Gen Z are over having their work ethic questioned: ‘Most boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week and still not be able to afford a house’

fortune.com Gen Z are over having their work ethic questioned: ‘Most boomers don’t know what it’s like to work 40+ hours a week and still not be able to afford a house’'

One Gen Zer went viral for explaining how much easier life was for boomers.

News @lemmy.world

fortune.com /article/gen-z-work-ethic-vs-millennials-problem-habits-young-adults-workplace-employees/

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Nothing will piss me off faster than people attacking the work ethic of young people in the US. These poor fucking kids are working 60-100 hours a week for the "privilege" of living in a roach-infested studio, likely with roommates, where our parents could afford a house, education, and family on 40 hours a week.
In-fucking-furiating.
- This has been going on since Elder Millennials were the young people.
  Nothing has changed- same Boomers at the top, punching downward. Millennials are just older now, so Z is in the spotlight.
  
  Elder millennials like me are either stable, or have dead or dying boomers parents who support them. We’re care taking for the second elderly parent with dementia now. One more to go after that and we’ll split the house sale with siblings and maybe have enough for a meager retirement in 25 years.
  If Social Security is gone I’m fucked though.

Not a GenZ, but i feel this. Forget affording a house. If I lost my car I'd be so fucked financially that I'd be in debt for the next 10 years or worse. And I know this because it actually happened to me 6 years back. Couldn't get to work so I couldn't make money. Within the span of a few months I was in almost $15,000 of credit card debt on top of a car loan. That's almost half of what I make in a year I built that up in just a few months just to survive. I'm still in debt from back then and I still haven't paid off the car and now I'm a little over 30 years old. All while I get to live in a shitty apartment building where half my neighbors are meth-heads while the other half make the meth (nothing against them personally. Except for the dude that bangs on my door at 4 AM) And one might think "this guy probably has a shitty job that doesn't pay very well" and no, I don't. I actually have a pretty decent job. I'm a CAD tech for a land surveying company and I'm making the most money I ever have in my entire life. Yet I'm still 2 paychecks away from being homeless.
Sorry, I just needed to rant cuz I'm 30 and tired of being poor.
- If I lost my car I’d be so fucked financially
  My 80 year-old parents are in this situation. In April they will have been "borrowing" my car for an entire year, because no one will employ them and the gig economy is the only thing standing between them and homelessness.
  I'm lucky to live in an area with good public trans, myself.
- I remember losing my car (my brother borrowed it and burned out the transmission fucking around. Totaled it. Thanks bro) and just trying to get around on bicycle during commute hours was pretty bad. My town hadn't heard of bike lanes yet and riding on the street was a good way to get clipped by a pickup. I lucked into a POS Ford that cost $50, was held together with duct tape and I got ripped off, but it ran. Put a new radiator in it, pawned it off on the next schlub, and got something that wasn't a deathtrap. But those were some rough months.

The generational wealth gap isn't about work ethic—it's about economic warfare disguised as meritocracy. Boomers built equity on minimum wage jobs while zoning laws now prevent duplexes. Their Cadillacs cost less than today's used Corollas.
Social media didn't create narcissism—it monetized it. The real hustle culture scam? Convincing kids to trade sleep for side gigs so landlords can buy third vacation homes.
The system's not broken. It's functioning exactly as designed: extracting youth labor until retirement becomes mythological. But keep arguing about avocado toast—the banks love watching tenants fight over crumbs.
- Ohhh, I think banks don't love that. They don't even think of us at all.

What’s truly fucked is that it costs more to be poor than rich and it takes substantial money to accumulate wealth.
When a rich person buys a product, like a pair of winter boots, they will purchase a pair of high quality that will last many seasons. A poor person buying cheap boots will have them wear out faster and they’ll need to be replaced much sooner, so they’ll have to keep buying boots periodically. By spending more at the outset, the rich person spends less in the long run. You can see this with William Sonoma cookware. Each item is the last "that thing" that you'll ever need. Only things like plates that can be dropped and broken will even need to be repurchased.
As for building wealth, you have to have enough money to invest to build wealth. This can be by buying a house that appreciates in value or by investing in the market. You can’t throw a thousand dollars into the market and have it appreciate in a meaningful way. You have to have real money to make anything unless you’re risking it all looking for a unicorn. This is why hedge funds make so much. They can afford to throw money at everything that has an opportunity to be a unicorn. The handful of successful unicorns offset the rest that go bust. A regular person can’t do this; even most wealth people can’t do this. For the rest, investing in "safe" funds will generate a smaller return over a longer period of time. But how can you access this avenue if you're living paycheck to paycheck or an emergency car repair could wipe out your savings?
It’s a perverse and lousy system. And the cracks have been showing for quite some time. I believe now we’re at the end of the ride. The illusion of capitalism as a good system is continually eroding and it’s all going to be downhill from here. We’re going to get squeezed, companies are going to screw us harder and jack up prices, and everything is going to get worse, worse, worse until the mask is fully off and the evil of the system is obvious to anyone clear-eyed enough to understand why living is hell. But some people will still think the reason for their misery is drag queens and immigrants, rather than the wealthy people they admire. And keeping that fight going is how they distract us from what would really solve our problems: a drastic reduction of wealth for the very top.
I hope more people become aware of the existing class-war, because it's been active this whole time; it's just that the ones currently winning didn't declare war openly, but in whispers among themselves.
- it takes substantial money to accumulate wealth.
  Yeah, this is huge.
  Right now you need a half mil cash invested and stable investments to start seeing a measurable return. A mil before you might think investing is worth it. Two mil and retirement might be something you could realistically consider and have a life. 3 and now you can have a real retirement.* This doesn’t include a CoL increase starting now until when you retire, $3 mil today will get you $150k before taxes and any major expenses like mortgage or medical. In 20 years who knows, it might take 5 mil to retire if everything hasn’t turned into a shitshow otherwise.
  (*With a conservative 5% estimate on return and not touching the principal).

