On the Unbearable Sadness of Being Young (at Work)
“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.” — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Part One: Lightness and Weight
I have been thinking a lot about this burden lately — about the quiet sadness that seems to have seeped into so many corners of modern life, especially the workplace.
A few days ago, my 26-year-old daughter reminded me of a comment I made when she was 12. I had noticed how “sad” her generation seemed — less lighthearted than I remembered being at that age. Something about their posture, their quietness, even their “obedient goodness,” struck me at the time as being, well, different.
Parents in my cohort often had to encourage their kids to play, to act, to explore — sometimes overscheduling them in the process. We seemed to be training kids to compete, not just in sports, but also socially. Our parents had a different challenge: keeping us indoors and out of the mud.
My daughter’s recall of my comment led me to return to Judith Twenge’s Generations — and to the quiet structural shift and emotional inflection point in how we live and lead. I started to wonder what had happened to the “lightness of childhood and early teenage years” between our generations and how this loss might help us better understand, measure, and address a general malaise we are feeling or reporting at work.
2012: The Year Sadness Took Hold
Jean Twenge’s research points to 2012 as a turning point in adolescent mental health. Around that year, sadness, loneliness, and hopelessness — especially among girls — began rising sharply. And this was not necessarily in response to great losses, but to the erosion of self-worth and purpose. Young people seemed to feel sad because something essential was missing.
Sadness is a normal response to a difficult world and, unlike depression, is usually proportional to a specific event or trigger. It is an emotional state marked by sorrow, grief, or discouragement. It is typically temporary, but if it endures, it can become persistent.
Also, sadness doesn’t always look like tears or silence. It can show up as avoidance, distraction, irritability, hyper-productivity, or behaviors like vaping, endless scrolling, obsessive exercise, or compulsive busyness.
As a result, motivation becomes performance. “Happiness performance art.” Some respond by withdrawing, others wear exhaustion like a badge of honor. Others work like Hammy the Squirrel from Over the Hedge—frenetic, overstimulated, and unsustainably productive (see Hammy video).
But beneath the noise is something quieter: unmet expectations, mistrust in institutions, and fear that work will demand everything while offering very little in return.
As a result, many younger people invest elsewhere. They build emotional homes in other communities — often virtual ones — where they feel at least seen, if not fully known, or heard. This disconnection from work is not a loyalty crisis. It is a sadness response.
This trend has only deepened. The drivers — smartphones, social media, the distress of climate change, and declining in-person interaction — are now woven into the fabric of our homes, schools, and workplaces.
Teens today are more unhappy with their bodies than any generation before. A 2022 study found a sharp rise in eating disorder-related hospitalizations during the pandemic, with the steepest increases among girls aged 12 to 17.
From 2011 to 2021, youth suicide rates rose nearly 48%. Every age group except 45 to 64 saw double-digit increases.
That “lightness of being” is hard to define for those who never knew it. A big part of it was being connected locally, not globally. Playing outside unsupervised. Being blissfully disconnected — except for the occasional call on a rotary phone.
Even now, many in my generation struggle to explain what was lost — or how we lost it. Was it the rise of social media? The replacement of community with connectivity? Was it the shift to data-driven business culture, where every interaction is logged and measured? Or maybe it is more subtle: the slow substitution of human-centered connection for the convenience of technology.
Finally, the children in my daughter’s generation were raised on social media and became fluent in a certain mental health vocabulary, which may make them more self-aware, but also more emotionally exposed. Even the presentation of teens seemed to have evolved, from characters like Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) or Allison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club (1985) who are presented as withdrawn, eccentric, or physically unwell — exceptions among their peers in those movies.
By contrast, post-2010s streaming shows like 13 Reasons Why (2017) and Sex Education (2019–2023) brought teen mental health to the foreground — it became the plot, not just a subplot. These characters do not hide their sadness behind sarcasm or silence, but confront trauma, consent, anxiety, depression, and identity in explicit terms.
Looking back, 2012 was a personal inflection point, too, when I began my personal inquiry into mental health and work — research that would lead to a book on Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace, many precious interdisciplinary collaborations, over 100 articles here on Medium, and international publications exploring how compassion, culture, and context shape our ability to cope and contribute.
2022: The Year Sadness Graduated and Clocked In
“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Part One: Lightness and Weight.
By the time the GenZ cohort entered the workforce or stepped onto a (virtual) college campus, a significant fraction of them were officially diagnosed with mood disorders and/or carried an invisible sadness — shaped by loneliness, uncertainty, climate change, and a loss of faith in institutions that once offered meaning. They also pick up on our sadness, especially for those of us who hoped to leave them something sturdier.
