Say what you will about this whole “Gen X can’t become CEOs thing” – but it never ceases to amaze me how cruelly people will talk younger generations in the workplace.

We millennials were ridiculed for literally 2 decades about bad financial decisions (avocado toast); Gen Z is getting the same treatment for their “obsession with BNPL”.

And yet we’re also “prized for our youth" which feels less like appreciation and more like appraisal — like we’re shiny new cars on a showroom floor, admired, leveraged, and ultimately measured by how well we serve someone else’s bottom line.

These are both headline-level items on LinkedIn News. What do we make of that?