Generations In India Are Living Different Realities Today

The other day, I heard someone describe the older generation as though they had been imported from another planet. They apparently do not understand work-life balance, do not talk enough about feelings, stayed too long in one organisation and, in the final indignity, still ask their children how to use an app. Every generation eventually invents a vocabulary for its own superiority, then wonders how the previous one managed to survive without it.

The ‘olders’ are now obsessed with their views on Gen Z. Their anxieties, expectations, aspirations and relationships are analysed as though a new species has arrived and requires decoding. We debate what they want from employers, how they view money and success, and whether they will stay in a job for more than one year.

Young Indians are entering a society and economy unlike the one their parents entered, and they should not be asked to inherit its rules unquestioningly. But somewhere along the way, fascination with the young has acquired an odd condition: the old are increasingly expected to prove that they deserve a place in the world they helped build.

The Older Generation Was Never One Block

The older generation is not one homogeneous block. The small-town entrepreneur who built a first-generation business, the homemaker whose economic contribution never appears on GDP calculations, the public-sector employee who spent three decades inside one institution, and the farmer who educated children through uncertain harvests did not live the same lives merely because they belonged to one generation. At considerable personal cost, they were trying to create the means, education, access and social standing that their children could inherit and build upon.

Progress has its own historical amnesia. The “older” built that inheritance when jobs were fewer, information scarce, credit expensive, choices and means fewer, comforts rarer and infrastructure unreliable. They built businesses without digital tools, careers without online networks and families without the conveniences now taken for granted. They saved because tomorrow was uncertain, stayed because stability mattered and learnt to make progress without the safety nets youngsters today sometimes mistake for the natural order of life.

A generation accustomed to abundance can easily mistake scarcity for a character defect. A telephone connection then took years, a foreign holiday was for the rich and air travel was exceptional. There was no wellness vocabulary for every disappointment, and often no parent waiting to repair the consequences or finance another attempt. They absorbed setbacks because there was little else to do. Not every work disagreement required a resignation, and not every difficult boss was treated as a mental-health event.

The generation that waited years for a telephone connection is now being lectured by one that treats a three-second video buffer as a global calamity.

Freedom Built On Earlier Sacrifice

The young can question a workplace, change careers, move cities, work remotely, build a business online or reject a conventional definition of success. Those freedoms should be celebrated. But behind them are decades of people who built what we have today. Someone had to build the road before the next generation could complain about the traffic.

Inside families, the same history can look very different depending on who remembers it. A child may remember a father rarely being home. The father may remember working fourteen hours a day just to pay school fees. A daughter may remember that her mother never spoke openly about emotions. The mother may remember expressing love through quietly giving up everything she ever wanted.

Many middle-class and affluent youngsters have grown up barely noticing the domestic labour their parents and elders still perform to keep their lives running. The work is largely invisible, and so is the gratitude for it. A request to participate in the ordinary business of family life can land as though someone has asked for a kidney.

For a generation determined to keep life asset-light, family can become the one liability that cannot be outsourced, and parental expectations can become a “stressed asset”, while parents quietly wonder whether they are still raising independent adults or lifelong dependants with excellent résumés.

What Both Generations Must Learn

For the ‘olders’, resilience can become an inability to ask for help, loyalty an excuse to remain in unhealthy institutions, frugality a fear of spending and sacrifice a bill quietly handed to the next generation. Authority can harden into control, while emotional restraint can leave a family financially secure and conversationally bankrupt. The qualities that helped a generation survive can become precisely the ones it must learn to surrender.

Gen Z has brought a necessary mindset. It has made dignity at work harder to dismiss, questioned whether long hours automatically demonstrate commitment, challenged hierarchy for its own sake and asked whether a career should consume an entire identity. Its insistence on flexibility, inclusion, purpose and wellbeing has forced institutions to examine assumptions they carried for too long.

The road ahead is being reshaped by technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, relentless competition and a workplace changing faster than many careers can keep pace with. Gen Z can see more disruption coming, and that visibility is its own burden. Its demand for quality of life is also shaped by an India where private prosperity has raced far ahead of public and civic capacity, leaving people to buy privately what a functioning city should provide.

Our greater advantage is having generations with different forms of capital alive at the same time: one sees possibility quickly, while the other has learnt what possibility can cost. Perhaps the one trait every generation should nurture is the hunger to grow, excel and do more, while recognising that ambition need not come at the cost of gratitude for what made that growth possible.

Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai

Published on: Thursday, August 13, 2026, 09:51 PM IST