They also carried the weight of pandemic isolation, political instability, and social disconnection.
Joining the workforce during and right after COVID was complicated on two levels — first, they seemed to be a generation unlike all others on the mental health front and second, they were joining a workplace and social environment that was itself in flux.
In short, the younger generations are joining systems still largely unprepared to meet them where they are. Instead of meeting them with understanding, we often manage them like tech orders: optimized, efficient, and easily replaced. They are viewed as too disconnected, too demanding, too fragile — and therefore inherently expendable.
But what we often mistake for entitlement may be self-protection. What we call disengagement may be sadness — over lost purpose, stalled futures, or a world they were told to prepare for that no longer exists.
These young workers often do not commit because they do not expect commitment in return. If they seem untethered, it is not because they do not care — it is because they do not trust that anyone else does care — for their hopes, dreams, and professional aspirations.
The Heaviness of Feeling for Others
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Part Two: Soul and Body
When no one invests, nothing grows. And in workplaces where sadness is ambient but unspoken, relationships — like creativity — remain shallow. In workplaces filled with quiet sadness — our own and others’ — the emotional weight grows, leading to stagnation.
That vicarious pain — when we feel empathy for another person — can be even harder than our suffering — certainly as a parent but also as schoolmates and classmates. Our pain is immediate and embodied. Someone else’s pain, however, comes with uncertainty and helplessness, because we do not know what to do, nor how to help.
When sadness affects young people, it hits us harder because we know at that point in their lives, they should still be hopeful about what the future holds. But they are not. The pace of change brings us all loss.
In this light, what we face in many workplaces today is not a sudden outbreak of clinical depression or a rise in pathological disengagement.
It is something quieter and more widespread. Not necessarily diagnosable, but persistent all the same. This sadness is not always dramatic or verbalized, but it is visible in missed deadlines, increased cynicism, reduced patience, and emotional flatness in the face of both criticism and praise. People at work are tired — not just physically, but existentially. But sadness is not the end of the story. It can also be a signal — an invitation to slow down, to listen differently, to lead with care.
The Unbearable Lightness of Organizational Fixes
In many ways, the modern workplace feels like something out of a Kafka novel: you clock in to a space tinged with sadness. “Company cheerleaders” try to motivate but often fail. The boss is frustrated you are not “working hard enough.” Consultants propose expensive “efficiency” models with little buy-in from staff. These efforts might temporarily treat the surface wounds of productivity. But businesses tend to treat symptoms and rarely the underlying disease. The weight is real; the responses are not.
A paycheck is essential — but for many young workers, it comes at a steep emotional cost. They enter workplaces still carrying the sadness of their formative years — only to find that the systems they’re joining cannot hold it, nor address it.
Instead of care, they often encounter shallow wellness initiatives, or leaders trained more in control than compassion.
Kundera writes about the irreversibility of choices and the weightlessness that paradoxically results from that. His protagonist Tomáš struggles with the emotional weight of Teresa’s suffering — and how her vulnerability becomes his responsibility. He’s torn between the lightness of detachment and the weight of intimacy. Much like empathetic managers and leaders with their employees.
In the business world, we ask people to make serious decisions — to lead, to perform, to motivate — while carrying invisible emotional burdens.
This is the dilemma many employees — and managers — face today. Our hearts are speaking. Sadness, disconnection, fear of irrelevance, existential fatigue. Yet employees still expect phenomenal and sometimes impossible things of leadership, and leadership still also expects phenomenal and impossible things of employees.
Leaders are often praised for their resilience, decisiveness, and clarity — but rarely for their emotional depth. Yet it may be this emotional depth and awareness that allows them to carry the weight of others with humility, rather than looking to performance as the only metric. The result is a dissonance between internal experience and external expectation. That dissonance is where sadness settles.
In other words, perhaps better leadership today isn’t about being less affected, but about being more attuned and open — while still knowing where their boundaries (and ability to make realistic and reasonable change) actually lie.
Sadness may look like disengagement, and depression may show up as poor communication or uneven performance. Both are frequently misread as personal failings or motivational problems rather than signs of struggle. We ask employees, particularly younger ones, to regulate, reframe, and rebound without pausing to ask what they are carrying.
We sometimes intervene without considering what employees might want to share, or how we might support them with something as simple as a day off, a gentle check-in, or the flexibility to travel home to see an ailing parent. But small gestures require something most systems are not built to prioritize: noticing.
Instead, many organizations turn to mental health and well-being interventions that are too broad, too corporate, or too disconnected from lived experience. Mindfulness apps. Resilience training. These initiatives may be well-intentioned, but they often feel like solutions to a different problem. They address stress but not sadness. They offer tools for managing pressure, but not for processing pain. And in doing so, they sometimes backfire — leaving people feeling as though they are failing twice: first, for feeling sad, and second, for not recovering quickly enough.
