Generational Conflict in the Workforce: Sunday musings…11/1/2026
1) Candy. Pro tip for Halloween: always buy candy that you don’t eat.
2) Gratitude. “Gratitude is like wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk.” Rumi
What this 13th Century poet and mystic was suggesting was to give oneself fully and gleefully to the joys of gratitude. I quite like this.
3) EHR. Could this really be true? Today’s Sunday paper in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer, had an article stating that the VA medical system has increased the efficiency with which it cares for our nations military veterans with a proprietary Electronic Health Record (EHR or EMR). Is it really possible that the health system that has defined inefficiency in health care has cracked this code?
Please let this be true. Please let this not be simply an improvement over the abysmal but a true slap in the face to every commercially available system (EPIC, Cerner, et al).
This could turn out to be the only good thing that could come to medicine from Washington if it is true and it we could all have it.
4) Club. Last weekend the WSJ had an article on the so-called “new” country club. Traditional clubs are supposedly struggling to fill their rolls because they lack activities and spaces that include the wives and children of the male members. Gone are the members’ lounges and the members-only spaces, replaced with multiple lounges/bars/restaurants geared toward family members whether or not they play golf.
For that matter, gone are the blank checks for the golf courses and all that comes with them. Money that would traditionally be spent on a larger chipping green or a Par-3 course now goes to larger resort-style pools and multi-sport racquet facilities.
The cigar bar is now a nursery.
Honestly, this is progress. Everything about this trend, with the exception of the still astronomical entry fees and monthly dues, is superior to the rather myopic design of the traditional country club. I’ve noted many times that my parents social life revolved around their club; it was an early example of this new trend all the way back in the ’70’s. If there must be country clubs I sincerely hope this is the model that becomes the norm.
In other news, the average initiation fee to join the remaining traditional golf clubs in major metropolitan regions is now said to be >$200,000. La plus ca change…
5) Generation. A couple weeks ago there was an op-ed in the WSJ by Todd Kashdan, a psychology prof at George Mason, which basically takes old guys like me who say that younger workers have a totally warped sense of what it means to go to work, and that this sense is different from what we Boomers thought and did at the same age. While he doesn’t come out and say it, he is also saying that Millennials and Gen Z’s who say that their experiences are uniquely different from those of their Gen X and and Boomer bosses are equally inaccurate.
The data are fascinating.
It turns out that Baby Boomers were just as insubordinate at work as both Gen Z and Millennials. We changed jobs just as frequently, and we protested by walking off those jobs with the same frequency as well. Our Greatest Generation bosses described us as narcissists with a poor work ethic. Sounds kinda familiar if you are either a Baby Boomer boss or a Mellennial/GenZ’er employed or managed by one, eh? This one’s on us my fellow Boomers; we did pretty much and had pretty much the same attitudes when we were in our first 2 or 3 jobs as our young employees do now. We stayed with our jobs for the same amount of time and had the same number of jobs at the same stage. We were no more or less drawn to altruistic work than today’s young workers, but the young of today are markedly more interested in leisure time and activities than we were at the same age.
Ah, there it is. There’s the rub.
The young of today are expressly intolerant of what Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, and Gen X considered nothing more or less than stage of life problems/issues/inconveniences during launch phase. Cramming 4 or 5 bodies into a 3 bedroom apartment? What’s the big deal…everyone did that. 60 hours in the office every week and only 2 weeks of vacation? Standard issue first job. Are you on X/Twitter? Take a look at some of Mark Cuban’s recent responses to younger members of the workforce and their complaints about how much harder it is today than back “in the day”. Like Boomer and Gen X bosses who think their charges are somehow different from them when they were young in their careers, today’s young workers have no meaningful understanding of how similar their experiences are with those of their bosses.
Honestly I can’t tell if Cuban is being sarcastic or sympathetic in his response. 5 bodies in a 3 bedroom apartment at the inflation adjusted same-rate rent. Eating crappy take-out, canned and frozen food from the discount stores. I remember all of that. Beth and I only ate meat twice a week. Not because we were ahead of the health curve on the whole plant protein thing, but because we couldn’t afford to eat meat. My non-medical buddies all lived the same life. We hit up every Happy Hour buffet we could find, existing on over-cooked wings and Swedish meatballs for the $1.00 Coors Light entry fee. Remember Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in The Wedding Crashers? Yah, my buddies and I may or may not have attended 40+ wedding receptions in our quest to be fed on the weekend in med school.
And how about the whole “things are so much harder now” than they were “back in the day” thing? Yah…about that. I accept that there are some pretty standard issue things that exist today that weren’t on our list of monthly bills in the 80’s and ’90’s. Stuff like cell phones and the basic app universe young’uns “need” now. I’ll grant that this is different. But if you do the math and adjust for inflation in all things including salaries that stuff is, what, $25/month? Sorry, I’m not buying it. In 2026 inflation is at the excruciating level of 3.4%, unemployment is <6%, and the 30 yr. fixed mortgage is around 7%. When Cuban (and I) was a young member of the working force in the 1980’s inflation was 15%, unemployment was almost 10%, and my first mortgage in 1990 was %11.5%.
But sure, tell me how much worse it is now.
Listen, being young and out on your own is hard. It’s always been hard. It was hard for my parents’ generation and it was hard for mine. There’s a certain “pay your dues” aspect to being on the bottom of the ladder that really doesn’t look a whole lot different to the folks in my generation when we look at the young people who work for us. Kinda like it didn’t seem all that different when our Greatest Generation parents looked at our Boomer experiences. It was hard for them. It was hard for us.
The generations may or may not be different. As Kashdan would certainly say, it is not for the older generations to say. But the experiences of the lived lives of each generation are objectively the same. What is different is the interpretation of that experience.
Will today’s young employee rise to their today’s reality as their bosses and their bosses’ bosses did?
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2026 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.