How Gen Z is redefining adulthood | The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

Description

This audio explores how Generation Z is redefining adulthood by shifting the focus away from traditional milestones toward internal qualities such as personal agency and financial autonomy. While previous generations relied on visible markers such as marriage and homeownership to signal maturity, modern youth face economic pressures and rising housing costs that frequently delay these events. This shift suggests that becoming an adult is no longer a linear checklist but rather a gradual accumulation of responsibility and the ability to make independent decisions. Furthermore, the source highlights how socio-economic backgrounds create unequal paths to independence, making family support a critical factor in navigating today's financial landscape. Ultimately, the text argues that young people are not necessarily rejecting traditional life goals, but are instead detaching their identity from symbols that are becoming increasingly difficult to attain.

The Gen Z Shift: European leadership decoded

An essential audio series by Benoît Vancauwenberghe, founder of 20Something, realized by an AI podcast by NotebookKLM. This is the indispensable resource for HR Leaders and Managers across Europe. We cut through the noise, providing actionable insights on how Gen Z is fundamentally reshaping leadership, work, and talent strategy. Packed with cutting-edge research and consulting experience.

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Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to the Gen Z Shift, a podcast decoding Generation Z and Generation Alpha for leaders, brands, and changemakers. Based on the research and articles of Benoît van Kouwenberg, a European expert on Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and brand culture, each episode helps you understand the generations reshaping how we work, consume, connect, and live. Because the future isn't coming. It's already here.
Speaker #1
Absolutely.
Speaker #0
So, for today's deep dive, I want you to just... Imagine for a second that you are 29 years old, you've got a master's degree, you know, you're managing this thriving international career, and you take complete responsibility for your life.
Speaker #1
Right. Doing everything right, basically.
Speaker #0
Exactly. But at the end of the day, you go home to this cramped apartment that you share with, like, three roommates. Or, I mean, worse, you go to sleep in your childhood bedroom.
Speaker #1
Which is incredibly common now.
Speaker #0
It is. And the thing is, 10 years ago, society would have looked at you and labeled you a, you know, a failure to launch. But today. You're basically the new blueprint for adulthood.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's a staggering transformation, honestly. We're witnessing this complete uncoupling of adulthood from the material milestones that defined it for the last hundred years.
Speaker #0
And if you're listening to this, whether you manage Gen Z employees or you're trying to market to them, or maybe you're raising one or you're just navigating this reality yourself, you really have to understand this shift.
Speaker #1
You really do.
Speaker #0
So we are jumping right into the first part of a new 20-something series, and we're tackling a massive question, which is, how is Gen Z entirely redefining adulthood? Because we are moving away from those old visible markers of growing up towards something that's just, well, much more internal. The old roadmap is just gone.
Speaker #1
It really is gone. And, you know, the conversation we usually have in the media about this, it's completely backwards. Society just keeps asking, like, why is Gen Z taking so long to grow up? But when you actually look at the data, whether that's a across Europe or globally, we really shouldn't be asking about delays. I mean, that just misses the point entirely.
Speaker #0
The structures are changing, right? Yeah,
Speaker #1
exactly. The very structures of adulthood themselves are changing. Gen Z isn't like failing the test of adulthood. The test itself has basically been rewritten.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think to really get our heads around this new test, we sort of need to look at what the old one was. I mean, for practically the entire 20th century, growing up had this highly predictable Totally widely accepted sequence.
Speaker #1
A literal checklist.
Speaker #0
Right. You finish school, then you found a job, moved out of your parents' house, you found a partner, you got married, bought a house, had kids, boom, It was a standardized checklist.
Speaker #1
And that checklist was incredibly powerful, largely because it was legible.
Speaker #0
What do you mean by legible?
Speaker #1
Well, anyone, your boss, your neighbor, your bank, they could look at your life at age 25 and instantly grade how quote unquote adult you were based on those visible markers.
Speaker #0
Oh, right. Sure.
Speaker #1
Now, obviously, it's important to note that this sequence was never completely universal, like class, geography, cultural background. They always played a part. But the cultural dominance of that sequence was undeniable. It was the gold standard.
Speaker #0
But today, that sequence is just completely scrambled.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
I mean, looking at the source material from Benoit van Kallenberg, it provides these really vivid examples of what reality looks like on the ground right now.
Speaker #1
Yeah. The data paints a very different picture.
Speaker #0
Like you, that 29-year-old international manager with roommates. Or, you know, you have a Gen Zer living in their childhood bedroom, but they're building a highly profitable tech startup from their laptop.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Or even a couple who has been in this deeply committed shared bank account relationship for like eight years, but they are married.
Speaker #1
Or individuals who desperately want children, but they feel nowhere near financially stable enough to even consider it. The milestones themselves, they haven't vanished from human desire, you know, but they have completely stopped arriving in a predictable order. And that lack of predictability, it forces this fundamental question. If you don't have a mortgage or a marriage certificate to point to, how do you actually know when you've become an adult?
Speaker #0
Which is a million dollar question. And to answer that, we have some really fascinating research. Let's pull up the 2023 study by Anna Walsack. So she surveyed 303 young adults ages 18 to 29 in Poland, and the researchers simply asked them, what does adulthood actually mean to you?
Speaker #1
And the answers were just entirely divorced from what older generations would expect.
Speaker #0
Totally.
Speaker #1
The defining factors for these young adults, they weren't marriage. They weren't having children. They weren't even about completing their formal education.
Speaker #0
So what were they?
Speaker #1
Responsibility and independence. But specifically, the internal ability to make their own decisions. to take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions, and to achieve financial economy.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and here's the kicker. Even having independent housing wasn't seen as the ultimate deciding factor. For them, adulthood is internal. It's an operating system. It's not a physical destination.
Speaker #0
Okay, let's unpack this, because I think the best way to visualize what's happening here is actually to look at video games.
Speaker #1
Oh.
Speaker #0
So the old path to adulthood was like playing a linear video game. Like the original Super Mario, you had to beat level one to unlock level two. You finish school to unlock the job. You get the job to unlock the house. You get the house to unlock the family. It was a totally straight line.
Speaker #1
Right. Very rigid.
Speaker #0
But for Gen Z, adulthood is like an open world game. You're dropped into this massive map and you can tackle any quest in any order. You might, you know, max out your career stats while still hanging out in the starter village, which is your parents' house. It completely breaks the old scoring system.
Speaker #1
What's fascinating here is how well that analogy captures the cognitive shift. We're watching a transition from visible proof to personal agency. For previous generations, adulthood was almost a physical object you could hold up to society. A house key, a wedding ring, a permanent employment contract.
Speaker #0
Visible proof.
Speaker #1
Exactly. But Gen Z has internalized adulthood. It's about your capacity to manage your finances, to set boundaries, and to build a life that's authentically yours. regardless of what your physical address is.
