A 25-year-old freelancer recently found herself in a conversation about something that once seemed almost unquestionable: if you worked hard enough, eventually life would reward you. The older generation in the conversation remembered working long hours, sometimes seven days a week, with the belief that sacrifice could build a better future. The younger woman was not arguing that she wanted to work less. She was questioning whether the promise behind all that work still existed.

Her response was only four words: “But you had hope.” They landed differently because they pointed toward something deeper than workplace stress. For many young adults, the hardest part may not be the long hours themselves. It may be the growing uncertainty over whether those hours can still buy the stability, security, independence, and sense of progress they were told to expect.

The Conversation That Exposed A Generational Divide

Suzy Welch, the NYU professor and former Harvard Business Review editor, shared the exchange during the July 24 episode of the Masters of Scale podcast. She was describing how intensely she worked when she was younger, saying she had worked seven days a week and loved it. If she had been able to work more, she said, she would have.

That kind of story has traditionally been presented as evidence of ambition. Work harder, stay longer, make sacrifices, and eventually those sacrifices will create opportunities. For Welch, the long hours existed within a larger sense of possibility. The work was difficult, but the future felt worth working toward.

“I did have hope. We all did have hope. We believed that if you worked hard you were rewarded for it. And so this is the disconnect,” Welch said.

The younger freelancer’s response suggested that the problem was not necessarily a refusal to make sacrifices. She had watched older generations make them. What she questioned was the outcome. Gen Z has seen parents and older siblings work hard and still face layoffs, financial pressure, and career instability. As Welch described their perspective, they have watched people follow the old rules without always receiving the promised reward.

That changes the meaning of hard work. When sacrifice appears connected to progress, exhaustion can feel temporary. When the destination keeps moving further away, the same exhaustion can begin to feel pointless.

Burnout Is Becoming Part Of Early Adulthood

The numbers suggest that this feeling extends far beyond one conversation. Aflac’s 2025-2026 WorkForces Report, based on a Kantar survey of 2,000 U.S. employees, found that 74% of Gen Z workers reported at least moderate burnout. Millennials followed at 66%. Across all generations, 72% of employees reported moderate to very high levels of workplace stress, which Aflac described as a six-year high.

Heavy workloads were the most commonly identified driver, cited by 35% of respondents. That finding is important because it points toward something concrete. Burnout is not simply a matter of younger workers being dissatisfied with work culture or having different expectations about employment. A large number are reporting that the amount of work itself has become difficult to carry.

Another survey makes the age at which this happens even more striking. Talker Research asked 2,000 U.S. adults when they felt they reached their personal burnout ceiling. The average American answered 42. Gen Z and millennials answered 25.

Twenty-five is usually associated with possibility. People are starting careers, forming relationships, deciding where they want to live, and imagining what adulthood might look like. Yet one-quarter of Americans surveyed said they had already experienced burnout before turning 30.

Among younger respondents, work was the leading reported cause at 33%, followed by finances at 27%. At the same time, 83% said entering adulthood today is more challenging than it was a decade ago. Taken together, the findings paint a picture of people reaching the beginning of adulthood while already feeling as though they have been running for years.

The Pressure Does Not End When The Workday Does

Workplace exhaustion rarely stays neatly inside office hours. The mind can carry an unfinished task into dinner, a difficult conversation into the evening, and financial worries into the bedroom.

CDC data published from 2024 found that 30.5% of American adults were sleeping fewer than seven hours a night. Among adults aged 18 to 34, 18.3% reported trouble falling asleep most days or every day. Another 18.1% reported difficulty staying asleep.

Sleep statistics cannot tell us exactly why every person is awake at night. They do, however, show how common inadequate sleep has become. For someone already carrying workplace stress, financial uncertainty, or anxiety about the future, the boundary between work and personal life can become increasingly difficult to maintain.

The problem can become circular. Stress makes rest harder, poor sleep makes ordinary responsibilities more difficult, and those difficulties can create more stress. A person may technically leave work at the end of the day while remaining mentally attached to everything that happened there.

That is one reason burnout can feel larger than a demanding job. The exhaustion eventually begins to affect the parts of life that were supposed to make the work worthwhile.

Financial Insecurity Makes The Future Harder To Trust

Money sits underneath much of the anxiety facing younger workers. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey included 23,482 respondents across 44 countries. It found that 48% of Gen Z respondents and 46% of millennials did not feel financially secure. The previous year, those figures were 30% and 32%.

More than half of both generations also reported living paycheck to paycheck. That reality changes how people think about work. When a paycheck is responsible for rent, food, debt, transportation, and the possibility of eventually building savings, walking away from an unhealthy situation can feel far more complicated than simply deciding to find another job.

The same Deloitte research found that 41% of Gen Z respondents and 46% of millennials said their primary job was central to their identity. That creates another layer of pressure. Work is being asked to provide financial security while also providing meaning and a sense of who someone is.

