At some point, you look at someone younger in your life — your child, your sibling, your grandkid, maybe even a coworker — and realize they’re navigating the world in a way that feels completely foreign to you. Not wrong. Not necessarily worse. Just…different.
That’s the tone behind a recent post on Reddit’s r/Millennials, where a brother opened with a blunt admission: “The younger generation is much different, physically and mentally as I found out the hard way.”
He explained that his sister is Gen Z — eight years younger than he is — and that for most of his life, he believed she simply “never applied herself and didn’t work hard enough.” But, as he put it, “lately I have come to realise that she is a product of her generation too.”
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In the post, he described what that looks like in daily life. “She has trouble walking for more than half a mile. She gets genuinely emotionally overwhelmed at doing house hold chores. Has touble taking public transport. Basically struggles with everyday tasks,” he wrote. He went on to explain that “She gets legit anxiety and raving thoughts when she has to interact with people she feels don’t like her enough.”
What struck readers wasn’t just the anxiety. It was the dependency. He shared that his sister has repeatedly asked who would take care of her if their parents pass away, admitting he “never knew that she has become so cripplingly dependent” on their dad.
He ended the post by asking other millennials whether they’ve had similar experiences with younger siblings and confessed, “I find it hard to advise her anything because her world view is so different from mine.”
The comment section suggested he’d tapped into something bigger than one family dynamic.
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One millennial responded with a line that resonated throughout the thread: “She not only grew up in a different world than I did, but she had totally different parents than I did, even though they were technically both the same people.”
Others widened the lens beyond siblings. One Redditor wrote, “In working with the zoomers at my work, the high-achieving ones are REALLY high-achieving—much better at their jobs than I was at that age. The others are basically office furniture.”
It’s easy to frame this as a millennial-versus-Gen-Z debate. But history suggests every generation feels this way about the next.
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One commenter captured the balance in a way that cut through the noise: “Multiple things can be true at the same time: mental health issues/diagnoses and also the need to persevere and work through difficulties.”
Whether you’re 22 and overwhelmed, 42 and watching it happen, or 72 shaking your head because you’ve seen this movie before, the underlying tension is the same: how much of who we become is grit, and how much is the era we’re dropped into?
That’s not just a Gen Z issue. It’s a generational cycle — playing out in real time.
According to a 2025 report from Savings.com, 50% of U.S. parents provide ongoing financial support to their adult children, contributing an average of $1,474 per month to help cover expenses like groceries, cell phone bills, and rent. That kind of support can quietly chip away at retirement savings, especially if it stretches on longer than expected.
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