Speaker #0
I mean, think about your own employees for a second. If you're a manager listening to this, you might be evaluating the maturity of a 24-year-old on your team based on old metrics like how they dress, whether they own a car, their traditional career ambitions.
Speaker #1
Sure.
Speaker #0
Meanwhile, that 24-year-old is defining their own maturity by their ability to set a firm boundary on working over the weekend, you know, to protect their mental health.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
It's just a completely different language.
Speaker #1
It's a massive disconnect. And honestly, it explains a lot of the intergenerational friction we see in the workplace today.
Speaker #0
But hold on a second, because if Gen Z is internalizing all this and they feel like adults on the inside, why is the media narrative still so consistently negative?
Speaker #1
That's the real question.
Speaker #0
You read the think pieces and it's always, you know, Gen Z refuses to leave the nest. They're coddled. They have a failure to launch,
Speaker #1
which, I mean, brings us to the elephant in the room here, which is the economic reality disguised as a generational flaw. Let's look at the housing data. Yeah, it's so easy to look at a 30-year-old living at home and blame their work ethic, but that completely ignores the structural collapse of how wealth is built. Let's dig into the 2024 Eurostat data. The average age for a young person leaving their parental home across the European Union is 26.2 years old.
Speaker #0
Okay, 26.2.
Speaker #1
But that average hides these massive systemic differences. So in Finland, the average age for leaving home is 21.4. in Sweden It's 21.9.
Speaker #0
Okay, pretty young.
Speaker #1
But then you look at the other end of the spectrum. In Italy, the average age is 30.1. And in Croatia, it's 31.3.
Speaker #0
Here's where it gets really interesting. Because critics will look at that 30-year-old Italian living with his parents and loudly claim, Gen Z doesn't want to grow up. They just want to play video games and let mom cook.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
But a 21-year-old Finn is also Gen Z. They're the exact same generation consuming the exact same global internet culture.
Speaker #1
Precisely. The cultural narrative tries to pathologize the generation when it's really an economic issue.
Speaker #0
So what's the actual mechanism there? Why is there a nine-year gap between Finland and Italy?
Speaker #1
Well, it comes down to structural economics and the welfare state. In Nordic countries, you have strong social safety nets, you've got robust student housing subsidies, and just a system that's designed to spring young people into independence.
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
In Southern Europe, you have this potent mix of stagnant youth wages, high unemployment, and a structural reliance on the family unit to act as the primary safety net. When the state doesn't provide affordable housing, the family absorbs the shock.
Speaker #0
So we are basically mistaking a brutal housing market for a generational personality trait.
Speaker #1
Exactly. And the pressure cooker of that housing market, it is intense across the board. In 2024, 9.7% of Europeans aged 15 to 29 lived in households spending 40% or more of their disposable income on housing.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
That is a massive crushing chunk of your income just to keep a roof over your head. Furthermore, 26.5% of young Europeans are living in overcrowded conditions.
Speaker #0
That's like one in four young people living in a space too small for them.
Speaker #1
And if you look at long-term wealth building, the picture just gets even clearer. A 2025 OECD report showed that 52% of people born around 1980 owned a home by the time they were 29. But for the cohort born around 1990, That figure dropped to 41%.
Speaker #0
Wait, an 11-point drop? I mean, when you scale that across an entire population, we are talking about millions of young adults who are just priced out of a middle-class milestone that used to be a given.
Speaker #1
Millions. So when a young person is renting forever or living in their childhood bedroom, it is rarely a rejection of independence. It's the simple mathematical fact that the economics of independence have completely changed.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And this economic instability, it doesn't just delay these milestones. It fundamentally rewires how young people imagine their future.
Speaker #0
But how so? Because, I mean, if I can't afford a house at 27, maybe you just buy it at 32. That's a delay. It's not a rewiring.
Speaker #1
Well, it's more complicated than that. A 2024 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research by Rubin, Chen, and Tung, they looked into this. They found that adolescents and early emerging adults see economic instability and rising living costs as literal restrictions on their ability to become independent.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
They aren't just adjusting their timeline, they are adjusting their aspirations.
Speaker #0
Ah, so they just stop wanting it all together.
Speaker #1
Right. If you start to internalize the belief that homeownership is this fantasy that might literally never happen, the milestone itself loses its psychological power. You stop using it to define your own adulthood. You start looking for other ways to feel like a grown-up.
Speaker #0
That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker #1
And we see this reflected in the 2025 EU Parliament Youth Survey. where a staggering 40% of 16 to 30-year-olds said the number one thing they want the EU to prioritize is rising prices and the cost of living.
Speaker #0
And that has huge implications for brands. I mean, if you're a bank trying to sell mortgages or a furniture company trying to sell dining room sets to young couples, you are basically marketing a dream they've already deemed impossible. It's not that they woke up one day and decided they hate houses. It's that the economic backdrop dictates what feels possible. If they can't buy a house, Maybe they spend that money on micro-treats or travel or premium experiences just to feel some sense of agency.
Speaker #1
That's a very sharp business insight, actually. The disposable income is being rerouted to things they can actually control.
Speaker #0
But this leads to a really messy reality on the ground. Because if the traditional milestones are economically out of reach, how is Gen Z actually achieving this internal independence that the Polish study said they value so highly?
Speaker #1
It's complicated. Right,
Speaker #0
because independence used to be like a simple switch. You were dependent on your parents, you moved out, boom, independent. It was totally binary.
Speaker #1
Today, independence is anything but binary. The pathways into housing and financial independence have become highly varied. Like, you can live completely alone in your own apartment in a major city, appearing incredibly independent, but your parents are quietly paying half your rent. Are you independent?
Speaker #0
Good question.
Speaker #1
Alternatively, you could be living in your parents' basement. But you are completely financially independent. You're paying your own bills, buying your own groceries, saving aggressively. Are you dependent?
Speaker #0
So it's not a straight staircase anymore. It's like a web. You move away for college. You move back home to save money. You move out with a partner. You go through a bad breakup. And you move back into your childhood bedroom at 26.
Speaker #1
Exactly.
Speaker #0
The whole concept of a failure to launch is wildly inaccurate. Because launching is no longer a one-time event. It's a series of launches and landings.
Speaker #1
And this brings up... Violetta Tucci's 2024 research in the Journal of Youth Studies, which really pulls back the curtain on how this web actually functions. Tucci's work shows that parental socioeconomic background heavily dictates this entire process.
Speaker #0
Oh, wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it dictates not just when you can afford to leave home, but the quality and stability of the housing you can secure once you do leave.
Speaker #0
Let's break that down for the listener. Walk us through a concrete example of what these socially stratified pathways actually look like in real life.
