My position: Young people are not rejecting hard work. They are responding to a different world. Many were born into a life where basic security and comfort were already in place, so naturally they look to work for something different.
I keep hearing the same complaint: young people are lazy. They are not proud of their work. They do not want to hustle. They job-hop, care too much about work-life balance, want flexibility, purpose, meaning and everything else.
I don’t buy it.
Of course some young people are lazy. Some 50-year-olds are lazy too. Laziness is not invented by, or tagged to, a certain generation.
What I see instead is a generation becoming more selective about what truly deserves their hard work.
We all start from a different place
Think about what progress meant to earlier generations. Clean water entering the home. Electricity. A stable job. Their own flat. Enough income to raise a family. Savings. Security.
Those were enormous improvements in quality of life. If working harder moved you from insecurity to security, of course hard work looked attractive.
Our generation inherited much of that progress. In a developed city like Singapore, clean water is not a reward for working harder. It is already there. So are electricity, education, transport, healthcare and a level of safety previous generations worked very hard to build.
Naturally, the next generation wants the next thing: purpose, time, autonomy, health, relationships, meaning.
That is not greed.
Progress changes what people consider worth working for.
More effort does not always feel worth it anymore
Economics has a useful idea: diminishing marginal utility. The first unit of something valuable can change your life. The tenth may still be useful, but it rarely changes your life by the same amount.
Work can feel similar.
A previous generation might have experienced hard work as the bridge from very little to much more. Today, many younger workers feel they are being asked for much more effort to achieve a much smaller improvement in life.
Work harder. Accept the promotion. Stay later. Take on more responsibility. Then look at housing prices, career uncertainty, the cost of raising a family and how much life the next rung of the ladder consumes.
A normal thinking person is going to ask:
Worth it or not?
That question is not laziness.
It is judgment.
Same game or not?
If the system worked well for your generation, be careful about assuming the next generation will get the same reward from playing by the same rules.
Housing appreciated. Careers rewarded tenure. Assets compounded. Economic growth created mobility.
Then someone who benefited from those conditions tells a 25-year-old:
Just work hard like I did.
And the young person looks around and thinks:
You sure same game or not?
This does not mean previous generations had easy lives. Many worked brutally hard and tolerated things younger people today would probably refuse to tolerate.
But for many of them, the sacrifice led somewhere obvious.
The mistake is assuming that because hard work paid off for you, your success proves you simply had better character. No, not true.
Maybe Gen Z is simply less willing to pretend
I don’t think younger people necessarily care less about effort.
I think they care less about pretending.
Pretending the company is family. Pretending loyalty will always be reciprocated. Pretending the next promotion automatically means a better life. Pretending working longer always means progressing faster. Pretending a job title must become your identity.
Some choose to work less. Some prioritise family, health, flexibility or a lower-cost life over the traditional idea of success.
Others work incredibly hard, but on things they actually believe in.
If young people were truly lazy, they would avoid effort everywhere.
They don’t.
They start businesses, create things, train obsessively, learn new skills, move countries and work ridiculous hours when something matters enough to them.
They are not rejecting hard work. They are becoming more selective about what truly deserves it.
Isn’t that what progress was for?
There is something strange about one generation working hard to give the next generation a better life, then becoming upset when the next generation expects life to actually be better.
If every generation is supposed to tolerate exactly the same hardship as the previous one, then what was all that progress for?
Our grandparents may have wanted security. Our parents may have wanted prosperity. The next generation may want autonomy, meaning and enough time to enjoy the prosperity already created.
That does not make them weaker.
It means the definition of a good life changed.
Perhaps some expectations are too high. Perhaps a generation raised with more comfort naturally expects more from life.
But then again:
Isn’t that how progress works?
Stop calling them lazy
I am not arguing that young people should stop working, or that every complaint about work is justified.
Hard work still matters.
But suffering itself is no longer enough to prove that the work is worthwhile.
Work hard because the effort builds something you value. Work hard because the skill matters. Work hard because you believe in what you are creating. Work hard because the reward is worth the trade-off.
But “work hard because we suffered too” is a terrible value proposition.
If employers want stronger engagement from younger people, perhaps the answer is not another lecture about attitude.
Give them responsibility. Give them room to grow. Recognise effort. Reward contribution. Let them see where good work can lead.
One of my previous bosses once said something I still remember:
We were also young once, and someone gave us the chance. So let’s do the same. 大胆地用年轻人.
Use young people boldly.
Trust them with something real.
Let them prove what they can do.
And to the younger ones: do not let somebody else’s definition of work ethic convince you that you are weak because you want something different from life.
Be selective.
But when you find something worth doing, do it properly.
What would change my mind?
Give young people meaningful work. Give them responsibility. Give them room to grow. Reward them fairly. Give them somewhere worth going.
And if, broadly, they still avoid effort even when the effort is worth it?
Then okay lah, maybe they really are lazy..