I am thirty. And twice in my life I have witnessed the same, identical scene.
The first time, I was just a boy. Sitting at a table of adults, I listened to conversations that had nothing to do with me but stayed with me. They talked about a world going to pieces, about how everything used to be different: better, more serious. They talked about young people with a mix of pity and contempt: “They don’t want to work. They don’t know what sacrifice means. They want everything now.”
The second time is now. Same words, same rhetoric, same frustration. Only this time it was not my parents speaking, but my peers. Thirty-somethings looking at twenty-somethings the way their fathers once looked at them.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd? In less than twenty years, we have gone from being the problem to diagnosing the same problem in others. Always in the same, identical words.
A 2,500-year-old script
In 1907, Cambridge student Kenneth John Freeman published a dissertation summarising the criticisms that adults in ancient Greece levelled at the young. The summary was so effective that for over a century it was wrongly attributed to Socrates: the young love luxury, show disrespect for their elders, contradict their parents, and chatter instead of working.
Four hundred years before Christ, adults said the same things about young people that we say today. Word for word. Hesiod, around 700 BC, wrote that he had no hope for the future of humanity because the youth of his time were unbearable.
The truth is that every generation has said exactly the same thing about the next. Every single time, for two and a half thousand years. And every single time, the “hopeless” generation has produced inventors, leaders, artists and entrepreneurs who redefined the world.
New generations do not exist
This is the thesis I want to defend: new generations, understood as entities radically different from those before them, do not exist. What exists are societies that change, technologies that evolve, habits that transform. But people, in their deeper structure, remain the same. Hunger, fear, ambition, laziness, courage: these are anthropological constants that cross the centuries without undergoing any substantial change.
What changes is the context, not human substance. 1970s America gave birth to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, yet most of their peers lived ordinary lives without ever founding anything. It is not generations that differ. What stays constant is the share of people willing to pay the price of their own dream: a small minority. Defined by attitude, not by year of birth.
The sacrifice equation
Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, summed it up in an iconic phrase:
Growth and comfort never coexist.
You have to learn to be comfortable with discomfort. This is not meant as a poetic idea. It is a mechanical description of how personal progress works.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has expressed the same principle from a different angle: to succeed you must necessarily be uncomfortable, because if you stay in your comfort zone you will not develop the resilience needed to face the next challenge.
And this brings us to the heart of it all.
What is uncomfortable, and what is comfortable
There is a concept emerging strongly in conversations among entrepreneurs and senior leaders.
I call it Scomodo Comodo.
What it means is this: the most important challenges of your life will inevitably be uncomfortable. Moving to another country, learning a new language, leaving a secure job to build something of your own. The point is not to avoid discomfort. The point is to live it comfortably. With determination instead of anxiety. With clarity instead of panic.
Jeff Bezos left a vice-president role on Wall Street to sell books online from a garage. He approached that choice with what he called a regret minimisation framework: projecting himself to the age of eighty and asking what he would regret most. He would not regret having tried and failed. He would regret not having tried. The discomfort of the choice became emotional comfort.
This is Scomodo Comodo. Not enduring suffering through gritted teeth, but embracing the challenge with the attitude of someone who knows that discomfort is the toll for getting where they want to go.
The invisible rift between rights and duties
In recent decades, public debate has focused on individual rights: the right to wellbeing, to personal fulfilment, to a balance between private and professional life. None of these rights is wrong. But they have become the dominant theme, often the only one.
What has almost disappeared is the concept of duty. The duty to build before demanding, to prove one’s worth before negotiating one’s pay. This has created a distorted expectation: that success should be attainable without the unavoidable passage through sacrifice. And empty expectations breed frustration, which in turn gives rise to the very phrase we have been hearing for two and a half thousand years.
To those who say “it was better before”
A message for those who, like my peers, have already started saying that phrase.
It wasn’t better before. It was different.
Nostalgia is a filter that removes the effort and keeps only the results. When we say “it was better before”, we are comparing the best of the past with the average of the present. It is a structurally dishonest comparison. Above all, it is sterile. It builds nothing and shapes no one. It is the rhetorical shortcut of those who have stopped looking for solutions.
To those in their twenties
A message for those on the other side of this argument.
The world owes you far less than you think. Not because you have no value, but because value is not something you possess by birthright. It is built choice after choice, sacrifice after sacrifice. Learn a language you do not need today but will need tomorrow. Accept responsibilities that frighten you. Say no to comforts that lull you to sleep.
The difference between those who build something meaningful and those who stand by and watch has never been talent or luck. It has always been the willingness to go through discomfort without losing their bearings.
To boards and decision-makers
There is one last audience this article addresses: the people who sit on boards, who run companies and who make strategic decisions about human capital.
Stop talking about generations as if they were monolithic categories.
Within the same age group, motivated people coexist with disengaged ones, exactly as in yours. The question is not “how do we manage young people?” but “how do we create environments in which those who are hungry can express themselves?”
Bezos built Amazon’s culture around a simple principle: it is Day One. Always. The Day Two mindset, one of stability, comfort and bureaucracy, is the prelude to irrelevance. This applies to companies as much as to people.
The crossroads
In the end, the matter is far less complex than we make it seem.
Always, in every era, there has been a crossroads. On one side, complaining, regretting, waiting. On the other, putting yourself on the line and accepting that discomfort is the price of growth.
That is why Scomodo Comodo is a way of being in the world.
Because new generations do not exist. There are only those who choose to be uncomfortable. And they do it comfortably.
New Connections (FAQ)
Are young people today less willing to work hard?
No, and history proves it. From Hesiod in 700 BC to Aristotle, from the Earl of Shaftesbury to the English newspapers of 1936, every generation has said exactly the same things about the next. And every time, the “hopeless” generation produced inventors, leaders and entrepreneurs who redefined the world. What changes is the context, not human nature. The share of people willing to pay the price of their own dream has stayed constant over time: a small minority, regardless of year of birth.
What does “being comfortable with discomfort” mean?
It means facing difficult challenges with determination rather than anxiety, with enthusiasm rather than resignation. It is not enduring suffering through gritted teeth: it is embracing discomfort in the knowledge that it is the unavoidable toll for getting where you want to go. Bezos left a vice-president role to sell books from a garage. Musk invested everything while putting his chances of success at under 10%. Neither describes it as an act of desperation. It was alignment between choice and values: discomfort in circumstance, comfort in identity.
What do young people really look for in a job, beyond salary and benefits?
To achieve better results, we should stop treating new recruits as monolithic categories. Within the same age group, extraordinarily motivated people coexist with completely disengaged ones, exactly as in any other. The right question is not how to manage young people, but how to build environments in which those who are hungry can express themselves. Organisations that produce excellence reward real merit, offer early responsibility, honest feedback and productive challenges. They do not shield people from discomfort: they equip them to get through it.
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