Speaker #1
Sure. Think about this scenario. You have two 28-year-olds. They work at the exact same company, they have the exact same job title, and they earn the exact same salary.
Speaker #0
Okay, so on paper, they are equals.
Speaker #1
Right. But one of them has parents who can help with a deposit on a starter home, or who can comfortably cover a sudden $2,000 medical emergency. The other one does not.
Speaker #0
So employee A is building equity in a home and has this psychological safety net. While employee B is trapped in a cycle of skyrocketing rent and lives in constant like low-grade financial terror, despite their on-paper equality at work.
Speaker #1
Precisely. If we connect this to the bigger picture and return to your video game analogy, it's an open-world game, but it has become completely pay-to-win.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's brutal.
Speaker #1
The invisible safety net of the bank of mom and dad is what makes the modern transition to adulthood playable for some and impossible for others.
Speaker #0
So what does this all mean? I mean, if everything is so expensive that you have to rely on your family to hit these milestones, isn't there a massive irony here? We have a generation that values independence and autonomy above all else, but they are completely tethered to intergenerational wealth just to survive.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Doesn't this make the new adulthood incredibly unequal?
Speaker #1
That is the defining inequality of this generation's transition. Adulthood is becoming more flexible, yes, but it is simultaneously becoming dangerously stratified. Two people can work just as hard, but their outcomes are dictated by their parents' bank accounts. The real question we need to stop asking is, why are young people taking so long to grow up? The actual question we should be asking is, what does it actually cost to become independent today?
Speaker #0
And if you're an employer, that financial anxiety doesn't just disappear when they log on to Slack. I mean, that impacts performance, loyalty, burnout. It's a chilling question when you really look at the numbers. But I want to pivot to the psychological toll this takes. Because if you pull the Super Mario analogy all the way through, if you're dropped into this massive open world map without a compass, no wonder there's cognitive overload.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
You don't know if you're supposed to be fighting the career boss or doing the side quest of finding an apartment or just wandering around. When you separate adulthood from its traditional symbols, you're left with this really heavy burden of choice.
Speaker #1
It is a tremendous cognitive load. Gen Z is separating adulthood from its traditional symbols, right? Marriage and kids are now seen as choices or expressions of personal commitment. They are no longer societal obligations required to prove you are a legitimate adult.
Speaker #0
Which sounds great. I mean, on paper, it looks like this ultimate liberated utopia. You don't have to get married or buy a house by 25 to be respected.
Speaker #1
But without that fixed roadmap, young people are facing paralyzing decisions amidst massive economic uncertainty.
Speaker #0
It sounds absolutely exhausting to me. You're waking up every day and you have to invent your own metrics for success. You ask yourself constantly, you know. Should I buy a tiny place? Should I rent forever and invest my money? Do I settle down now or do I emigrate to a country with better pay?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Am I prioritizing my career hustle or my mental health? You basically have to invent the finish line every single day, all while the economy makes you feel like you're permanently falling behind.
Speaker #1
It is exhausting and we really shouldn't romanticize it. Gen Z is not refusing to grow up. But they also haven't discovered some magical, stress-free version of adulthood either. They're simply trying to build a stable life, while the very structures that previously defined stability are crumbling around them.
Speaker #0
You're trying to build a house in an earthquake.
Speaker #1
Exactly. The ultimate conclusion we can draw from all the source material, from Walczak in Poland to the Eurostat data to Tucci's research, is that for Gen Z, adulthood is something you feel capable of long before you can afford to show it.
Speaker #0
Wow. Capable of long before you can afford to show it. That per- perfectly encapsulates the shift. The visible proof is lagging years behind the internal maturity.
Speaker #1
And that reality is deeply going to impact how this generation views specific milestones moving forward. If you feel like an adult without a house or a spouse or a child, what do those things actually mean to you now? Why would you pursue them?
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
And that's exactly what the rest of the series will explore as we dive into how Gen Z approaches love, housing, and family in the future.
Speaker #0
It changes the entire paradigm. Which brings me to a final provocative thought I want you, the listener, to mull over as you go about your day. We've talked deeply about how Gen Z defines adulthood and maturity by these internal metrics. Agency, decision making, setting boundaries, responsibility. Rather than visible milestones like a mortgage or a marriage certificate. But what happens when this generation ages into senior leadership, into management, and into political power? Will they evaluate the maturity and the readiness of their own employees or even their own children? Using completely invisible internal metrics that older generations can't even recognize. If the game is shifted from a linear Super Mario checklist to an open world experience, the people writing the rules of society are about to change the scoring system permanently. Are you ready for how they'll keep score?
Speaker #1
That's a great question.
Speaker #0
Free X for listening to the Gen Z Shift Audio.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

The Generation Z Shift: Conversations explores the signals, tensions and changes emerging across today’s workplaces. Inspired by Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s work with younger generations, his 20something articles, research, and consulting experience, each episode turns one idea into a short, accessible conversation.

The series looks at questions such as why loyalty is changing, what younger generations expect from leadership, how feedback culture is evolving, why disengagement can be a signal rather than the problem itself, and what organizations need to rethink to stay relevant.

This audio series expands on the world behind The Gen Z Shift. It is not the audiobook, but a complementary series designed to explore the ideas, observations, and generational shifts shaping work, leadership, and culture. Created from Benoit’s original content and produced in an AI-generated conversational format using NotebookLM. Listen, question your assumptions, and learn to read the signals differently.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

The Gen Z Shift: European leadership decoded

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to the Gen Z Shift, a podcast decoding Generation Z and Generation Alpha for leaders, brands, and changemakers. Based on the research and articles of Benoît van Kouwenberg, a European expert on Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and brand culture, each episode helps you understand the generations reshaping how we work, consume, connect, and live. Because the future isn't coming. It's already here.
Speaker #1
Absolutely.
Speaker #0
So, for today's deep dive, I want you to just... Imagine for a second that you are 29 years old, you've got a master's degree, you know, you're managing this thriving international career, and you take complete responsibility for your life.
Speaker #1
Right. Doing everything right, basically.
Speaker #0
Exactly. But at the end of the day, you go home to this cramped apartment that you share with, like, three roommates. Or, I mean, worse, you go to sleep in your childhood bedroom.
Speaker #1
Which is incredibly common now.
Speaker #0
It is. And the thing is, 10 years ago, society would have looked at you and labeled you a, you know, a failure to launch. But today. You're basically the new blueprint for adulthood.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's a staggering transformation, honestly. We're witnessing this complete uncoupling of adulthood from the material milestones that defined it for the last hundred years.
Speaker #0
And if you're listening to this, whether you manage Gen Z employees or you're trying to market to them, or maybe you're raising one or you're just navigating this reality yourself, you really have to understand this shift.
Speaker #1
You really do.
