There’s a video circulating from the Substacker Amie McNee that opens with a line most people my age have muttered at some point, usually in a kitchen, usually holding a cup of something they’re about to let go cold. Oh, kids these days, all they want to do is be YouTubers and they want to live stream and they want to be influencers.
She says it in the voice we use when we’re warming up to complain. And then she doesn’t complain. She pivots, hard, and makes a claim that took me a few seconds to absorb: she deeply respects it. Because when a kid says they want to be a creator, they’re not saying they want to avoid work. They’re saying they want a life where being themselves is enough to eat.
You can watch her note here. It’s about ninety seconds. That’s roughly the amount of time it took me to recognise I was looking at a clean, unsentimental version of an argument I’d been circling for about thirty years.
I want to sit with that for a while, because Amie is pointing at something most of the discourse around young people and work is too embarrassed to examine in good light.
The argument nobody wants to lose
The boomer complaint runs on a very simple engine. They don’t want to work like we did. The implied second half of the sentence is and that’s a character flaw. Laziness. Entitlement. Softness. The usual list, delivered with the gravity of a judge handing down sentence while the judge’s own shoes are on fire.
I was born in 1958. I’ve been inside the machine Amie is describing for long enough to know how it looks from both sides of the glass. From about 2005 I was one of Australia’s leading social media evangelists — a job description that, with the benefit of twenty years’ distance, reads like weather forecaster for a hurricane I was helping organise. I told companies the future of work was going to be different, that people would want meaning, that the old command-and-control model was on borrowed time. I believed it. I was also, in parallel, burning myself to a fine ash trying to deliver on it inside structures that had no intention of changing. The hurricane blew through me first.
So when I hear someone my age complaining that the kids don’t want what we had, I’m not automatically on the side of the complainers. I watched what we had. I watched what it did to us. I watched what it did to our kids while we were doing it.
The generational complaint, I keep thinking, is a displaced grief wearing a cardigan.
What the kids actually saw
The kids grew up watching their parents be metabolised by jobs that didn’t love them back. They saw mum come home too tired to talk. They saw dad check his phone through dinner with the devotion of a man monitoring his own pacemaker. They watched the slow, inch-by-inch withdrawal of presence that happens when a person is being ground down by work that demands everything and returns very little of what actually matters.
Somewhere around 2008, the structure shifted under everyone’s feet. The implicit deal my generation grew up with—show up, work hard, get a career, retire with something—got quietly replaced with the gig economy. Not jobs, gigs. Not careers, portfolios. Not employers, platforms. The companies that used to at least pretend to be communities of practice became logistics networks for human attention, with about as much interest in the humans as a distribution warehouse has in the individual histories of its pallets.
The kids watched this too. They watched their parents lose one of the few compensations for selling their days. The security evaporated. The pay kept failing to catch up. The productivity gains went somewhere else entirely.
This isn’t a vibe. The Economic Policy Institute’s figures on the United States are stark: net productivity grew 59.7% from 1979 to 2019 while a typical worker’s compensation grew by 15.8%. Workers produced more. They did not get paid more. Where did the money go? Up. Into the top decile of earners, and into capital. The implicit promise that hard work would be fairly rewarded dissolved sometime in the Carter administration, and nobody had the decency to issue a retraction.
Australia’s numbers point the same direction. The specifics differ but the shape is the same. Productivity up. Wages stagnant or sliding in real terms. Housing priced so far out of reach of a median wage earner that the whole concept of owning a home has taken on the mythological quality of a unicorn with good credit. Job security replaced with the gentle fiction of career agility.
The kids are not confused. They can read the situation. They are responding to the information available.
What Amie is actually saying
The part of her video that landed hardest for me was this: people are done. Not angry, not agitating, not drafting reform proposals over zoom. Done. The kind of done you feel in your bones when you’ve realised a system cannot deliver what it promised and has no intention of trying.
What Amie names next matters, because it isn’t what the cynics assume. The kids aren’t trying to escape work. They’re trying to escape a very specific configuration of work—the one where you trade your waking hours for wages that don’t quite cover your life, where the labour itself is alienated from anything you value, where the output of your effort goes to someone you’ll never meet and who, if you ever did meet them, would probably not recognise you from the other line items on the spreadsheet.
When a kid says I want to be a YouTuber, Amie hears: I want to create, I want to connect, I want to be witnessed, and I want that to be enough to sustain my life.
She’s not wrong. She’s describing the breakdown of something I spent a good chunk of my academic life studying, and it has a name.
