What Gen X Can Learn From Gen Z About Working on Your Own Terms

Steven Miyao, Coaching Metta

I was standing in the San Francisco airport when my left arm and neck went numb, my heart started racing, and I was sure I was having a heart attack. The EKG came back normal. My doctor told me that if I didn't learn to reduce my stress, the next one would be real.

That was the cost of decades of working hard on terms I had never stopped to examine. Last week, a 22-year-old described what I was missing better than I ever have:

"Our generation recognizes a bad deal when they see it. If I have to go through pain, I'd rather it be on my own terms than the terms you made."

That's Nathan Majeed, a recent computer science graduate quoted in an opinion piece for The New York Times by Emi Nietfeld, "Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don't Blame Them." Nietfeld, who wrote a memoir about climbing from homelessness to Harvard to Google, went back to talk with graduating students about how they see work now. It took me until my fifties to understand what Majeed already knows. I read the piece expecting to worry about the students. Instead, I kept thinking about us.

The deal we signed without reading

If you're Gen X like me — somewhere in your late forties or fifties — you probably signed the deal the same way I did: without reading it. Work hard, stay loyal, keep climbing, and the career takes care of the rest. Nobody handed us a contract. We absorbed it, from our parents, from the culture, from watching what got rewarded. And for a while, it paid off in titles, raises, and the respect of people we wanted respect from.

I lived by those terms for decades, right up to that morning in the San Francisco airport. What I understood much later was that the pain I was going through wasn't pain I had chosen. It was pain on terms I had never examined — my company's terms, my industry's terms, and underneath those, the terms of a kid with undiagnosed ADHD who needed to prove his doubters wrong. I was going through plenty of pain. None of it was on my own terms.

What Gen Z sees that Gen X didn't

The Gen Z students in Nietfeld's piece watched millennials burn out. They watched wages stagnate, degrees lose their value, and institutions wobble. Now they're graduating into one of the worst job markets in years, and eight out of ten of them don't expect work to be an important part of their lives.

It's easy for Gen X to read that and see a lack of ambition. That's not what I see. I see a generation that read the contract before signing.

The research is on their side. Nietfeld cites Timothy Judge, a psychologist at Ohio State who followed more than 700 people across 70 years. The most ambitious people in his study died slightly younger than everyone else — he believes because they carried more stress and neglected their health and relationships. Most of us in Gen X have read some version of that finding before. We just kept working like we didn't believe it.

I watch that gap between knowing and acting play out in my coaching practice every week. Most of the leaders I work with are in their forties and fifties, and the presenting problem is rarely the real problem. Someone comes in wanting help with a job search, and a few sessions later we're talking about a deal they signed thirty years ago and have never renegotiated. So the question I ask them is the one I'd ask you: whose terms are you working on right now? If you're not sure, look at your calendar. How much of what's on it did you actually choose, and how much is there because someone else expects it of you?

Where I part ways with the students

I don't want to romanticize any of this. Their outlook is a warning to all of us: the world they're inheriting from us frightens them. The most sobering line in the piece wasn't about work at all. An Emory professor, Stephen Nowicki, found that his students felt less control over their lives than the average prisoner felt in 1966. One graduate told Nietfeld that owning a home didn't seem feasible, "so I'm not wanting it."

I understand where that comes from. But there's a difference between rejecting a bad deal and giving up on wanting things. The belief that your effort shapes your future is one of the strongest predictors we have of health, income, and happiness. People who feel agency take better care of themselves, apply for more jobs, and recover faster from setbacks. Losing that belief costs more than any bad job.

But Gen X has something these students don't have yet: decades of evidence that we can figure things out. We've survived reorgs, recessions, and industry shifts. AI is still an open question, but it isn't the first wave that was supposed to make us obsolete. We have skills, networks, savings, and judgment. What most of us have never done is use that agency on our own behalf. We spent it on the company, the kids, the mortgage. The students Nietfeld spoke with feel powerless because they're at the beginning, with nothing yet to fall back on. Most people my age have real leverage and haven't touched it.

What I'm practicing

I include myself in that. Even after years of doing this work, I still catch myself sliding back onto the old terms — saying yes out of fear rather than choice, or judging whether a week was good by how much I got done. The renegotiation isn't a decision you make once. I have to keep making it, usually after I notice I've stopped.

I don't think Nathan Majeed's generation has everything figured out. They're scared, and they have reasons to be. But when a 22-year-old says he'd rather go through pain on his own terms than on terms someone else made, I don't hear entitlement. I hear a question I'm still answering for myself. Whatever pain your work is asking of you right now, is it pain you chose? Because unlike the students in Nietfeld's piece, most of us are in a position to renegotiate.

If you found this valuable, sign up for my email list, and I'll send you the new posts as soon as they are published.

                                                                 -------------------

If you are looking for a coach and are interested in working with me, please contact me here.

                                                                 -------------------

If you enjoyed it, please share it with others.