Once again I’m reading that today’s young people — the generations identified by letters — are supposedly different because work is no longer their highest priority. They are said to work in order to live, rather than live in order to work.
But has there ever been a generation in history that truly saw things differently? All of us had some vision of life that came first. And we understood that if we wanted to realize it, we had to earn the means to do so. Our parents understood this, and so did their parents before them. The only real difference is that those visions of life gradually evolved — from merely having enough to eat and a roof overhead to expecting a respectable standard of living, including culture and travel.
Still, there are differences.
Earlier generations were raised with the understanding that they could not have everything immediately. That effort — often prolonged effort — was necessary. The newer alphabet generations are taught something else: you will get whatever you want, you will get it quickly, and without hard work. This is not their fault. The fault lies with those who raised them and removed from their childhood and adolescence nearly every experience through which resilience might have been learned. Many of these young people will eventually acquire that resilience, but painfully and slowly.
They enter adulthood with this mentality while facing a world in which they can never attain some of the things their parents took for granted. For many of them, no amount of work will ever secure dignified housing of their own. They will never have employment stable enough to feel certain they can provide for a family. Some people — myself included — once believed this would produce mounting resentment among the young. We were mistaken. They simply changed their goals. They reconciled themselves to a condition that earlier generations would have called “homelessness,” and somehow attached to it not merely a sense of dignity, but even superiority over others.
This is true throughout the Western world. In the Czech environment, however, there is an additional contrast. Today’s sixty-year-olds were present when the wealth accumulated under communism — and inherited from even older regimes — was being divided up. Despite all the rhetoric about a devastated and internally indebted country, the period enabled fairy-tale fortunes for entire family dynasties and modest prosperity for millions of others. In the early 1990s, for example, we bought a house in an exceptionally desirable neighborhood for a price our children could scarcely imagine affording today. Others used the same era to establish businesses.
So it should not surprise us that many young people lack the desire to grind endlessly when they see no meaningful destination at the end of it. This is not a question of wisdom or moral character. It is a question of how the conditions have been arranged.
And it should also be said that this phenomenon applies primarily to young white-collar employees — both corporate and government. Young tradesmen, by all appearances, are not much different from their parents.