Speaker #0
So we are jumping right into the first part of a new 20-something series, and we're tackling a massive question, which is, how is Gen Z entirely redefining adulthood? Because we are moving away from those old visible markers of growing up towards something that's just, well, much more internal. The old roadmap is just gone.
Speaker #1
It really is gone. And, you know, the conversation we usually have in the media about this, it's completely backwards. Society just keeps asking, like, why is Gen Z taking so long to grow up? But when you actually look at the data, whether that's a across Europe or globally, we really shouldn't be asking about delays. I mean, that just misses the point entirely.
Speaker #0
The structures are changing, right? Yeah,
Speaker #1
exactly. The very structures of adulthood themselves are changing. Gen Z isn't like failing the test of adulthood. The test itself has basically been rewritten.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think to really get our heads around this new test, we sort of need to look at what the old one was. I mean, for practically the entire 20th century, growing up had this highly predictable Totally widely accepted sequence.
Speaker #1
A literal checklist.
Speaker #0
Right. You finish school, then you found a job, moved out of your parents' house, you found a partner, you got married, bought a house, had kids, boom, It was a standardized checklist.
Speaker #1
And that checklist was incredibly powerful, largely because it was legible.
Speaker #0
What do you mean by legible?
Speaker #1
Well, anyone, your boss, your neighbor, your bank, they could look at your life at age 25 and instantly grade how quote unquote adult you were based on those visible markers.
Speaker #0
Oh, right. Sure.
Speaker #1
Now, obviously, it's important to note that this sequence was never completely universal, like class, geography, cultural background. They always played a part. But the cultural dominance of that sequence was undeniable. It was the gold standard.
Speaker #0
But today, that sequence is just completely scrambled.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
I mean, looking at the source material from Benoit van Kallenberg, it provides these really vivid examples of what reality looks like on the ground right now.
Speaker #1
Yeah. The data paints a very different picture.
Speaker #0
Like you, that 29-year-old international manager with roommates. Or, you know, you have a Gen Zer living in their childhood bedroom, but they're building a highly profitable tech startup from their laptop.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Or even a couple who has been in this deeply committed shared bank account relationship for like eight years, but they are married.
Speaker #1
Or individuals who desperately want children, but they feel nowhere near financially stable enough to even consider it. The milestones themselves, they haven't vanished from human desire, you know, but they have completely stopped arriving in a predictable order. And that lack of predictability, it forces this fundamental question. If you don't have a mortgage or a marriage certificate to point to, how do you actually know when you've become an adult?
Speaker #0
Which is a million dollar question. And to answer that, we have some really fascinating research. Let's pull up the 2023 study by Anna Walsack. So she surveyed 303 young adults ages 18 to 29 in Poland, and the researchers simply asked them, what does adulthood actually mean to you?
Speaker #1
And the answers were just entirely divorced from what older generations would expect.
Speaker #0
Totally.
Speaker #1
The defining factors for these young adults, they weren't marriage. They weren't having children. They weren't even about completing their formal education.
Speaker #0
So what were they?
Speaker #1
Responsibility and independence. But specifically, the internal ability to make their own decisions. to take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions, and to achieve financial economy.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and here's the kicker. Even having independent housing wasn't seen as the ultimate deciding factor. For them, adulthood is internal. It's an operating system. It's not a physical destination.
Speaker #0
Okay, let's unpack this, because I think the best way to visualize what's happening here is actually to look at video games.
Speaker #1
Oh.
Speaker #0
So the old path to adulthood was like playing a linear video game. Like the original Super Mario, you had to beat level one to unlock level two. You finish school to unlock the job. You get the job to unlock the house. You get the house to unlock the family. It was a totally straight line.
Speaker #1
Right. Very rigid.
Speaker #0
But for Gen Z, adulthood is like an open world game. You're dropped into this massive map and you can tackle any quest in any order. You might, you know, max out your career stats while still hanging out in the starter village, which is your parents' house. It completely breaks the old scoring system.
Speaker #1
What's fascinating here is how well that analogy captures the cognitive shift. We're watching a transition from visible proof to personal agency. For previous generations, adulthood was almost a physical object you could hold up to society. A house key, a wedding ring, a permanent employment contract.
Speaker #0
Visible proof.
Speaker #1
Exactly. But Gen Z has internalized adulthood. It's about your capacity to manage your finances, to set boundaries, and to build a life that's authentically yours. regardless of what your physical address is.
Speaker #0
I mean, think about your own employees for a second. If you're a manager listening to this, you might be evaluating the maturity of a 24-year-old on your team based on old metrics like how they dress, whether they own a car, their traditional career ambitions.
Speaker #1
Sure.
Speaker #0
Meanwhile, that 24-year-old is defining their own maturity by their ability to set a firm boundary on working over the weekend, you know, to protect their mental health.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
It's just a completely different language.
Speaker #1
It's a massive disconnect. And honestly, it explains a lot of the intergenerational friction we see in the workplace today.
Speaker #0
But hold on a second, because if Gen Z is internalizing all this and they feel like adults on the inside, why is the media narrative still so consistently negative?
Speaker #1
That's the real question.
Speaker #0
You read the think pieces and it's always, you know, Gen Z refuses to leave the nest. They're coddled. They have a failure to launch,
Speaker #1
which, I mean, brings us to the elephant in the room here, which is the economic reality disguised as a generational flaw. Let's look at the housing data. Yeah, it's so easy to look at a 30-year-old living at home and blame their work ethic, but that completely ignores the structural collapse of how wealth is built. Let's dig into the 2024 Eurostat data. The average age for a young person leaving their parental home across the European Union is 26.2 years old.
Speaker #0
Okay, 26.2.
Speaker #1
But that average hides these massive systemic differences. So in Finland, the average age for leaving home is 21.4. in Sweden It's 21.9.
Speaker #0
Okay, pretty young.
Speaker #1
But then you look at the other end of the spectrum. In Italy, the average age is 30.1. And in Croatia, it's 31.3.
Speaker #0
Here's where it gets really interesting. Because critics will look at that 30-year-old Italian living with his parents and loudly claim, Gen Z doesn't want to grow up. They just want to play video games and let mom cook.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
But a 21-year-old Finn is also Gen Z. They're the exact same generation consuming the exact same global internet culture.
Speaker #1
Precisely. The cultural narrative tries to pathologize the generation when it's really an economic issue.
Speaker #0
So what's the actual mechanism there? Why is there a nine-year gap between Finland and Italy?
Speaker #1
Well, it comes down to structural economics and the welfare state. In Nordic countries, you have strong social safety nets, you've got robust student housing subsidies, and just a system that's designed to spring young people into independence.
