A Friend in Mumbai recently forwarded me a meme: “Gen Z employees need a trigger warning before receiving feedback.” He is a Baby Boomer, and he was chuckling. I didn’t have the heart to remind him that in 2013, TIME magazine put his children’s generation on its cover as “The Me Me Me Generation” — entitled, tech-obsessed, narcissistic. Nor that in the 1970s, when he was young and wore bell-bottoms to Marine Drive, Tom Wolfe had branded his lot the original “Me Generation”, too busy with self-fulfilment to care about society. His own father, no doubt, had opinions about long hair and Kishore Kumar.
The prosecution’s charge sheet, it turns out, is a hand-me-down. Every generation inherits it, edits the nouns, and serves it on the next. Newspapers from the early 1900s carried sweeping complaints about idle, pleasure-seeking youth. Gen X were slackers; Millennials were snowflakes, and Gen Z, apparently, are unemployable divas who want to discuss their feelings and leave at 6 pm sharp — a scandal in a country where sitting at your desk till the boss leaves was long considered a core competency. Give it 15 years and Gen Z managers will be complaining that Generation Beta refuses to answer their neural implants after work hours.
Why do we keep doing this? Psychologists call part of it the “kids these days” effect: people judge today’s youth against their own present-day selves, forgetting they were once 23, clueless, and convinced the world owed them an interesting life. Memory is a flattering editor. The uncle who despairs at a Gen Z hire “job-hopping” has quietly deleted the memory of how he switched from the family textile business to a bank, over his own father’s loud objections, because the salary was better and the office had air-conditioning.
There’s ego in it too. Admitting the young might be adapting sensibly to a changed world means admitting our expertise has a shelf life. It is more comforting to conclude they are broken than that we are becoming obsolete. And so the Instagram reel becomes proof of narcissism rather than what it mostly is — the response of people handed a camera, an audience, and an algorithm at age 12.
But — and here both sides must lean in — the young are not blameless in this pantomime. Every generation arrives convinced it has invented authenticity, burnout, and the critique of hustle culture. A young Bengaluru techie recently explained “quiet quitting” to her father with the solemnity of Newton unveiling gravity. Her father, who spent the 1990s in a PSU perfecting the art of the extended lunch and the strategically placed files, listened with remarkable restraint.
The truth is that each cohort is a product of its circumstances. The generation that queued for Bajaj scooters and telephone connections chased security because it had seen scarcity. Millennials, mugged by the 2008 crash even as India’s IT dream matured, redefined success as meaning rather than the corner office. Gen Z, raised on precarity, climate anxiety, and a phone that never sleeps, negotiate boundaries because nobody else will do it for them. Traits read as moral failure are usually rational responses to the hand dealt.
So, one lesson for each side. Elders: before diagnosing the young, check whether the same complaint was once filed against you. It almost always was — possibly by a grandparent who considered your Maruti 800 an extravagance. Youngsters: the greying colleague across the table survived licence raj, liberalisation, Y2K, and demonetisation. Some of that scar tissue is wisdom, and mining it is cheaper than acquiring your own.
The workplace does not need a generational war; it needs a trade agreement. The old have context, the young have current software. Neither travels well alone. And if all else fails, remember the great unifier: every generation believes the one after it cannot draft a proper email — and every generation before it believes the same about them.