```
I really do understand what you're describing. As a millennial born in 1985, I've come to think that what truly defines our generation isn't a reluctance to work hard. We just happen to be living in the narrow gap between two eras.
The education we received as children was shaped by the logic of a fast-industrialising, fast-urbanising age. Study hard, work hard, put in the long hours, buy a house, start a family, and believe the world will get better each year.
The problem is that by the time we actually stepped into the working world, that era was already drawing to a close.
2008 was a major turning point. That year the global urbanisation rate passed 50 per cent for the first time, the American subprime crisis broke out, and China launched its four-trillion yuan stimulus. The whole world moved into a phase of sustaining growth through debt and vast production capacity.
Industrialisation and urbanisation release demand only once, a point that often gets missed. A country goes through its rail-building, its housing build-out and its big urban expansion only once. After that infrastructure is in place, genuine new demand falls off noticeably.
Logically, when productivity rises, society should reduce total working hours and let people live more easily.
What's actually happened is that the entire world has slid into something far more punishing.
China has its 996 culture. The American finance and tech sectors have run on eighty-hour weeks for years. Japan and South Korea have grappled with overwork for decades. Working hours in Europe have come down, but many young people there have ended up in a low-protection gig economy.
So many millennials feel a deep sense of dislocation. Technology keeps advancing and productivity keeps rising, yet people feel more tired, more anxious and less secure than ever.
A great deal of the work people do today isn't really about meeting genuine demand. It exists to keep the asset system running. Someone has to take on the next mortgage. Pension contributions need to keep coming in, debts need to keep being rolled over, and company valuations need to keep climbing. So society as a whole stays locked into long working hours.
I've increasingly come to think that the issue with our generation isn't that we can't cope with work. The rules of the world have changed under our feet.
We were raised and educated to be people of the industrial age, yet we find ourselves living in a post-industrial, post-urbanisation world where AI is beginning to take over production.
That sense of being caught between two worlds is probably what really binds the millennial generation together.
*This text was assisted by AI.*