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
In Southern Europe, you have this potent mix of stagnant youth wages, high unemployment, and a structural reliance on the family unit to act as the primary safety net. When the state doesn't provide affordable housing, the family absorbs the shock.
Speaker #0
So we are basically mistaking a brutal housing market for a generational personality trait.
Speaker #1
Exactly. And the pressure cooker of that housing market, it is intense across the board. In 2024, 9.7% of Europeans aged 15 to 29 lived in households spending 40% or more of their disposable income on housing.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
That is a massive crushing chunk of your income just to keep a roof over your head. Furthermore, 26.5% of young Europeans are living in overcrowded conditions.
Speaker #0
That's like one in four young people living in a space too small for them.
Speaker #1
And if you look at long-term wealth building, the picture just gets even clearer. A 2025 OECD report showed that 52% of people born around 1980 owned a home by the time they were 29. But for the cohort born around 1990, That figure dropped to 41%.
Speaker #0
Wait, an 11-point drop? I mean, when you scale that across an entire population, we are talking about millions of young adults who are just priced out of a middle-class milestone that used to be a given.
Speaker #1
Millions. So when a young person is renting forever or living in their childhood bedroom, it is rarely a rejection of independence. It's the simple mathematical fact that the economics of independence have completely changed.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And this economic instability, it doesn't just delay these milestones. It fundamentally rewires how young people imagine their future.
Speaker #0
But how so? Because, I mean, if I can't afford a house at 27, maybe you just buy it at 32. That's a delay. It's not a rewiring.
Speaker #1
Well, it's more complicated than that. A 2024 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research by Rubin, Chen, and Tung, they looked into this. They found that adolescents and early emerging adults see economic instability and rising living costs as literal restrictions on their ability to become independent.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
They aren't just adjusting their timeline, they are adjusting their aspirations.
Speaker #0
Ah, so they just stop wanting it all together.
Speaker #1
Right. If you start to internalize the belief that homeownership is this fantasy that might literally never happen, the milestone itself loses its psychological power. You stop using it to define your own adulthood. You start looking for other ways to feel like a grown-up.
Speaker #0
That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker #1
And we see this reflected in the 2025 EU Parliament Youth Survey. where a staggering 40% of 16 to 30-year-olds said the number one thing they want the EU to prioritize is rising prices and the cost of living.
Speaker #0
And that has huge implications for brands. I mean, if you're a bank trying to sell mortgages or a furniture company trying to sell dining room sets to young couples, you are basically marketing a dream they've already deemed impossible. It's not that they woke up one day and decided they hate houses. It's that the economic backdrop dictates what feels possible. If they can't buy a house, Maybe they spend that money on micro-treats or travel or premium experiences just to feel some sense of agency.
Speaker #1
That's a very sharp business insight, actually. The disposable income is being rerouted to things they can actually control.
Speaker #0
But this leads to a really messy reality on the ground. Because if the traditional milestones are economically out of reach, how is Gen Z actually achieving this internal independence that the Polish study said they value so highly?
Speaker #1
It's complicated. Right,
Speaker #0
because independence used to be like a simple switch. You were dependent on your parents, you moved out, boom, independent. It was totally binary.
Speaker #1
Today, independence is anything but binary. The pathways into housing and financial independence have become highly varied. Like, you can live completely alone in your own apartment in a major city, appearing incredibly independent, but your parents are quietly paying half your rent. Are you independent?
Speaker #0
Good question.
Speaker #1
Alternatively, you could be living in your parents' basement. But you are completely financially independent. You're paying your own bills, buying your own groceries, saving aggressively. Are you dependent?
Speaker #0
So it's not a straight staircase anymore. It's like a web. You move away for college. You move back home to save money. You move out with a partner. You go through a bad breakup. And you move back into your childhood bedroom at 26.
Speaker #1
Exactly.
Speaker #0
The whole concept of a failure to launch is wildly inaccurate. Because launching is no longer a one-time event. It's a series of launches and landings.
Speaker #1
And this brings up... Violetta Tucci's 2024 research in the Journal of Youth Studies, which really pulls back the curtain on how this web actually functions. Tucci's work shows that parental socioeconomic background heavily dictates this entire process.
Speaker #0
Oh, wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it dictates not just when you can afford to leave home, but the quality and stability of the housing you can secure once you do leave.
Speaker #0
Let's break that down for the listener. Walk us through a concrete example of what these socially stratified pathways actually look like in real life.
Speaker #1
Sure. Think about this scenario. You have two 28-year-olds. They work at the exact same company, they have the exact same job title, and they earn the exact same salary.
Speaker #0
Okay, so on paper, they are equals.
Speaker #1
Right. But one of them has parents who can help with a deposit on a starter home, or who can comfortably cover a sudden $2,000 medical emergency. The other one does not.
Speaker #0
So employee A is building equity in a home and has this psychological safety net. While employee B is trapped in a cycle of skyrocketing rent and lives in constant like low-grade financial terror, despite their on-paper equality at work.
Speaker #1
Precisely. If we connect this to the bigger picture and return to your video game analogy, it's an open-world game, but it has become completely pay-to-win.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's brutal.
Speaker #1
The invisible safety net of the bank of mom and dad is what makes the modern transition to adulthood playable for some and impossible for others.
Speaker #0
So what does this all mean? I mean, if everything is so expensive that you have to rely on your family to hit these milestones, isn't there a massive irony here? We have a generation that values independence and autonomy above all else, but they are completely tethered to intergenerational wealth just to survive.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Doesn't this make the new adulthood incredibly unequal?
Speaker #1
That is the defining inequality of this generation's transition. Adulthood is becoming more flexible, yes, but it is simultaneously becoming dangerously stratified. Two people can work just as hard, but their outcomes are dictated by their parents' bank accounts. The real question we need to stop asking is, why are young people taking so long to grow up? The actual question we should be asking is, what does it actually cost to become independent today?
Speaker #0
And if you're an employer, that financial anxiety doesn't just disappear when they log on to Slack. I mean, that impacts performance, loyalty, burnout. It's a chilling question when you really look at the numbers. But I want to pivot to the psychological toll this takes. Because if you pull the Super Mario analogy all the way through, if you're dropped into this massive open world map without a compass, no wonder there's cognitive overload.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
You don't know if you're supposed to be fighting the career boss or doing the side quest of finding an apartment or just wandering around. When you separate adulthood from its traditional symbols, you're left with this really heavy burden of choice.
Speaker #1
It is a tremendous cognitive load. Gen Z is separating adulthood from its traditional symbols, right? Marriage and kids are now seen as choices or expressions of personal commitment. They are no longer societal obligations required to prove you are a legitimate adult.
Speaker #0
Which sounds great. I mean, on paper, it looks like this ultimate liberated utopia. You don't have to get married or buy a house by 25 to be respected.
