Millennials and the Managed Collapse of Work

Millennials were prepared for a very specific kind of life.

We were told — explicitly and implicitly — that knowledge work was the only sustainable future. Public high schools were defunded. Vocational programs disappeared. Trades were reframed as fallback options rather than skilled, dignified paths. From middle school on, competition was normalized: grades, testing, extracurriculars, leadership. The goal was clear. Get into the right college. Earn the right degree. Then — and only then — could you participate safely in the economy.

That degree, increasingly, required astronomical debt. Undergraduate education became a prerequisite not for employment, but for further credentialing. Professional and vocational degrees stacked on top of one another, even as the people occupying senior roles — CEOs, tenured academics, institutional leaders — simply refused to retire. The ladder didn’t move. It just got taller.

Still, many of us believed. We internalized the logic. We identified with our work. We learned that physical labor was something to escape, not respect. That care work was invisible. That worth was cognitive, not material. If we worked hard enough, got good enough, built the right skill set, there would be a place for us — and it would pay enough to live sustainably.

That belief turned out to be a lie.

What replaced it wasn’t a meritocracy, but a performance economy. In academia, I learned that you were either good or you weren’t. Mentorship mattered, but your work still had to stand. In corporate life, I learned something else entirely: there are people who work to be good, and people who work to look good. These are not the same goal. And there is a third category — people who are neither good nor convincing, who survive by offloading their failures onto others and ensuring no one looks too closely at their own incompetence.

Many of us assumed that being genuinely good — producing value, thinking strategically, solving real problems — would be recognized and rewarded. Instead, we found ourselves in systems optimized for optics, risk avoidance, and internal politics. Work expanded to fill all available mental space. “Unlimited PTO” arrived alongside the expectation of constant availability. We took work home not because it mattered, but because our identities were fused to it — even as we understood we were employees without ownership. We wanted to own our work and wanted to be worthy of our teammates. And yet we gained no real security to compensate for the sacrifice.

At the same time, the material world didn’t disappear. People still needed housing, food, care, transportation. Physical labor didn’t vanish — it was just stripped of dignity and financial value. Knowledge workers were floated just high enough above precarity to keep the system stable, while being told they were lucky not to be doing “that kind” of work.

Now, in our forties, the floor has dropped out.

AI speculation props up the imaginary money world while actively destabilizing the labor market. Skills that took decades to acquire are suddenly framed as obsolete. Jobs disappear not because the work is unnecessary, but because the returns are being captured elsewhere. The pyramid stays intact by changing the conditions for just enough people to prevent revolt.

Many millennials were told this was fine — because we would inherit. We tolerated underpayment, instability, and burnout on the assumption that family wealth would close the gap. But that, too, is a mirage. For-profit healthcare and insurance systems are already positioned to extract the majority of that wealth during aging and end-of-life care. What parents think they will leave and what their children will receive are not the same number.

Gen Z sees this more clearly. Many are opting out — of career ladders, of institutional loyalty, of the fiction that work will save them. They’re not wrong. But opting out doesn’t redesign education. It doesn’t stabilize labor markets. It doesn’t solve elder care, climate collapse, or the material limits of human bodies.

The problem is not that millennials failed to adapt.

The problem is that we were trained — deliberately — for a labor system that could not and did not keep its promises.

Until we stop treating this as a personal disappointment instead of a structural bait-and-switch, we will keep blaming people for responding rationally to a broken deal.