In my day you had to put in the footwork, walking around until you found an unoccupied house and then that one was yours.
- And before that, you'd just wait for the government to clear all the natives from an area, saunter over and plant a post with your name on it.
  Land stealing is in American DNA
  
  Wait, I’m a native (at least of where I’m a citizen)! Should I be worried?

Anyone got a link to the TikTok video? It's removed from TikTok from what I could find.

It took me 20+ years of 40+ hours of work a week (when I could get it) to be able to afford a house, doing without things like eating out, having a cellphone, going on vacations. But then, I’m no boomer. Boomers started being born in 1945 and ended in 1964; that means that today, they’re between 60 and 80 years old.
I’m pretty sure that at this point, Gen Z will find that it’s Gen X and Millennials who are questioning their work ethic… and not the work ethic of ALL of Gen Z, just those who expect everything to be handed to them as if they were boomers.
Yeah, the housing market sucks, and it has got progressively worse over the past 50 years. But then I remember that when my parents built their house, the oil crisis was in full swing, they’d just seen their savings vanish in the market crash, and they lived for a year in the shell of a house they built with their own hands — they’d been able to afford land in the middle of nowhere, and ran out of money part way through construction. They eventually finished it and got back on their feet.
The big thing today is that very few people are willing to go buy property in the middle of nowhere and risk starvation or exposure and 10 years of their lives to make it all work.
And I’m not saying they should have to; there were socially progressive programs put in place to make things better for this generation — and they failed. So now we’re back to the 1800s as far as social security and healthcare, and have to make the best of it.
- Hi, millennial here.
  Anyone questioning the work ethic of gen z is themselves lazy, stupid, entitled, and has never worked a day in their life.
  Life in the US and West in general is harder now than at any point in the last 60 years. Gen z works more hours for lower pay than you did at the same age, or than I did. And I worked a lot of hours for shit pay.
  I will never own a house. Moving to the middle of nowhere doesn't work, there's no jobs and the houses arent much cheaper. It will take the death of capitalism or massive crippling depopulation for me to own a home. These are incontrovertible facts, and its worse for the average Gen z or alpha.
- Buying property in the middle of nowhere is genx shit. I'd have to go 4 hours outside of nowhere before land prices started becoming realistically affordable, but I'm one of those entitled millenials who expects to live somewhere where I can also have a job.
  
  The challenge these days is finding a “middle of nowhere” place that’s affordable AND actually has reliable high speed Internet.
- Middle of nowhere today is ghost towns in the midwest abandoned when the corps pulled out shop and sent their factories china to sell their garbage back to us at higher costs.
  But do go on.

I'd feel sorry if most understood what sacrifice actually means. If you want to get out of debt, make actual sacrifices instead of blaming it on everything else. Nothing comes easy. Gen Z people have a sense of entitlement and "don't understand how to manage money."
How bout stop being children and educate yourselves on what it means to budget (oh, you weren't taught how to do it in school? Pull up your favorite media consuming app and look it up); what the dollar's actual value is; what it means to not eat fucking fast food every day (know how to make a sandwich and pack some fruits, meal prep?). How about stop relying on credit thinking its your money while paying the banks the interest you accrue by keeping a balance on your cards (look on your latest credit card and see how much money you've given to the banks just to have a "sense of security" through credit, hah) Or buying a vehicle that's 30% or more of your net income. COME ON!
Stop blaming the world and make it yours.
Or join the military, its actually got all of the facets of turning children into adults... You'll earn financial freedom through many sacrifices. It definitely will flush out the wannabes and "cant-get-rights."
Or, you know, just blame everything else and get nowhere. 👍
- "Join the military and die for the military industrial complex!"
  Do you even know how much an apartment rents for now in most major cities? You know, where most of the jobs are.
  