The psychological contract
In 1998 I published a paper in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology with Dr Lynne Millward, then at the University of Surrey. We’d spent my Honours year building and validating an instrument called the Psychological Contract Scale. Lynne has since passed, and I still miss her, but the scale is stubbornly alive—last time I checked it had 449 citations and was being actively deployed by researchers as recently as 2025. That’s roughly the academic equivalent of a pop song still being covered twenty-seven years after release, except the cover artists are all wearing lab coats and nobody has ever streamed it on Spotify.
I mention this not to wave a CV around but because the durability tells you something important about the construct. Researchers keep coming back to it because the thing it measures keeps happening.
The psychological contract is the implicit deal between employer and employee. Not the written contract—that’s the legal document, and it covers almost none of what actually matters. The psychological contract is the set of unwritten expectations both parties bring to the relationship. You’ll show up, work hard, be loyal, go the extra mile. In return, we’ll pay you fairly, invest in your development, keep you secure, promote you when you earn it, look after you when things get tough. Nobody signs this. Everybody assumes it. It’s the handshake under the handshake.
The construct was developed in its modern form by Denise Rousseau in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The research literature on it is now the size of a small library wing. The core finding is consistent and uncomfortable. When the psychological contract is honoured, people invest discretionary effort, stay engaged, and weather hard periods with surprising grace. When it’s breached, they disengage, withdraw, or exit. And—critically—when the breach is perceived as a violation rather than a simple renegotiation, the damage is durable. Trust, once broken at this level, doesn’t rebuild easily. People don’t just leave the job. They leave the category of worker the old deal described.
Now layer that onto what’s happened since the late 1970s. The old psychological contract—security, development, loyalty for loyalty—wasn’t formally cancelled. Nothing so honest. It was quietly hollowed out, like a termite-infested beam that still looks like a beam until someone leans on it. By the 2000s the written contract and the psychological one had diverged so far that the gap itself became the lived experience of work. You were expected to perform as if the old deal was still operating while being paid and treated as if it wasn’t. Performance of loyalty without the reciprocal obligation. The classic violation pattern, dressed in HR-branded language about being part of the family, which in hindsight reads like a hostage note.
My generation mostly absorbed this and kept going. We had too much sunk cost to rebel. The mortgage does not care about your structural critique of late capitalism. The kids watched us absorb it. They’re not going to.
What Amie is describing—the done-ness, the refusal, the creator instinct—isn’t a generational quirk. It’s what the literature predicts happens after large-scale perceived violation of the psychological contract. You don’t get reform. You get withdrawal. You get people building their own economies, their own audiences, their own arrangements, outside the structure that broke the promise. The research called this twenty years ago. The kids are just the first ones enacting it at scale, without needing a journal subscription to know what they’re doing.
The autonomy, competence, relatedness problem
If the psychological contract explains what got broken, Ed Deci and Richard Ryan explain why it hurts as much as it does when it breaks.
They’ve been working on self-determination theory since the 1970s. Their core claim is that human motivation isn’t a generic force you can top up with bonuses and threaten with performance reviews. It comes from the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Autonomy is the feeling that your actions originate with you, that you’re the author of your own day rather than a character somebody else is writing. Competence is the feeling that you’re good at something that matters and getting better at it. Relatedness is the feeling that you’re connected to other people in ways that are real, as opposed to the ways that involve Slack reactions.
When work satisfies these, people thrive inside it. When it doesn’t, they don’t. It’s not a preference. The need is highly sensitive to context. Change the context, and motivation comes back, often with embarrassing speed, as if the whole problem had been the room rather than the person in it.
Now listen again to what Amie says creator kids want: to create, to connect, to have curiosities, to be witnessed. That is autonomy, competence, and relatedness, translated into the plain language of a person who has never read Deci and Ryan and doesn’t need to.
Conventional employment, the way it’s been structured for the last forty years, systematically starves all three. You don’t choose what to do. You execute a task list someone else wrote. You don’t get to develop toward mastery. You rotate through roles with the logic of a supermarket aisle refresh. You don’t form real relationships. The org chart reshuffles every eighteen months, each time presented as strategic renewal rather than what it actually is, which is the corporate equivalent of rearranging deckchairs while insisting the deckchairs are the problem. The whole structure is a slow-acting corrosive on the nervous system.
The kids aren’t fleeing work. They’re fleeing work that makes them sick.
