Are younger workers finally ringing the death knell on “hustle culture”? The research points to yes. But it’s not due to lack of ambition.
In its 2026 global survey, Deloitte found that only 6% of Gen Zers and millennials believed that achieving a leadership position was their primary career goal. But the rest of the same survey suggests some decidedly mixed feelings: 76% of Gen Zers and 67% of millennials showed an interest in pursuing senior or executive leadership roles at some point over the course of their careers.
Gen Z wants the corner office. Just not right away.
Whether conscious or unconscious, this shift away from the “rise and grind” mindset that began in the late 1990s has been playing out in public and on social media ever since. And the clever, and often not-so-clever, buzzwords and phrases have followed along.
From “quiet quitting” and “bare minimum Mondays” to “lazy girl jobs,” the post-pandemic world saw Gen Z wanting work that didn’t absorb their entire identity. Next came “soft life,” a hashtag that racked up more than 10 billion views on TikTok, showing people cooking at home, moving slower and stepping back from the constant slog.
The played-out trend of adding “core” to just about everything has broadened recently to include “having-a-life core.” This latest addition to the lexicon can be traced, at least in part, to TikTok creator Jayne. The shift away from the constantly overscheduled, “high-performing” work mode toward savoring small everyday rituals is part of the broader “slow living” movement that more explicitly flies in the face of hustle culture. The most anti-hustle of cultures, of course, would be what few of us can say we’ve never done: bed rotting, doomscrolling or the far more punchy (and Scottish) “hurkle durkling.”
The arc from hyperproductivity to watching bread rise seems to flow cleanly from ambition to inertia. But writing off younger generations as lazy is an easy way out that ignores the more interesting question behind this resistance to leadership: Why?
Why Doesn’t Gen Z Want to Be Managers?
The Deloitte survey provides a pretty direct answer and lines up just about how you’d expect. Among Gen Zers and millennials who aren’t prioritizing leadership roles, the main reasons cited were stress and burnout (50% and 49%, respectively), excessive responsibility (50%, 48%), and concerns about work/life balance (41%, 46%).
In a 2024 study, the UK recruitment firm Robert Walters found that 72% of Gen Z workers surveyed said they’d rather progress as individual contributors than become middle managers. Lucy Bisset, a director from Robert Walters, distilled it as Gen Z workers wanting to “bring their ’whole self’ to projects and spend time cultivating their own brand and approach, rather than spending time managing others.” The tendency even garnered a pithy catchphrase: “conscious unbossing.”
Sarah, a 21-year-old factory worker in Minnesota who asked us not to include her last name, said she’s been considered for an assistant floor manager opening where she works, but she’s not interested. “It’s not worth the trade-off. I look at the current managers here… They’re stressed, glued to their phones and taking the blame for things they didn’t do,” she said.
How Financial Pressure Is Delaying Gen Z’s Career & Life Decisions
There’s also a financial layer that has nothing to do with values or aesthetics. The Deloitte survey found that more than half of Gen Z (55%) and millennial (52%) respondents said they’ve delayed major life decisions—marriage, starting a family or business, continuing education—because of their financial situations. This isn’t new. Deloitte says that the cost of living has been the top-ranked concern on this survey for five years.
The report summary itself calls this the “maybe later” pattern. It’s not a rejection of ambition. It’s a tendency toward prioritizing stability and well-being before committing to things that feel unsustainable.
Sarah said it’s not that she doesn’t want to develop her career; she just doesn’t want to manage people. She’s been devoting time to advancing her technical skills and hopes to eventually work on equipment maintenance and more of the hands-on repair side of the machinery.
Robert Walters’ own reporting on “conscious unbossing” backs up the burnout-avoidance logic from a different angle: A separate 2024 UK study found that 69% of Gen Z respondents said they don’t want a managerial role because such positions are seen as both too stressful and not sufficiently rewarding.
Through this lens, avoiding leadership right now looks less like lack of drive and more like a reasonable response to real financial pressure and a perceptive read on what leadership can actually cost.
Do Senior Leaders Actually Have Less Stress Than Junior Employees?
The tension, however, comes with that perception about leadership. The same Deloitte survey also found something that seems to work against the “leadership is bad for you” assumption. People already in senior leadership positions reported better mental health and better work/life balance than people in junior roles, and people in senior leadership positions were less likely to cite long working hours as a source of stress. This could mean the well-being trade-offs younger workers associate with leadership aren’t actually showing up for people holding those jobs, or perhaps people who reach senior roles are just already more accustomed to the demands of the position.
The report quotes Charlotte Simpson, an executive at Novartis, on this question: “I think there’s this assumption that as you climb the ladder, you have more stress. I’ve been in junior roles where it’s been stressful, and I’ve been in senior roles or supported senior leaders where they’ve had low stress and good work/life balance. So, the analogy that the more senior you are, the more stress you have should be questioned.”
Perhaps the group avoiding leadership roles is hasty in making that decision. People who actually hold those roles don’t seem to be confirming the stress and burnout experiences (at least not in this one study). After all, it’s reasonable to think that people who are unhappy or burned out in senior roles would be more likely to leave those roles altogether, which could skew who’s left to be surveyed. But those decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.
What Would Make Gen Z Want to Take on Leadership Roles?
Older generations love to assume younger generations just don’t have the chutzpah for hustle culture, but that’s a simple read on a far more complex issue. The reality is that people are trying to make real-life decisions under legitimate financial pressure, based on whatever information is available—most of which comes from social media and watching older co-workers or managers burn out. This leads them to conclude that leadership isn’t worth the risk yet.
The 76%/67% figures for long-term interest in leadership suggest most young workers haven’t ruled it out entirely. Instead, it’s a recalculation of when and how the risk is worth taking. The data backs this up. When asked what would make leadership more appealing, top factors included higher compensation, flexible work arrangements and a clearer understanding of the path to leadership roles within their organization. Those aren’t the ideals of someone rejecting the idea of leadership itself.
Gen Z isn’t killing hustle culture to rot in their beds. They’re recalculating the best path forward for the ideal version of success. And they’re doing it on the schedule that makes sense for them.
Featured image by DC Studio/Shutterstock