Speaker #1
But without that fixed roadmap, young people are facing paralyzing decisions amidst massive economic uncertainty.
Speaker #0
It sounds absolutely exhausting to me. You're waking up every day and you have to invent your own metrics for success. You ask yourself constantly, you know. Should I buy a tiny place? Should I rent forever and invest my money? Do I settle down now or do I emigrate to a country with better pay?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Am I prioritizing my career hustle or my mental health? You basically have to invent the finish line every single day, all while the economy makes you feel like you're permanently falling behind.
Speaker #1
It is exhausting and we really shouldn't romanticize it. Gen Z is not refusing to grow up. But they also haven't discovered some magical, stress-free version of adulthood either. They're simply trying to build a stable life, while the very structures that previously defined stability are crumbling around them.
Speaker #0
You're trying to build a house in an earthquake.
Speaker #1
Exactly. The ultimate conclusion we can draw from all the source material, from Walczak in Poland to the Eurostat data to Tucci's research, is that for Gen Z, adulthood is something you feel capable of long before you can afford to show it.
Speaker #0
Wow. Capable of long before you can afford to show it. That per- perfectly encapsulates the shift. The visible proof is lagging years behind the internal maturity.
Speaker #1
And that reality is deeply going to impact how this generation views specific milestones moving forward. If you feel like an adult without a house or a spouse or a child, what do those things actually mean to you now? Why would you pursue them?
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
And that's exactly what the rest of the series will explore as we dive into how Gen Z approaches love, housing, and family in the future.
Speaker #0
It changes the entire paradigm. Which brings me to a final provocative thought I want you, the listener, to mull over as you go about your day. We've talked deeply about how Gen Z defines adulthood and maturity by these internal metrics. Agency, decision making, setting boundaries, responsibility. Rather than visible milestones like a mortgage or a marriage certificate. But what happens when this generation ages into senior leadership, into management, and into political power? Will they evaluate the maturity and the readiness of their own employees or even their own children? Using completely invisible internal metrics that older generations can't even recognize. If the game is shifted from a linear Super Mario checklist to an open world experience, the people writing the rules of society are about to change the scoring system permanently. Are you ready for how they'll keep score?
Speaker #1
That's a great question.
Speaker #0
Free X for listening to the Gen Z Shift Audio.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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The Gen Z Shift: European leadership decoded

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to the Gen Z Shift, a podcast decoding Generation Z and Generation Alpha for leaders, brands, and changemakers. Based on the research and articles of Benoît van Kouwenberg, a European expert on Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and brand culture, each episode helps you understand the generations reshaping how we work, consume, connect, and live. Because the future isn't coming. It's already here.
Speaker #1
Absolutely.
Speaker #0
So, for today's deep dive, I want you to just... Imagine for a second that you are 29 years old, you've got a master's degree, you know, you're managing this thriving international career, and you take complete responsibility for your life.
Speaker #1
Right. Doing everything right, basically.
Speaker #0
Exactly. But at the end of the day, you go home to this cramped apartment that you share with, like, three roommates. Or, I mean, worse, you go to sleep in your childhood bedroom.
Speaker #1
Which is incredibly common now.
Speaker #0
It is. And the thing is, 10 years ago, society would have looked at you and labeled you a, you know, a failure to launch. But today. You're basically the new blueprint for adulthood.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's a staggering transformation, honestly. We're witnessing this complete uncoupling of adulthood from the material milestones that defined it for the last hundred years.
Speaker #0
And if you're listening to this, whether you manage Gen Z employees or you're trying to market to them, or maybe you're raising one or you're just navigating this reality yourself, you really have to understand this shift.
Speaker #1
You really do.
Speaker #0
So we are jumping right into the first part of a new 20-something series, and we're tackling a massive question, which is, how is Gen Z entirely redefining adulthood? Because we are moving away from those old visible markers of growing up towards something that's just, well, much more internal. The old roadmap is just gone.
Speaker #1
It really is gone. And, you know, the conversation we usually have in the media about this, it's completely backwards. Society just keeps asking, like, why is Gen Z taking so long to grow up? But when you actually look at the data, whether that's a across Europe or globally, we really shouldn't be asking about delays. I mean, that just misses the point entirely.
Speaker #0
The structures are changing, right? Yeah,
Speaker #1
exactly. The very structures of adulthood themselves are changing. Gen Z isn't like failing the test of adulthood. The test itself has basically been rewritten.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think to really get our heads around this new test, we sort of need to look at what the old one was. I mean, for practically the entire 20th century, growing up had this highly predictable Totally widely accepted sequence.
Speaker #1
A literal checklist.
Speaker #0
Right. You finish school, then you found a job, moved out of your parents' house, you found a partner, you got married, bought a house, had kids, boom, It was a standardized checklist.
Speaker #1
And that checklist was incredibly powerful, largely because it was legible.
Speaker #0
What do you mean by legible?
Speaker #1
Well, anyone, your boss, your neighbor, your bank, they could look at your life at age 25 and instantly grade how quote unquote adult you were based on those visible markers.
Speaker #0
Oh, right. Sure.
Speaker #1
Now, obviously, it's important to note that this sequence was never completely universal, like class, geography, cultural background. They always played a part. But the cultural dominance of that sequence was undeniable. It was the gold standard.
Speaker #0
But today, that sequence is just completely scrambled.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
I mean, looking at the source material from Benoit van Kallenberg, it provides these really vivid examples of what reality looks like on the ground right now.
Speaker #1
Yeah. The data paints a very different picture.
Speaker #0
Like you, that 29-year-old international manager with roommates. Or, you know, you have a Gen Zer living in their childhood bedroom, but they're building a highly profitable tech startup from their laptop.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Or even a couple who has been in this deeply committed shared bank account relationship for like eight years, but they are married.
Speaker #1
Or individuals who desperately want children, but they feel nowhere near financially stable enough to even consider it. The milestones themselves, they haven't vanished from human desire, you know, but they have completely stopped arriving in a predictable order. And that lack of predictability, it forces this fundamental question. If you don't have a mortgage or a marriage certificate to point to, how do you actually know when you've become an adult?
Speaker #0
Which is a million dollar question. And to answer that, we have some really fascinating research. Let's pull up the 2023 study by Anna Walsack. So she surveyed 303 young adults ages 18 to 29 in Poland, and the researchers simply asked them, what does adulthood actually mean to you?
Speaker #1
And the answers were just entirely divorced from what older generations would expect.
Speaker #0
Totally.
Speaker #1
The defining factors for these young adults, they weren't marriage. They weren't having children. They weren't even about completing their formal education.
Speaker #0
So what were they?
Speaker #1
Responsibility and independence. But specifically, the internal ability to make their own decisions. to take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions, and to achieve financial economy.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and here's the kicker. Even having independent housing wasn't seen as the ultimate deciding factor. For them, adulthood is internal. It's an operating system. It's not a physical destination.
