Only 32 percent of Gen Z believe the global economy will improve in the next year, and fewer than three in ten expect the social or political climate to get better, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey. For a generation that came of age amid recession, a pandemic, and the accelerating effects of climate change, optimism has become a scarce resource. Yet despite that uncertainty—or perhaps because of it—Gen Z has been branded lazy.
The label circulates everywhere: in workplace think pieces, TikTok debates about “quiet quitting,” and casual remarks from older colleagues who insist that “young people just don’t want to work.” But behind the stereotype lies a more complicated reality—one shaped by new technologies, a long history of generational stereotyping, mounting stress about existential uncertainties, unstable economies, the looming weight of the climate crisis, and a growing openness about mental health that older generations often mistake for weakness.
For Lehua Norris ‘28, a second-year environmental history major at Yale University, the accusation feels personal. “I feel like that stereotype comes from older generations who are unable to fully comprehend the new technologies, the new ways that newer generations organize their lives,” she said.
Seen through Professor Rebecca Bigler’s lens, Norris’s frustration becomes part of a much older pattern: every generation mistakes new forms of work for a lack of work altogether.
Norris has observed that older relatives equate physical labor and in-person jobs with discipline. Alternatively, her peers manage responsibilities through digital platforms, budgeting apps, shared documents, and remote learning systems.
“Older people perceive work as something more hands-on,” she explained. “You’re either going into an office, or you’re showing up to your job. It’s kind of different now, especially after COVID. A lot of employees have the ability to go to their job online. I think a lot of older people perceive that as being lazy.”
To Norris, those assumptions are more than misunderstandings; they can be barriers. The same people likely to employ her one day may still define productivity through outdated terms. “I would hate for people to assume that the way I conduct my life—mostly through technology, or if I choose to have a remote job—means I’m lazy by any means, because that’s just not who I am,” she said. For her, technology is less a distraction than a lifeline.
The tension she describes—the gap between perception and reality—raises a larger question: Where does the perception of a “lazy generation” come from, and why does it persist even as the working world transforms?
According to Professor Bigler, a developmental psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, these generational judgments are a predictable feature of social life. Bigler, whose research examines how stereotyping and prejudice take shape, explained that such labels act as mental shortcuts when people try to understand rapid cultural change.
“Children don’t really stereotype things they can’t see,” Bigler said. “They notice race, gender, and age—categories made visible in the people around them.” But “generation,” she added, is invisible. It becomes meaningful only later, when people begin to attach moral weight to the behaviors of different age groups.
The accusation itself is hardly new, inherited by each generation, akin to a hand-me-down. Members of the Silent Generation were often dismissed as “complacent” or overly obedient by younger boomers who saw themselves as challengers of the status quo. In the 1960s, baby boomers were scolded for abandoning “real work” in favor of protest and counterculture. In the 1990s, Generation X was derided as cynical slackers. In recent memory, Millennials were accused of being “entitled” and portrayed as a generation unwilling to grow up. Now, the cycle continues with Gen Z.
Once those judgments form, they stick. “Generational labels exacerbate stereotyping,” Bigler said. “Instead of appreciating differences within each group, people lean on easy generalizations; Boomers are traditional, Millennials are entitled, Gen Z is lazy.” Her findings show how rigid these constructs are. Even when people encounter clear contradictions, they often ignore them.
“People resist changing their attitudes,” she noted. “It’s easier not to revise your beliefs, even when the evidence is right in front of you.”
This inertia explains why the “lazy Gen Z” trope endures despite mounting evidence of structural stress—rising living costs, digital overload, and job insecurity. Each time an older manager sees a younger employee log off at five o’clock, the act of setting a boundary is mistaken for a lack of ambition, even if the work is already done. Moments like these don’t create the stereotype, but they help older generations reinforce it as they fold these everyday choices into a narrative of laziness.
If stereotypes endure because they are easier to hold than to question, the “lazy” label sticks because it conveniently ignores context. The world Gen Z has inherited bears little resemblance to the one that shaped its critics.
Professor Bigler explained that stereotypes don’t just emerge—they survive because they offer psychological comfort. “Stereotypes are sticky not because they’re accurate but because they’re comfortable,” she said. “People don’t have to confront how much the world has changed if they can say the problem is just that young people don’t work hard.” Generational judgments, in other words, often say more about the people holding them than about those being judged. By simplifying complex social change into a moral failing, older generations avoid grappling with structural instability: stagnant wages, housing shortages, political unrest, and climate fear.
For Lehua Norris, the misalignment between perception and reality feels like a weight on her shoulders. “There’s this sense that if you’re tired or struggling, it must mean you’re not working hard enough,” she said. “But that doesn’t make sense when you look at what we’re actually dealing with.” Fatigue is not a lack of work ethic, she added, but a symptom of trying to function in a world defined by crisis.
