From Saving the World To Saving Themselves
The Journey of Gen Z
In May 2013, TIME Magazine called millennials the “Me Me Me Generation.”
I remember that cover well. I was a young millennial working in PR and communications at the time, spending real energy fighting those stereotypes in rooms full of people who believed them. Lazy. Entitled. Narcissistic. Too self-absorbed to build anything that lasted.
The article, written by Joel Stein, actually made the case that millennials would ultimately save us. The subheadline said as much. But nuance doesn’t travel. What stayed in the culture was the cautionary tale of a doomed society at the selfie stick gripped hands of millennials.
We were the problem generation.
Five years later, TIME ran another generational story. This time for our successor:
“Move Over, Millennials: Generation Z Will Change the World.”
The antidote generation had arrived! Civic-minded, purpose-driven, free from the narcissism that supposedly plagued us. They were going to fix climate change, political dysfunction, systemic inequality. We handed them the crown and it. was. heavy.
Then the world happened.
In the decade that followed that cover, Gen Z (the oldest of whom were 21 in 2018) grew up into something that looked nothing like the world that had crowned them.
A pandemic that upended their formidable years, school and early careers. Economic instability that made the “American dream” feel like a fairy tale. School shootings. Political unrest. Social and racial inequality on full display. A housing market so broken that homeownership barely registers as a realistic goal for millions of young people.
It’s turned a generation meant to save the world into a generation forced to save themselves.
And we’re starting to see those impacts show up at work.
The “Quiet Quitting.” The “Conscious Unbossing.”
1 in 10 managers in the U.S. are Gen Z.* And only 6% of Gen Z say reaching a leadership position is their primary career goal,** not to mention, over half of them are avoiding management roles altogether.***
The generation we crowned as world-changers is stepping into management roles in real numbers -- and a significant portion of them are doing it reluctantly, on different terms, or with a completely different definition of what leadership is even supposed to mean.
Worth noting before the “Gen Z are quitters” narrative hardens: Glassdoor’s 2025 Worklife Trends data shows Gen Z is entering management at roughly the same rates as prior generations. They’re showing up. They’re leading. The shift isn’t in the numbers, it’s in the values they carry into the role.
And to me, that’s the far more interesting story.
What They Watched
Gen Z didn’t arrive at this moment in a vacuum.
They watched their parents take the management track. The one that promised influence, growth, and meaningful reward. What many of them got was 60-hour weeks, marginal raises, and the grinding pressure of being squeezed between executive demands above and employee needs below.
Then came 2023 and 2024. Meta cut 21,000 jobs. Google cut 12,000. Amazon cut 27,000. Microsoft eliminated entire layers of middle management and called it “flattening the organization.” The people who went first were not the executives announcing the cuts. They were the middle managers -- the role that, not long ago, was supposed to be the aspiration.
71% of current middle managers describe their work as overwhelming, stressful, and burned out.
Gen Z watched all of this and did something the generations before them didn’t do quite as cleanly: they adjusted the calculation before accepting the deal.
The Values Shift
I see this showing up in my classrooms, my teams, and my research through The Path Project.
In The Path Discovery Tool -- an assessment I’ve developed to help people identify what they actually optimize for (and why), the pattern of values among younger professionals is consistent. They aren’t achievement, leadership, or ambition. They’re joy, autonomy, and balance.
Work-centered values are giving way to life-centered values.
Their drive is real. Their work ethic is real. They’re developing skills at higher rates than millennials. What they’re pushing back on is a specific package -- the one where career success and life success get bundled together and sold as one in the same.
For younger generations, they’re actively working to break those apart. Gen Z is the first generation to name that shift out loud, before signing the offer letter, without apology. And, I’m here for it.
Life Success Is No Longer Tied to Career Success
That sentence used to feel like a provocation. It’s starting to feel like a fact.
What does success mean for a generation that has watched every traditional marker of it -- the title, the promotion, the mortgage, the retirement timeline -- wobble or disappear? They’ve been forced to build a different answer. One where work is part of life, a meaningful part, but the vehicle -- not the destination.
And the rest of us are starting to follow.
Combine a generation of young professionals quietly redefining what success looks like with a wave of burnt out Gen Xers and Millennials questioning their careers after 15, 20, 25 years -- and you may just have the recipe for saving the world after all.
*Glassdoor Worklife Trends 2025
**Deloitte 2025 Gen Z & Millennial Survey
***Robert Walters “Conscious Unbossing” Report
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Absolutely loved this article!