  In my region the army was how we got to college. Fair trade given 90% of the work we end up doing is sandbags or chasing jail escapees (it's like search and rescue except everyone's got guns and the training not to use them).
  Sorry your impression is different from my memory.
- Stop blaming the world and make it yours.
  Ogey
- Found the boomer.
  The cheapest new car (by MSRP, not actual dealer pricing) in America right now is the Nissan Versa... manual.
  A manual transmission.
  In 2025.
  It costs $18.3k.
  Before tax and dealer markup.
  For this car to be 30% of your yearly income, you would need to make $61k a year.
  That's an hourly wage of $29.33 an hour, after taxes, with a full time, 40 hr/week job, taking zero time off.
  Before only federal income taxes, you'd have to make about 72k yearly, a full time 40 hr wage of about $34.61.
  If you say the median zoomer is 28 years old...
  Then only a quarter of zoomers in America make that much money, or more.
  ... and the ones that make that much are very likely to have student loan debt at least on par with the monthly payments for that car, if not more.
  Oh, and that quarter of zoomers isn't really a quarter of zoomers, its a quarter of zoomers with jobs, in the workforce.
  If you're unemployed for roughly over 6 months, or disabled or seriously injured or whatever, you aren't counted as as unemployed, you just fall out of the denominator of the 'people with jobs / workforce' equations that are unemployment numbers.
  By your 30% metric, the median 28 year old in America who works makes about 47k yearly before taxes, so about $41.5k after just federal income tax, and can thus afford a car with a sticker price of...!
  $12.5k.
  On Edmunds, I'm getting about 500 cars (all used, none are even 'certified pre owned') within 200 miles of me that aren't obvious repair nightmares, get 30 MPG, and have less than 100k miles on em, which are $12.5k or under.
  There are 10 million people in that same radius of which roughly 15% are 28 years old +/- 5 years...
  ...so...
  Thats about 500, roughly affordable to the average person, cars for about 1.5 million people.
  
  Here's another resource you can use if you're looking for an affordable car under $12,500. I'm sure we could find more 😉
- They have three choices: take out a lifetime of debt for a college degree and likely still not be able to find a job, get exploited for their labor because they don't have a union (likely working for poverty wages), or fight in some foreign land to further America's corporate power.
  The fact is young people are working harder, for longer hours, more days a week than any since the Industrial Revolution. For that they get the privilege of barely surviving here in the US.
  This isn't their fault. They were born into the shitty country our parents and grandparents created for them.
  Tax all wealth over $1,000,000,000 and use the money to increase the social safety net.
- I hope you get mugged 👍
- Hi.
  I never eat fast food.
  I don't have a car.
  I don't even have a credit card.
  I spend $150/mo to feed two people.
  Go fuck yourself.
- Reporter: [REDACTED]
  Reason: not a marxist lenninist
  I commend the spirit, but despite the rumors, this is not an explicitly nor exclusively Marxist-Leninist instance.
- People like you give all ancient fucks a bad name ☺️
- They have three choices: take out a lifetime of debt for a college degree and likely still not be able to find a job, get exploited for their labor because they don't have a union (likely working for poverty wages), or fight in some foreign land to further America's corporate power.
  The fact is young people are working harder, for longer hours, more days a week than any since the Industrial Revolution. For that they get the privilege of barely surviving here in the US.
  This isn't their fault. They were born into the shitty country our parents and grandparents created for them.
  Tax all wealth over $1,000,000,000 and use the money to increase the social safety net.
- Nobody likes hearing the truth. The more defensive the argument, the less you have to stand on.
  Generational relative hardship is a thing.
  Every generation has had to adapt, period. You can CHOOSE to overcome challenges or let them defeat you. You can CHOOSE to take out a school loan and either have a well thought out plan or fall flat on your face because due diligence wasn't paid to increase your knowledge in how the area of study will translate into the workforce. You can CHOOSE to take on mountains of debt to "survive" and think 40 hours a week is all the time there is to work. You can CHOOSE to have a child, two, three, four. All choices have risks and consequences. You can CHOOSE to "buy" that $1500 phone when you live paycheck to paycheck. You can CHOOSE to pursue a career in gaming, social media, and the so called "influencer." But with those choices, you accept the risk, responsibility, and the ownership of them.
  Learn what accountability means in your OWN life. Once the problem is everything else's fault - its time to look at the common denominator.
  The only one you have to look at in the mirror is yourself. Do something about it.
  
  How the fuck did you pass the .ml application?
  
  Or, you know, choose to join political revolutionaries.

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