Speaker #0
Okay, let's unpack this, because I think the best way to visualize what's happening here is actually to look at video games.
Speaker #1
Oh.
Speaker #0
So the old path to adulthood was like playing a linear video game. Like the original Super Mario, you had to beat level one to unlock level two. You finish school to unlock the job. You get the job to unlock the house. You get the house to unlock the family. It was a totally straight line.
Speaker #1
Right. Very rigid.
Speaker #0
But for Gen Z, adulthood is like an open world game. You're dropped into this massive map and you can tackle any quest in any order. You might, you know, max out your career stats while still hanging out in the starter village, which is your parents' house. It completely breaks the old scoring system.
Speaker #1
What's fascinating here is how well that analogy captures the cognitive shift. We're watching a transition from visible proof to personal agency. For previous generations, adulthood was almost a physical object you could hold up to society. A house key, a wedding ring, a permanent employment contract.
Speaker #0
Visible proof.
Speaker #1
Exactly. But Gen Z has internalized adulthood. It's about your capacity to manage your finances, to set boundaries, and to build a life that's authentically yours. regardless of what your physical address is.
Speaker #0
I mean, think about your own employees for a second. If you're a manager listening to this, you might be evaluating the maturity of a 24-year-old on your team based on old metrics like how they dress, whether they own a car, their traditional career ambitions.
Speaker #1
Sure.
Speaker #0
Meanwhile, that 24-year-old is defining their own maturity by their ability to set a firm boundary on working over the weekend, you know, to protect their mental health.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
It's just a completely different language.
Speaker #1
It's a massive disconnect. And honestly, it explains a lot of the intergenerational friction we see in the workplace today.
Speaker #0
But hold on a second, because if Gen Z is internalizing all this and they feel like adults on the inside, why is the media narrative still so consistently negative?
Speaker #1
That's the real question.
Speaker #0
You read the think pieces and it's always, you know, Gen Z refuses to leave the nest. They're coddled. They have a failure to launch,
Speaker #1
which, I mean, brings us to the elephant in the room here, which is the economic reality disguised as a generational flaw. Let's look at the housing data. Yeah, it's so easy to look at a 30-year-old living at home and blame their work ethic, but that completely ignores the structural collapse of how wealth is built. Let's dig into the 2024 Eurostat data. The average age for a young person leaving their parental home across the European Union is 26.2 years old.
Speaker #0
Okay, 26.2.
Speaker #1
But that average hides these massive systemic differences. So in Finland, the average age for leaving home is 21.4. in Sweden It's 21.9.
Speaker #0
Okay, pretty young.
Speaker #1
But then you look at the other end of the spectrum. In Italy, the average age is 30.1. And in Croatia, it's 31.3.
Speaker #0
Here's where it gets really interesting. Because critics will look at that 30-year-old Italian living with his parents and loudly claim, Gen Z doesn't want to grow up. They just want to play video games and let mom cook.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
But a 21-year-old Finn is also Gen Z. They're the exact same generation consuming the exact same global internet culture.
Speaker #1
Precisely. The cultural narrative tries to pathologize the generation when it's really an economic issue.
Speaker #0
So what's the actual mechanism there? Why is there a nine-year gap between Finland and Italy?
Speaker #1
Well, it comes down to structural economics and the welfare state. In Nordic countries, you have strong social safety nets, you've got robust student housing subsidies, and just a system that's designed to spring young people into independence.
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
In Southern Europe, you have this potent mix of stagnant youth wages, high unemployment, and a structural reliance on the family unit to act as the primary safety net. When the state doesn't provide affordable housing, the family absorbs the shock.
Speaker #0
So we are basically mistaking a brutal housing market for a generational personality trait.
Speaker #1
Exactly. And the pressure cooker of that housing market, it is intense across the board. In 2024, 9.7% of Europeans aged 15 to 29 lived in households spending 40% or more of their disposable income on housing.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
That is a massive crushing chunk of your income just to keep a roof over your head. Furthermore, 26.5% of young Europeans are living in overcrowded conditions.
Speaker #0
That's like one in four young people living in a space too small for them.
Speaker #1
And if you look at long-term wealth building, the picture just gets even clearer. A 2025 OECD report showed that 52% of people born around 1980 owned a home by the time they were 29. But for the cohort born around 1990, That figure dropped to 41%.
Speaker #0
Wait, an 11-point drop? I mean, when you scale that across an entire population, we are talking about millions of young adults who are just priced out of a middle-class milestone that used to be a given.
Speaker #1
Millions. So when a young person is renting forever or living in their childhood bedroom, it is rarely a rejection of independence. It's the simple mathematical fact that the economics of independence have completely changed.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And this economic instability, it doesn't just delay these milestones. It fundamentally rewires how young people imagine their future.
Speaker #0
But how so? Because, I mean, if I can't afford a house at 27, maybe you just buy it at 32. That's a delay. It's not a rewiring.
Speaker #1
Well, it's more complicated than that. A 2024 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research by Rubin, Chen, and Tung, they looked into this. They found that adolescents and early emerging adults see economic instability and rising living costs as literal restrictions on their ability to become independent.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
They aren't just adjusting their timeline, they are adjusting their aspirations.
Speaker #0
Ah, so they just stop wanting it all together.
Speaker #1
Right. If you start to internalize the belief that homeownership is this fantasy that might literally never happen, the milestone itself loses its psychological power. You stop using it to define your own adulthood. You start looking for other ways to feel like a grown-up.
Speaker #0
That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker #1
And we see this reflected in the 2025 EU Parliament Youth Survey. where a staggering 40% of 16 to 30-year-olds said the number one thing they want the EU to prioritize is rising prices and the cost of living.
Speaker #0
And that has huge implications for brands. I mean, if you're a bank trying to sell mortgages or a furniture company trying to sell dining room sets to young couples, you are basically marketing a dream they've already deemed impossible. It's not that they woke up one day and decided they hate houses. It's that the economic backdrop dictates what feels possible. If they can't buy a house, Maybe they spend that money on micro-treats or travel or premium experiences just to feel some sense of agency.
Speaker #1
That's a very sharp business insight, actually. The disposable income is being rerouted to things they can actually control.
Speaker #0
But this leads to a really messy reality on the ground. Because if the traditional milestones are economically out of reach, how is Gen Z actually achieving this internal independence that the Polish study said they value so highly?
Speaker #1
It's complicated. Right,
Speaker #0
because independence used to be like a simple switch. You were dependent on your parents, you moved out, boom, independent. It was totally binary.
Speaker #1
Today, independence is anything but binary. The pathways into housing and financial independence have become highly varied. Like, you can live completely alone in your own apartment in a major city, appearing incredibly independent, but your parents are quietly paying half your rent. Are you independent?