This isn’t just personal exhaustion—it’s generational exhaustion. Many students describe a constant sense of being “on,” of navigating shrinking opportunities while being told their stress is just an excuse. What some interpret as disengagement, many of these students view as a survival strategy. With rising living costs, a competitive job market, and growing burnout, caution has replaced complacency.
For students like Norris, the economic landscape feels more precarious than promising. Wages lag behind inflation, housing costs continue to climb, and student debt in the United States now exceeds $1.7 trillion. Financial stability—the reward that older generations were told would follow hard work—feels out of reach. “I think it’s more about what’s available to us,” Norris said. “The systems we’re working within aren’t the same ones that existed for our parents.”
These financial pressures don’t just create strain—they reshape the map of possibility. Rising housing costs make independent living harder to attain. Entry-level wages often can not support the cost of basic needs in many cities. And student loan debt, once framed as a path to a better future, now dictates everything from where young people live to what kinds of jobs they can afford to pursue.
Instead of being a stepping stone, debt and cost of living function like gatekeepers, narrowing the paths Gen Z can realistically take. Sam Gunawardena, a sophomore at California State University Long Beach, added that student loans and the lack of federal support have forced many to make pragmatic career choices. “Student loan debt and lack of federal funding also make people try to pick careers with high return on investment rather than actual passions,” he said.
The financial pressures young people face are not the only forces shaping their choices. Looming alongside them is another reality that is just as immediate: the climate crisis.
For many young people, climate change is not a distant abstraction—it is an everyday weight. Two-thirds of Gen Z respondents in Deloitte’s 2025 global survey said they’d felt worried or anxious about the environment in the past month. Many lived through events like record heat waves, fires, or flooding, which have shaped how they imagine their futures.
For some, that anxiety translates into shifting career ambitions. Gunawardena described how “a lot of people I know were swayed away from going into conservation or environmental fields because of the horrors.” These horrors encompass the daily barrage of images and reports of wildfires, disappearing coastlines, polluted water, mass extinctions, and governments failing to act at the scale the crisis demands. For many, entering environmental work does not feel like a path to hope—it feels like stepping into a storm they did not create.
For Norris, that description feels familiar. As an environmental history major, she studies the very crisis her generation will inherit. “It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when I’m older,” she said. Learning about rising sea levels and unstable ecosystems is not just coursework—it is a preview of the future she’ll live in.
That weight does not just shape individual career paths; it alters the emotional terrain of an entire generation. Students increasingly factor climate risk into major decisions—where to live, whether to have children, what industries to work in. Environmental concern isn’t a niche issue for Gen Z—it’s a defining feature of their adulthood.
The uncertainty tied to climate change feeds into a wider current of stress, anxiety, and burnout—feelings that, rather than being taken seriously, are often reduced to a single, dismissive word: lazy.
Across campuses, conversations about mental health have become as common as discussions about classes or internships. Unlike previous generations, many young people are not hiding their struggles behind silence or stoicism. They’re naming them. They’re talking about therapy, rest, burnout, and boundaries in new ways—and not everyone understands that shift.
Gunawardena put it plainly, “I think this is often misunderstood as laziness because prior generations’ lives often revolved around their job. Gen Z—in my experience—prioritizes hobbies and a well-rounded life. Mental health is also huge to Gen Z, and we don’t have the same attitude of ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ or ‘sucking it up.’”
Others see the same pressures feeding into broader disillusionment. Belle Vartanian, a senior at Purdue University majoring in Psychology and Law and Society, believes older generations misread Gen Z’s realism as apathy. “I think that older generations have a hard time understanding that times are different now–there’s a greater emphasis on self-expression– which affects the way they view us,” she said. “ I think that they call us lazy because they don’t understand that we are prioritizing our own mental health.”
That uncertainty—the collision of climate instability, economic precarity, and emotional fatigue— is something Professor Bhagavatula, who teaches psychology at California State University Long Beach, encounters often. With over two decades of experience as an educator and trauma-informed researcher, she focuses on how cultural heritage and community frameworks can build resilience and care.“They come in with these negative emotions, not about the job itself, but about things like climate change, the debt they’re carrying, political instability, inequality,” she said. Entering adulthood, she explained, can feel like “moving into an apartment still filled with a previous tenant’s trash.”
Professor Bhagavatula sees that kind of anxiety as a rational response to overlapping crises. “The hopelessness is not inevitable,” she emphasized, “but unless we reframe how we make sense of these negative emotions, it’s easy for them to feel permanent.”
