I am thirty years old. And in my life, twice, I have witnessed the same scene.
The first time I was just a kid. Sitting at a table with adults, I listened to conversations that had nothing to do with me but stayed with me. They talked about the world falling apart, about how everything used to be different: better, more serious. They talked about young people with a mixture of compassion and contempt: “Youngsters do not want to work. They do not know what it means to make sacrifices. They want everything immediately.”
The second time is now. Same words, same rhetoric, same frustration. Except this time it was not my parents speaking, but my peers. Thirty-year-olds looking at twenty-year-olds with the same gaze their fathers once directed at them.
Does that not seem strange to you? In less than twenty years, we went from being the problem to diagnosing the same problem in others. Always with the same words.
A script that is 2,500 years old
In 1907, Cambridge student Kenneth John Freeman published a dissertation in which he summarized the criticism adults in ancient Greece directed at young people. The summary was so effective that for more than a century it was mistakenly attributed to Socrates: young people love luxury, disrespect their elders, contradict their parents, 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 the same thing about the next. Every single time, for two thousand five hundred years. And every single time, the “hopeless” generation produced inventors, leaders, artists and entrepreneurs who redefined the world.
New generations do not exist
This is the thesis I want to support: new generations, understood as entities radically different from those before them, do not exist. Societies change, technologies evolve, habits transform. But people, in their deepest structure, remain the same. Hunger, fear, ambition, laziness, courage: these are anthropological constants that cross the centuries without undergoing substantial change.
What changes is the context, not human substance. America in the 1970s produced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but most of their peers lived ordinary lives without ever founding anything. Generations are not different. What remains constant is the percentage of people willing to pay the price of their dream: an absolute minority. Defined by attitude, not by year of birth.
The equation of sacrifice
Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM, summarized it in an iconic phrase:
Growth and comfort never coexist.
You have to learn to be comfortable with discomfort. This is not meant to be a poetic concept. It is a mechanical description of how personal progress works.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, expressed the same principle from a different angle: to succeed you necessarily have to 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 everything.
What is uncomfortable, and what is comfortable
There is a concept emerging strongly in conversations among entrepreneurs and high-level leaders.
I call it Comfortable Uncomfortable.
It means this: the most important challenges in 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 through it comfortably. With determination instead of anxiety. With clarity instead of panic.
Jeff Bezos left a vice president position on Wall Street to sell books online from a garage. He approached that choice using what he called a regret minimization strategy: projecting himself to the age of eighty and asking what he would regret more. He would not regret trying and failing, but not trying. The discomfort of the decision became emotional comfort.
This is Comfortable Uncomfortable. Not enduring suffering through gritted teeth: embracing the challenge with the attitude of someone who knows that discomfort is the toll required to reach where they want to go.
The invisible divide between rights and duties
In recent decades, public conversation has focused on individual rights: the right to wellbeing, personal fulfilment, balance between private and professional life. None of these rights is wrong. But they have become the dominant subject, often the only subject.
What has almost disappeared is the concept of duty. The duty to build before demanding, to demonstrate your value before negotiating your compensation. This has created a distorted expectation: that success should be accessible without the mandatory passage through sacrifice. And empty expectations generate frustration: which, in turn, gives rise to the same phrase we have been hearing for two thousand five hundred years.
To those who say “things were better before”
A message for those who, like my peers, have already started saying that phrase.
Things were not better before. They were different.
Nostalgia is a filter that removes the effort and preserves only the results. When we say “things were better before”, we are comparing the best of the past with the average of the present. It is a structurally dishonest comparison. And above all, it is sterile. It builds nothing, teaches no one. It is the rhetorical shortcut of someone who has stopped looking for solutions.
To those who are twenty
A message for those on the other side of this conversation.
The world owes you much 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 put you to sleep.
The difference between those who build something meaningful and those who remain watching has never been talent or luck. It has always been the willingness to move through discomfort without losing direction.
To boards and decision makers
There is one final audience this article addresses, and it is the people sitting on boards of directors, running companies and making strategic decisions about human capital.
Stop talking about generations as though they were monolithic categories.
Within the same age group there are motivated people and disengaged people, exactly as there are within 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 one simple principle: it is Day One. Always. The attitude of Day Two (stability, comfort, bureaucracy) is the beginning of irrelevance. This applies to companies just as much as to people.
The crossroads
In the end, the issue is much less complex than we make it seem.
There has always been, in every era, a crossroads. On one side: complaining, regretting, waiting. On the other: putting yourself on the line, accepting that discomfort is the price of growth.
That is why Comfortable Uncomfortable is a way of being in the world.
Because new generations do not exist. Some choose to be uncomfortable. And do it comfortably.
New Connections (FAQ)
Do young people today have less desire to work hard?
No, and history proves it. From Hesiod in 700 BC to Aristotle, from the Earl of Shaftesbury to English newspapers in 1936, every generation has said the same things about the one that followed. Every time, the “hopeless” generation produced inventors, leaders and entrepreneurs who redefined the world. What changes is the context, not human structure. The percentage of people willing to pay the price of their dream has remained constant over time: an absolute minority, regardless of year of birth.
What does it mean to “be comfortable with discomfort”?
It means facing difficult challenges with determination instead of anxiety, with enthusiasm instead of resignation. It does not mean enduring suffering through gritted teeth: it means embracing discomfort with the awareness that it is the mandatory toll for getting where you want to go. Bezos left a vice president position to sell books from a garage. Musk invested everything while estimating less than a 10% chance of success. Neither describes it as an act of desperation. It was alignment between choice and values: discomfort in circumstances, comfort in identity.
What are young people really looking for in a job, beyond salary and benefits?
To achieve better results, we should stop treating younger employees as monolithic categories. Within the same age group, there are extraordinarily motivated people and completely disengaged people, 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. Organizations that produce excellence reward real merit, offer early responsibility, honest feedback, and productive challenges. They do not protect people from discomfort: they equip them to move through it.
BLISS®
© 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED