I came across a video the other day called The Work Ethic of Boomers: What Gen Z’s Don’t Get, and I’ll be honest, the title alone made me want to argue with my phone.
Last spring, a kid named Marcus showed up on a job site I was visiting. Twenty-two years old, fresh out of trade school, holding a pair of linesman pliers like they were a TV remote. My buddy Dave, who’d taken him on as an apprentice, looked at me with that face. You know the face. The one that says: I’m too old for this.
Marcus was on his phone during break, which was fine. But then break ended and Marcus kept scrolling. Dave barked at him. Marcus looked up and said, completely calm, “I work better when I get a full reset.” A full reset. On a job site. With live wires ten feet away. I almost said something. Almost. But I bit my tongue, because something about the way he said it, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, made me realize this wasn’t laziness. It was a kid operating from a completely different manual than the one I was handed. And instead of getting loud, I got curious. That part surprised me more than anything Marcus did.
That night I watched the video I linked above. The whole thing. And it got under my skin in a way I wasn’t expecting, not because it was wrong, but because it put words to things I’ve been chewing on for years without knowing how to say them. If you’ve ever had one of those arguments about work ethic that goes nowhere, I’d recommend giving it a watch. It lays out the psychology behind both sides better than I ever could.
But I can give you what I know. And what I know comes from forty years of wiring houses, running a crew, building a business out of a van and a toolbox, and watching three generations of young men and women show up on job sites with completely different ideas about what work is supposed to mean.
So here’s my honest take. Not the sanitized version. The real one.
I didn’t call it hustle culture because it didn’t have a name
When I was 18, I started as an apprentice electrician. I showed up at 6 AM, I did what I was told, I kept my mouth shut, and I went home sore. Nobody asked if I was fulfilled. Nobody checked on my mental health. The deal was simple: you work hard, you get your license, you build a life. And for a long time, that deal held up.
I got my journeyman’s license at 22. Master electrician at 26. I bought a house. I married Donna. We had two boys. The system worked, at least for people like me, in the time I was coming up. So when I hear someone call that “hustle culture” like it’s a disease, my first instinct is to get defensive. Because it feels like they’re saying my whole life was a scam.
But here’s the thing I’ve had to sit with, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit. The deal I got? My sons didn’t get the same one. And the kids coming up now got an even worse version of it. I was able to buy a house on an electrician’s salary. Try doing that today in Boston. The math doesn’t work. So when I catch myself saying “just work hard and you’ll be fine,” I have to stop and ask myself: is that still true, or is that just what was true for me?
I built my whole identity around what I did for a living
Ask me who I am and the first thing out of my mouth, even now, two years into retirement, is “I’m an electrician.” Not “I was.” I am. That tells you something.
For my generation, your job wasn’t just how you paid the bills. It was how people measured you. It was your standing in the neighborhood, your worth at the dinner table, your answer to every small-talk question at every cookout for forty years. When a customer once told me “you’re just an electrician,” it sat in my chest for years. Because if that’s all I was, and someone could dismiss it that easily, then what did any of it mean?
I think younger people have a healthier relationship with this, if I’m being honest. My granddaughter is eleven, and when she talks about what she wants to be when she grows up, she talks about things she wants to do and places she wants to see. She doesn’t talk about a title. And part of me thinks that’s smarter than anything I figured out before I was sixty.
But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting a little. When you’ve spent your whole life letting your work define you, watching someone shrug at that idea feels personal even when it isn’t.
We were told that suffering was the price of admission
I nearly lost a finger on a job site at 24. I blew out my shoulder at 50 from decades of overhead work. I’ve got two bad knees from years on concrete and ladders. And for most of my career, I wore all of that like a badge. You endured things. That was the proof you were serious.
I watched guys come to work sick because calling in meant you were soft. I did it myself more times than I can count. Donna told me once in my late thirties that she felt like a single mother, and I told her I was doing it all for the family. Which was true and also completely missed the point.
There’s something that happens when you sacrifice that much for something. Your brain needs to believe it was worth it. Because if it wasn’t, then what were all those missed dinners and sore mornings for? That video I mentioned gets into the psychology of this, and it hit me right between the eyes. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say this: understanding why I think the way I think didn’t make me agree with Gen Z on everything.