There is nothing unusual about wanting those things. People have always hoped their work could support both their lives and their sense of purpose. What feels different is the degree to which younger workers appear to be questioning whether one career can reliably provide either.

When the financial foundation feels unstable, hope becomes harder to plan around. A person can tolerate a difficult season when they believe it is leading somewhere. It is much harder to tolerate it when the future looks just as uncertain as the present.

Belonging Can Change How Work Feels

One of the most revealing findings in the Aflac research concerns something that cannot be measured by workload alone: whether people feel that they belong.

Employees who said they felt a sense of belonging at work reported burnout at 55%. Among those who did not feel that sense of belonging, burnout reached 78%. Stress showed a similar pattern, with 30% among employees who felt they belonged compared with 56% among those who did not.

The difference is striking because belonging does not necessarily remove the work itself. Deadlines still exist. Responsibilities remain. A difficult week does not suddenly become an easy one because someone feels connected to the people around them.

What can change is the experience of carrying that pressure. Being recognized, supported, trusted, and included can give difficult work a different emotional weight. Isolation can make the same responsibilities feel much heavier.

Matthew Owenby, Aflac’s chief strategy officer, said, “Breaking the cycle of stress and burnout may begin with employers carefully analyzing employees’ responsibilities both on and off the clock.”

That puts part of the responsibility where it belongs. Burnout is experienced by individuals, but workplace conditions can shape how much pressure those individuals are asked to absorb.

The People Supporting Workers Are Struggling Too

Managers are often expected to become the solution to workplace burnout. They are asked to support employees, build healthy cultures, communicate expectations, and recognize when someone is struggling. Yet the people occupying those positions are experiencing significant pressure themselves.

A Seramount survey of 1,000 U.S. employees at large companies found that 80% of managers reported at least one symptom of burnout. Senior managers followed at 72%, while non-managers came in at 66%. Executives reported a much lower figure of 18%.

Younger workers also reported feeling unsupported when trying to balance mental health and employment. Sixty-eight percent of Gen Z respondents and 61% of millennials said they did not feel supported in managing both.

Deloitte found a related gap in expectations. Forty-two percent of Gen Z respondents believed managers had a responsibility to create a positive and inclusive culture. Only 22% believed managers were actually doing so.

That gap matters because culture is rarely created by slogans. It is shaped through everyday experiences: whether people can ask for help, whether workloads are realistic, whether managers listen, and whether employees feel safe enough to admit that something is becoming too much.

If the people responsible for creating that environment are already exhausted, the problem becomes much harder to solve.

The Research Cannot Tell Us Everything About A Generation

There is an important complication in the burnout conversation: the surveys do not all measure exactly the same thing.Aflac measured at least moderate burnout and found Gen Z ahead of millennials. Seramount measured at least one symptom and found millennials at 77% compared with 72% for Gen Z. A UKG study reported an 83% figure among Gen Z frontline workers, but that sample does not represent the entire generation.

These differences are worth acknowledging because burnout is self-reported and definitions vary between studies. None of these surveys can diagnose an entire generation. Still, a broader pattern remains visible. Younger workers consistently appear among the groups reporting substantial levels of workplace stress and burnout, while other research shows that workplace position can also make a major difference.

Diana Forster, Seramount’s senior director of qualitative research, suggested one possible explanation: “Younger employees joined the workforce in an era when mental health needs were more public and support more prevalent.”

That possibility changes how the numbers can be understood. Younger workers may be experiencing serious pressure, but they may also have more language for describing it than previous generations did.

There is value in recognizing that distinction. Calling an entire generation fragile can prevent us from examining the conditions surrounding them. Listening to what they are actually saying can reveal where those conditions are failing.

Maybe The Real Loss Is The Belief That Effort Leads Somewhere

The most memorable part of Welch’s conversation was not the number of hours she worked. It was the difference between her memory of those years and the uncertainty expressed by the younger freelancer. Welch remembers having hope. The freelancer was questioning whether hope was still a reasonable expectation.

That distinction reaches beyond the workplace. People can endure difficult periods when they believe those periods have a purpose. They can accept uncertainty when they believe stability is possible. They can make sacrifices when they can imagine the life those sacrifices are building.

The research cannot prove that younger generations have less hope than previous ones. It can show that many are dealing with significant workplace stress, financial insecurity, poor sleep, and uncertainty about the future. It can also show that belonging and support are associated with substantially different experiences of burnout.

Perhaps the question worth asking is not whether young people are willing to work hard. Many clearly are. The harder question is whether the world around them is giving that effort a future they can believe in.

When hard work no longer feels connected to a meaningful possibility, telling someone to work harder does little. People need more than endurance. They need evidence that their effort can still lead somewhere.

Loading...