I often struggle to understand my daughter’s generation. Their sadness seems deeper and more diffuse, shaped by forces I did not face at their age. And yet, I find myself managing them, leading them through systems that do not always see that weight, let alone accommodate it.
The truth is that many leaders feel the same quiet dissonance that younger employees do. We are also tired and wonder what we are powering through—and for whom.
But we are not allowed to say so. Instead, we’re told to motivate, perform, and inspire — often without being asked how we are doing. The result is not just exhaustion. It is shared sadness, passed quietly between desks and across Zoom calls. If we are indeed mislabeling sadness, we might be mismanaging the humans carrying it. And that sadness is not a bug in the system — it is a signal.
Illuminate, Don’t Immobilize
We can use this signal as employees, leaders, and organizations to do things differently.
Leaders do not need to be therapists or saviors. But they do need to acknowledge their, and their employees’, shared humanity. Managers do not need clinical training to ask more human (and humane) questions.
A weekly check-in that asks, “What’s weighing on you this week?” may do more for morale than a meditation app could.
Our one-on-ones could ask not only the question above, but also:
· Is there something you’re carrying alone that you wish others understood?
· What’s giving you strength — or stealing it — right now?
As leaders we need better tools to respond to what people are actually feeling, argues Daven Morrison, MD. One tool is Silvan Tomkins Affect Theory. He identified nine innate affects and emphasized that emotions are biological signals — calls for help, action, or connection. His idea of anger, fear, and distress as “911 calls” or emergency signals can be helpful.
Organizations can think about how to take an “emotional pulse” of the business — instead of tracking how fast people are running races. The Gallup Q12 and other tools focus on clarity, recognition, and productivity — “Do you know what’s expected of you at work?” or “Do you have the materials you need?” — but they rarely ask about emotional reality. They’re built to optimize performance, not understand the person. Most workplaces are optimized for efficiency, not for emotional truth. But without emotional infrastructure, even the best strategies buckle under pressure.
This also means that companies don’t have a baseline on how the person and the cohort is feeling — be it because they still have long COVID or might have experienced that 2012 inflection point or caring for young persons who have. If we don’t see engagement as a smile score or productivity report, would we learn if we asked (also or instead):
- What if we measured how safe people feel to say “I’m not okay”? or do they feel safe “showing up as they are”?
- Do you feel proud of who you are here — not just what you do?
- How many trusted relationships do you feel that have at work? Do you have someone here you can trust when things are hard?
- How often do you feel that someone listens to you without interrupting?
Finally, while leaders and managers shape culture, employees — especially younger ones — also have agency, and relational power if not positional power, which they will have soon. Small acts can shift the emotional weather of a team, like fostering emotional honesty in smaller groups, where truth can be shared, even quietly. They can also be encouraged to recognize that sadness is real, but like any emotion, it can also become a shield or a stall if not examined.
And, for individual younger employees especially, learning to differentiate between acknowledged sadness and resigned helplessness is powerful. They can ask “What does my sadness do for me?” It can tell us what matters, feels wrong, and needs healing. But it also becomes a hiding place, a reason not to try, buffer against rejection or failure. This could involve asking: Is there something I can change — or am I waiting for someone else to do it? Or noticing when sadness becomes cynicism and gently challenging it. And seek support not just to feel better, but to do differently.
Sadness is not weakness. It is information. It tells us something isn’t working. It tells us something isn’t working, a need is not met, and in one model of emotion, the brief moment of distress serves a specific motivating function: to seek help — not just for individuals, but for the system itself.
And yet, we treat it as a glitch. Something to fix, rather than listen to. Perhaps the challenge is not to solve sadness, but to make room for it. To stop mistaking silence for resilience, or burnout for laziness. To lead with presence, even when we do not have all the answers. Especially then.
Because while I may not fully understand this generation, I still have to lead them and they are changing the world of business — my world. And maybe that starts by simply saying: I better understand you path in this world and I see you. Even if I do not yet know what to do. You matter, not because you perform, but because you exist. And together, maybe, it will hurt less.
Sources
- Twenge, J.M. (2017). iGen. Atria Books.
- Twenge, J.M. (2025). Generations. Simon & Schuster.
- Twenge, J.M., Haidt, J., et al. (2023). Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Mental Health, 2009–2021. JAMA Psychiatry.
- American Psychiatric Association. (2023). What Is Depression?
- Kundera, M. (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
- Jobs, S. (2005). Stanford Commencement Address.
