate those two. I think they're bedfellows. That simply saying to people or doing a workshop, think of others, it's not just you, here's how to ask for things, it's pieces of the puzzle. Yeah, but I, I think that it doesn't fix the problem because the, the problem is that everything in my life, yeah, my work, you made the case of media and my phone, everything has been made about me The, the incentive structure is just about my performance, not about the team's performance. Everything is me, me, me, me, me. And you get the behavior you reward. And if the reward structures are screwed up and the cultures are screwed up, that no number of positively affected workshops will work significantly or substantively unless there's a wholesale change in the way we do business.

I completely agree. You can't fix anything in a workshop. What I'm really interested in—

and this is coming from somebody who likes to do workshops.

No, the reason I— no, but the reason I connect transactional relationship at work, rising individualism, and AI is because actually what there is is a solution in there. What we have is the last 20 years, the dehumanization of work. Right. Tech hasn't saved us time.

No, it's made it worse.

It's made it worse.

Tech was the promise that we could—

Right.

That we could leave the office.

We have the tyranny of our inbox and email.

Yeah.

But where I think there's some really interesting, fruitful optimism to be found, right? Oh, that is— is that AI does the stuff that dehumanise the workplace.

Mm-hmm.

It's really good at output. We know it's really good at productivity. It's really good at clearing our inbox. It's really good at the stuff you can count. But actually what you wanna do is get humans doing the stuff that can't be counted. And what's that? What is the stuff that actually oils the wheels of an organisation but is never rewarded? You can never count it and you never task someone with it. And it's definitely not under the line of productivity.

A good cup of coffee.

3 things. No, 3 things. 3 things. Listen up.

Yeah, sorry.

3 things. Number 1, and we— you talk about this so brilliantly, and I think we are beginning to talk about this much more, thankfully, in the workplace, is care. That ability to understand, tap into without prying people's family situations or, you know, um, their well-being.

Things, conversations that used to be completely forbidden at work.

That are done skillfully, that demonstrate care. Okay, not procedures done by HR, not wellbeing initiatives done by external providers. Number 2 is that wisdom sharing, collective wisdom sharing. Now, we have seen over the last 30 years the erosion of learning in the workplace. It didn't happen with COVID If you look at the Even the numbers, the investment that companies used to put into learning on the job and the erosion of that, it's staggering. So you've seen the loss of apprenticeship, the loss of learning, and now the loss of mentorship and those touch points and observation. The thing I hear most of, most, most complaint, the biggest complaint I hear about young people is, why can't they just pick up the phone? Because many of them didn't have a landline at childhood. They didn't have what you and I had, which was that was the only way we could speak to our friends, and we'd phone up our friends and speak to their parents first. So that formality was built in, but they're not seeing you do it, and you're not giving them the time to learn from you and see you do it. And then you're not giving them the time to do those low-stakes phone calls before they do the big-ass scary phone call to the big client. So that even learning those basics of professional etiquette aren't on happening. So, that collective wisdom. But also, in the age of AI, what you need is those digital natives, they need to be teaching the elders. So, that collective wisdom doesn't just flow down the organisation, it has to now flow up. So, we're talking care, collective wisdom, intergenerational sharing of learning. And then the third thing is that communication. I know you talk beautifully about this, this active listening, this clarity in communication. And one of the things that I see companies suffer from is everyone's trying to be too nice. Oh, I didn't want to give feedback because I didn't want to upset her in her annual review. Or, you know, I don't want to tell them to not wear a hoodie, they should know. There's a lack of clarity in people, in how people communicate.

Yeah.

And that is about listening and communicating. So going back to my original point is what we need here is companies to allow the humans to do the things you can't count.

Yeah.

And that connection point, that sense of belonging, and along with that learning, is the way that humans can thrive and connect and build trust and clean up the kitchen after they've made a cup of coffee.

Yeah.

And let AI do the thing that AI does best. Yeah. And that's why I'm excited about AI as an integration tool, I'm optimistic. I don't wanna ever answer an email again, thank you very much. But most people now see answering their emails as productivity. So let's kind of reimagine work as that point of human connection, as that point of, of learning, as that point of this is where I have low stakes moments. I'm taught, I'm nurtured, and I may not be here forever, I may not be here for 5 years. Can I learn as much as possible? Can I connect with the people around me as much as possible? Can I care for them? Can I show reciprocal responsibility to others? And let me be clear about that. That cannot be done in a fully remote workplace. It can be nurtured.

Amen for that. I think it's right, but it's hard.

Yes.

And I don't just mean hard to implement. Any company that would invest in that stuff has already made the decision that their people matter. And a lot of companies are now, because of AI, exploring that maybe productivity is everything and we don't have to rely on people as much because we can get all the productivity, productivity we want. And so I agree with you for the companies that are recognizing that people still matter in business. And I think the question is, is how do people matter at business? In business, collective wisdom is a thing for now. It runs out, right? You know, it's like AI people telling me, you know, we won't need celebrities anymore because we can take the celebrities and we can like make movies with their voices and their names. I'm like, okay, but what happens when there's no more celebrities? Like, yes, the celebrities had to do the work. The celebrities had to do the— they had to do the acting to become famous that you could then license their voice and their face. I think that clearly jobs will be lost, just like the production line had us lose jobs, the internet had us lose jobs. Like, there will be job losses. There will also be job changes, you know. There's no accountants reading our taxes anymore. It's all done by computers. But what we have is huge IT departments at Internal Revenue.