But it made me a lot less angry about it.
Here’s the video link if you’re interested.
Respect meant something different where I come from
On my job sites, you earned respect by showing up every day, keeping your head down, and learning the trade from the bottom up. Seniority mattered. I didn’t question my foreman when I was twenty-two, even when I thought he was wrong. You paid your dues first, and the respect came after.
My son Kevin followed me into electrical work. And when he was coming up, he’d challenge things on site that didn’t make sense to him. Processes, shortcuts, the way we’d always done something. And it drove me crazy. Not because he was wrong. Half the time he had a point. But because in my world, that’s not how a young guy was supposed to carry himself.
I’ve come around on this one more than I expected. I mentored over a dozen apprentices in my career, and the ones who asked good questions turned out better than the ones who just nodded along. I still think there’s value in earning your stripes. But I’ve had to admit that “because I said so” is not a leadership philosophy. It’s just stubbornness with a work shirt on.
We were never taught to talk about what work does to you
I grew up in South Boston in a house where men didn’t cry, didn’t complain, and didn’t talk about feelings. My father came home tired every night from pipefitting and never once said he was stressed. He just sat in his chair, drank his beer, and did it again the next day. That was the template.
So I did the same thing. For decades. I pushed through everything. A rough stretch in my late thirties nearly cost me my marriage because I buried myself in work and shut Donna out completely. I spent most of my life believing that real men don’t talk about their feelings, and I’ll tell you this plainly: unlearning that has been the hardest project of my entire life. Harder than any job I ever wired.
When I hear younger people talk about burnout and mental health and boundaries, my gut reaction is still, if I’m honest, a little dismissive. But then I think about my bad knees, my blown shoulder, the friendships I lost because I was too proud to pick up the phone, the years I spent white-knuckling through stress instead of dealing with it. And I have to ask: who actually got this one right?
Pushing through wasn’t wisdom. It was the only strategy anyone gave us. There’s a real difference, and that difference matters more than most guys my age want to admit.
The part nobody my age wants to say out loud
Here’s the honest truth, and I’m only able to say this because I spent two years in retirement staring at the ceiling before I figured it out. When I went after Gen Z’s approach to work, when I lectured my sons, when I rolled my eyes at somebody talking about work-life balance, it wasn’t always about values. Sometimes it was about fear.
When your whole identity is built on a way of doing things, and the world starts telling you that way is outdated, it doesn’t just feel like disagreement. It feels like you’re disappearing. I went through a rough patch after I retired when I genuinely didn’t know who I was without a toolbelt on. That scared me more than any job site ever did.
I think a lot of the anger people my age aim at younger workers isn’t really about work ethic at all. It’s about relevance. It’s about the terrifying possibility that the rules we followed, the sacrifices we made, the pain we treated as currency, might not mean what we always told ourselves they meant.
What I actually think, with all the noise stripped away
Boomers aren’t wrong for valuing hard work. I built a life, a family, and a business with my hands, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. But Gen Z isn’t wrong for asking whether work should cost you your health, your relationships, and your sense of self. That’s not laziness. That’s a generation looking at what happened to people like me and deciding they want something different.
The argument between our generations goes nowhere because we’re using the same words and meaning completely different things. “Hard work” to me meant showing up at 6 AM and not complaining. “Hard work” to a twenty-five-year-old might mean building something meaningful without destroying yourself in the process. Neither definition is wrong. They’re just shaped by different worlds.
If I could say one thing to both sides, it wouldn’t be “you’re both right.” That’s the coward’s answer. The truth is Gen Z sees something my generation refused to look at. The cost. We paid it and called it character. They looked at the receipt and said no thanks. And I think, more often than not, they’re the ones making the smarter call. That doesn’t erase what I built. But I’m sixty-six years old, and I can feel forty years of “just push through” in every joint in my body. I’m not sure that’s the legacy I want to defend anymore.
Last week Donna asked me to help our granddaughter build a birdhouse. Simple project. Half an hour, tops. I caught myself saying I’d do it Saturday because I had things to take care of in the garage. She’s eleven. She didn’t argue. She just said okay and went back to her coloring book.
I stood in that garage for two hours sorting screws I’d already sorted twice.
I don’t know what that tells you. But it tells me something I’m still not sure how to say out loud.