When young people internalize economic or environmental instability as personal shortcomings, the result can look like apathy from the outside. In reality, it’s closer to grief—a mourning for futures that feel uncertain or already foreclosed. It’s not just about what’s happening now, but about the imagined versions of adulthood—stable jobs, affordable homes, a livable planet—that no longer feel guaranteed.
For Norris and her peers, the grief for forgone dreams becomes part of their identity. Their skepticism about career ladders or homeownership is not rooted in entitlement but experience. They have watched the same institutions that promised stability falter under pressure. To them, recalibrating ambition is not avoidance—it’s adaptation.
As Professor Bhagavatula points out, adaptation may be the very thing keeping this generation afloat. If adaptation is Gen Z’s defining strength, technology is often its language. Yet it’s also one of the main reasons the generation is misunderstood. The same tools that facilitate flexibility, stress management, and balance are the ones that make young people appear disengaged to outsiders.
Mariana Barr, a sophomore engineering student at Scripps College, said. “I believe that this misinterpretation is because of the norms set by previous generations, which are the problematic ones. Dedicating one’s life to their job isn’t necessary or healthy.” That rejection of older norms isn’t about working less, but working differently—an idea that resonates strongly among her peers.
Sofia Arzola, also a student at Scripps College, added, “I do think it’s misunderstood as laziness. A lot of older generations never had a clear understanding of what ‘boundaries’ should look like, especially in a work environment. Just because I work a certain number of hours doesn’t mean the work I end up completing isn’t quality work. I think a lot of Gen Z focuses on being more efficient with their time.”
Taken together, these perspectives reveal a subtle cultural shift. Where previous generations equated effort with endurance, Gen Z is redefining it as sustainability.
Professor Bhagavatula’s mention of reframing also reflects the view that small acts of self-protection can be forms of resilience. When she encourages students to recognize stress as structural rather than personal, many begin to view rest not as avoidance but as a necessary condition for growth.
In that sense, boundaries are not walls—they’re the scaffolding that keeps this generation standing. If boundaries are Gen Z’s way of protecting themselves, the stereotypes that surround them often make that protection harder to maintain.
According to Professor Bhagavatula, that quiet pressure is more than social discomfort—it’s psychological. “Knowledge of a cultural stereotype can result in greater anxiety when we have setbacks, and that anxiety can end up confirming the stereotype,” she said. “When you’ve internalized the idea that your generation is lazy,” she continued, “normal fatigue or hesitation can feel like failure.”
For Norris, that feeling is all too familiar. “It’s just really taxing to be online all the time,” she said. “Parents and older colleagues may see screens as leisure, but for us they’re also how we study and work.”
That reframing is also visible in how Norris and her peers define self-care. What earlier generations might see as withdrawal—logging off at five, taking a mental health day—many young workers view as maintenance. Protecting time and mental energy isn’t a refusal to work; it’s how they make work sustainable.
Recognizing the weight of a stereotype is only the first step; the harder task is to live beyond it. For many in Gen Z, that means redefining what ambition looks like in an era where overwork no longer guarantees stability—or happiness.
“I don’t think setting that boundary is lazy whatsoever,” Norris said. “That just ensures there is good communication between the worker and the employer, and that the worker remains protected from any abuses.”
Professor Bigler noted that no generation is monolithic. To label millions of young people with a single adjective, she said, erases the creativity, adaptability, and resilience that define them.
Professor Bhagavatula sees this evolution as both cultural and psychological progress. “When a culture begins to treat rest as a right rather than a privilege,” she said, “that’s growth. It’s the opposite of laziness.”
What older critics interpret as a lack of drive is, in reality, an insistence on balance—a new kind of discipline built around self-awareness rather than self-sacrifice.
If redefining ambition is Gen Z’s quiet revolution, its power lies in the future possibilities. The same students and young professionals once dismissed as unmotivated are building a model of work that values well-being as much as output—and in doing so, they may be rewriting what success looks like for everyone.
For Norris, that cultural shift offers a measure of reassurance. “It just is, again, simply a clash of definitions between generations,” she said.
As Professors Bigler and Bhagavatula both observed, stereotypes may linger, but they can evolve. Bigler reminds us that each generation eventually outgrows the caricatures cast upon it, while Bhagavatula sees resilience in the act of reframing exhaustion as care.
Taken together, their insights reveal a generation that has learned to find hope in realism. Gen Z is not lazy—they’re strategic, pragmatic, and quietly radical in how they refuse to measure their worth solely through productivity.
As the world they inherit grows more uncertain, their insistence on balance may prove less a retreat and more a blueprint for what comes next. By centering mental health, equity, and sustainability, they are not stepping away from work—they are redefining it as something more humane and intentional.