My own version of this
I’ve written before about the decade I spent as a social media consultant, the collapse that followed, the years of being misdiagnosed, the eventual late-life AuDHD diagnosis that reframed six decades in about twenty minutes. I won’t rerun the whole thing here. The shape of it, though, is relevant.
I tried to make the conventional machine work for me until roughly sixty. I gave it everything. I gave it my sleep, my relationships, my nervous system, and eventually my sanity. The machine responded by paying me reasonably and eroding me completely. Nothing dramatic happened. I just ran out, the way a battery runs out: not with a bang, just a slow and irreversible loss of charge.
There’s a particular bitterness in having co-authored a scale that measures psychological contract breach while being, in real time, a walking example of what happens when you absorb one for too long. The research explained my own life back to me with a delay of about twenty years. You can be the cartographer and still get lost on your own map.
What brought me back wasn’t mindset work. I tried mindset work. I tried gratitude journals. I tried cognitive restructuring. I tried the whole resilience industrial complex, which sells you the idea that the problem with being pushed off a cliff is your attitude on the way down.
What brought me back was changing the environment. I moved to Đà Lạt, Vietnam. I stopped trying to fit a shape that had never fit me. I started writing what I actually wanted to write, to the people who actually wanted to read it. I’m 67 now and my work life is, for the first time in my adult existence, net restorative rather than net depleting.
That is not a moral victory. It’s not a courage story. It’s an environmental match. The work I do now satisfies autonomy, competence, and relatedness at a level the consulting years never came close to. The same nervous system that couldn’t cope in the old structure copes beautifully in this one. Turns out I wasn’t the broken part. The room was.
The kids are asking for the same match, at the front end of their lives, and we’re calling them lazy for it.
The generational envy problem
Here’s the part I want to name gently but clearly. A lot of the kids these days talk from people my age has an envious edge that the speakers themselves often haven’t noticed. We suspect the kids might be right, and we suspect we sold ourselves too cheaply, and the suspicion is uncomfortable, so we convert it into contempt for the people still young enough to negotiate. Contempt is cheaper than regret. It’s also, unfortunately, worse for everyone.
I don’t blame my generation for taking the deal that was offered. The deal looked fair when we signed it. A career in exchange for security, pension, a house, time. But the deal got altered mid-contract, and by the time we noticed, most of us were too deep in to get out. The kids watched that happen. They’re refusing to sign the new, worse version of the same contract.
Refusing a bad deal isn’t laziness. It’s literacy.
What this means for those of us already here
If you’re in midlife and reading this, the question isn’t whether to drop your job and start a YouTube channel. The world already has enough accounts run by burnt-out 52-year-olds, and I say that as a formerly burnt-out 67-year-old. The question is narrower and more useful: where in your current life are autonomy, competence, and relatedness being starved, and is there anything you can do about it?
Sometimes the answer is small. Claw back an hour. Say no to the meeting. Pick one piece of work that actually matters to you and protect it the way you’d protect a plant you actually want to see flower. Sometimes the answer is larger. Change the structure. Move. Leave. Rebuild.
I’m not prescribing. I’m pointing. The same principles that explain why the kids want to create also explain why midlife professionals are quietly breaking in offices around the country. The mechanism is the same. The name for the mechanism is unmet psychological need, not weakness.
And if you’re a parent of a kid who’s told you they want to be a creator, I’d gently suggest the following. Don’t argue them out of it. Don’t rehearse the statistics about how few YouTubers make money. They know the statistics. They carry them around like weather data. They’re choosing autonomy-with-risk over security-with-nothing, because the security-with-nothing option no longer exists. Help them build the skills. Help them think about revenue. Help them plan a fallback. But don’t treat their wanting as a character defect.
It’s not. It’s accurate.
Where I keep landing
I keep coming back to the thing Amie said near the end of her note, almost as an aside. Something has to change, and if I’m honest, shit is about to change.
She’s right. Something is changing. The old compact between labour and life is being renegotiated, unevenly, messily, by people who never agreed to the old version in the first place. Some of them will fail. Some of them will invent work structures the rest of us can’t currently imagine. Most of them are just trying to build a life where being themselves is compatible with eating.
That’s not a generational failure. That’s a generational repair attempt.
And the least the rest of us can do is not make it harder.
Amie McNee’s original note is on Substack here. It’s worth following the whole thread.
If this piece resonated and you’d like more like it, subscribe to The Quiet Half on Substack, where I write long-form essays on the places nervous systems and broken systems intersect, for people who are done with the usual story and want the honest one.