Mm-hmm.

That didn't exist before. So there's new jobs. And, you know, technologists love to tell us how 80% of jobs didn't exist 20 years ago, which means maybe 80% of jobs from this day on we can't even conceive of. Don't you remember it was just a few years ago when ChatGPT first showed up that literally people were saying the next job is a prompter.

Yeah.

And you can get a degree in prompting.

Become a prompter, quick. Right?

So like they were inventing jobs that seemed to make sense for like 20 minutes until the AI just got good enough that you didn't need a prompter anymore. So my point is, is like you can see us grasping at straws looking for the jobs that might be, that some of them might stick and some of them won't.

Right.

My general sort of like sort of snarky response to all of technologists is they always forget one thing: the people. Technology is a tool, and some of the tools we invent are astonishing and world-changing and earth-changing and generational-changing and all the rest of the stuff, but we never quite know how. And so I'm optimistic that things will be fine. Absolutely, there will be job losses, there's no question. I don't think it'll be this great gutting of business, but I think it will be a reinventing of how businesses work and what is valued at work and what people want from work.

Yes. I mean, I was— I think it's also how you frame it. It's always how you frame it. For example, I was talking to a very, very senior managing partner at a law firm, one of the top law firms in London. And I said, you know, what are you thinking about this AI stuff? And he said, you know, I'm going to tell you two things that seem bizarre and disconnected but totally are connected. He said, we are actually employing fewer paralegals. Okay, some of that grunt work been automated. Okay, and we more importantly, we trust it. Okay, we're beginning to trust it.

Yeah.

But we need people to oversee the automation for now. Right, of the grunt work. The second thing is we have spent so much money on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. And I was like, uh, and he said, yeah, we have realized that building relationships with our clients, okay, and particularly inviting their kids to the Taylor Swift concert, is gonna be the defining trait of a great lawyer. Okay, now a great lawyer is about judgment. Of course, you're asking and you're paying for that judgment. Okay, and we can talk about the transition from a knowledge economy to a judgment economy in the age of AI. I always think this is the best question when you think about AI. What is the thing that AI is exposing? Not what is it doing, what is it exposing? Well, it's exposing, I think, how weak our education system is. It's exposing a lot of bullshit work. Okay, but it's exposing— I think right now is the lack of human interaction at work. And why he was buying Taylor Swift concert tickets was because business is based on trust, okay? And trust is built on human connection. That skill of building those contacts, that connection, and that trust can only be delivered by the human at a Taylor Swift concert. But But the point is, is that two things: we're disrupting the path to mastery. That is a serious, serious problem. And there's all sorts of things that are happening now.

Amen to that.

You are ridding the path of the grunt work, okay? I did a PhD. It was 3 years of grunt and grind, okay? It really was. But I learned how to constantly question, right? That's what it was.

I wrote books.

Yeah.

And it was the writing of the books that made me smarter, not the existence of the books.

Exactly, right? We are disrupting that path to mastery. And in, in, in some professions, that path to mastery is really clear and really rigid and will probably be disrupted at a slower pace than others. So what is the route to mastery? What are you asking of young people? How are you also enabling your people that are halfway through that route to mastery and need to be agile. And then the second thing is you have to nurture your human skills within your organization. And, and when you have a scenario where your young lawyers are not emailing their seniors to ask for a holiday or telling them they can't do the work because they booked the theater that night, but are actually asking ChatGPT secretly, you have a disconnection problem because that Gen Zer doesn't want the friction and the awkwardness of asking you face to face, I can't do the work, or I need that day off on holiday. They're asking ChatGPT to script the email that then goes to you.

You can start to spot them now. They all, they all look the same, right?

And so you've got this, this real sort of challenge is how do you nurture those human skills as a generation where they've actually been massively undernurtured and are gonna have to be overly nurtured. And again, it goes back to my point is an organisation's need to Encourage the things that can't be counted. And a lot of this stuff is highly gendered. Let's not pretend that it's not. There's an evolution of what I call the team mum, and it's quite often a middle-aged woman in the office that everyone goes to for emotional support, administrative help, every question. And she's burdened and never rewarded, certainly never paid for the extra work she puts in. And quite often she gets burnt out and leaves. And when she leaves, a lot of things collapse. But those human interactions and that collaboration and those human skills are not being nurtured in the way that they should.

Yeah.

So that's where I think the generations genuinely have an opportunity of coming together.

Magic. You're wonderful.

Thanks, Babes. You're wonderful.

You're really good. This is great. I mean, you're— you're— I think your perspective is So helpful and so clear. And I'm really, really, really glad you came on.

Thank you.

Thanks. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company, lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbineas, Phoebe Bradford, and Devin Johnson. Subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. And if you want even more cool stuff, visit simonsinek.com. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.