Speaker #0
Good question.
Speaker #1
Alternatively, you could be living in your parents' basement. But you are completely financially independent. You're paying your own bills, buying your own groceries, saving aggressively. Are you dependent?
Speaker #0
So it's not a straight staircase anymore. It's like a web. You move away for college. You move back home to save money. You move out with a partner. You go through a bad breakup. And you move back into your childhood bedroom at 26.
Speaker #1
Exactly.
Speaker #0
The whole concept of a failure to launch is wildly inaccurate. Because launching is no longer a one-time event. It's a series of launches and landings.
Speaker #1
And this brings up... Violetta Tucci's 2024 research in the Journal of Youth Studies, which really pulls back the curtain on how this web actually functions. Tucci's work shows that parental socioeconomic background heavily dictates this entire process.
Speaker #0
Oh, wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it dictates not just when you can afford to leave home, but the quality and stability of the housing you can secure once you do leave.
Speaker #0
Let's break that down for the listener. Walk us through a concrete example of what these socially stratified pathways actually look like in real life.
Speaker #1
Sure. Think about this scenario. You have two 28-year-olds. They work at the exact same company, they have the exact same job title, and they earn the exact same salary.
Speaker #0
Okay, so on paper, they are equals.
Speaker #1
Right. But one of them has parents who can help with a deposit on a starter home, or who can comfortably cover a sudden $2,000 medical emergency. The other one does not.
Speaker #0
So employee A is building equity in a home and has this psychological safety net. While employee B is trapped in a cycle of skyrocketing rent and lives in constant like low-grade financial terror, despite their on-paper equality at work.
Speaker #1
Precisely. If we connect this to the bigger picture and return to your video game analogy, it's an open-world game, but it has become completely pay-to-win.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's brutal.
Speaker #1
The invisible safety net of the bank of mom and dad is what makes the modern transition to adulthood playable for some and impossible for others.
Speaker #0
So what does this all mean? I mean, if everything is so expensive that you have to rely on your family to hit these milestones, isn't there a massive irony here? We have a generation that values independence and autonomy above all else, but they are completely tethered to intergenerational wealth just to survive.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Doesn't this make the new adulthood incredibly unequal?
Speaker #1
That is the defining inequality of this generation's transition. Adulthood is becoming more flexible, yes, but it is simultaneously becoming dangerously stratified. Two people can work just as hard, but their outcomes are dictated by their parents' bank accounts. The real question we need to stop asking is, why are young people taking so long to grow up? The actual question we should be asking is, what does it actually cost to become independent today?
Speaker #0
And if you're an employer, that financial anxiety doesn't just disappear when they log on to Slack. I mean, that impacts performance, loyalty, burnout. It's a chilling question when you really look at the numbers. But I want to pivot to the psychological toll this takes. Because if you pull the Super Mario analogy all the way through, if you're dropped into this massive open world map without a compass, no wonder there's cognitive overload.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
You don't know if you're supposed to be fighting the career boss or doing the side quest of finding an apartment or just wandering around. When you separate adulthood from its traditional symbols, you're left with this really heavy burden of choice.
Speaker #1
It is a tremendous cognitive load. Gen Z is separating adulthood from its traditional symbols, right? Marriage and kids are now seen as choices or expressions of personal commitment. They are no longer societal obligations required to prove you are a legitimate adult.
Speaker #0
Which sounds great. I mean, on paper, it looks like this ultimate liberated utopia. You don't have to get married or buy a house by 25 to be respected.
Speaker #1
But without that fixed roadmap, young people are facing paralyzing decisions amidst massive economic uncertainty.
Speaker #0
It sounds absolutely exhausting to me. You're waking up every day and you have to invent your own metrics for success. You ask yourself constantly, you know. Should I buy a tiny place? Should I rent forever and invest my money? Do I settle down now or do I emigrate to a country with better pay?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Am I prioritizing my career hustle or my mental health? You basically have to invent the finish line every single day, all while the economy makes you feel like you're permanently falling behind.
Speaker #1
It is exhausting and we really shouldn't romanticize it. Gen Z is not refusing to grow up. But they also haven't discovered some magical, stress-free version of adulthood either. They're simply trying to build a stable life, while the very structures that previously defined stability are crumbling around them.
Speaker #0
You're trying to build a house in an earthquake.
Speaker #1
Exactly. The ultimate conclusion we can draw from all the source material, from Walczak in Poland to the Eurostat data to Tucci's research, is that for Gen Z, adulthood is something you feel capable of long before you can afford to show it.
Speaker #0
Wow. Capable of long before you can afford to show it. That per- perfectly encapsulates the shift. The visible proof is lagging years behind the internal maturity.
Speaker #1
And that reality is deeply going to impact how this generation views specific milestones moving forward. If you feel like an adult without a house or a spouse or a child, what do those things actually mean to you now? Why would you pursue them?
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
And that's exactly what the rest of the series will explore as we dive into how Gen Z approaches love, housing, and family in the future.
Speaker #0
It changes the entire paradigm. Which brings me to a final provocative thought I want you, the listener, to mull over as you go about your day. We've talked deeply about how Gen Z defines adulthood and maturity by these internal metrics. Agency, decision making, setting boundaries, responsibility. Rather than visible milestones like a mortgage or a marriage certificate. But what happens when this generation ages into senior leadership, into management, and into political power? Will they evaluate the maturity and the readiness of their own employees or even their own children? Using completely invisible internal metrics that older generations can't even recognize. If the game is shifted from a linear Super Mario checklist to an open world experience, the people writing the rules of society are about to change the scoring system permanently. Are you ready for how they'll keep score?
Speaker #1
That's a great question.
Speaker #0
Free X for listening to the Gen Z Shift Audio.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

The Gen Z Shift: European leadership decoded

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to the Gen Z Shift, a podcast decoding Generation Z and Generation Alpha for leaders, brands, and changemakers. Based on the research and articles of Benoît van Kouwenberg, a European expert on Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and brand culture, each episode helps you understand the generations reshaping how we work, consume, connect, and live. Because the future isn't coming. It's already here.
Speaker #1
Absolutely.
Speaker #0
So, for today's deep dive, I want you to just... Imagine for a second that you are 29 years old, you've got a master's degree, you know, you're managing this thriving international career, and you take complete responsibility for your life.
Speaker #1
Right. Doing everything right, basically.
Speaker #0
Exactly. But at the end of the day, you go home to this cramped apartment that you share with, like, three roommates. Or, I mean, worse, you go to sleep in your childhood bedroom.
Speaker #1
Which is incredibly common now.
Speaker #0
It is. And the thing is, 10 years ago, society would have looked at you and labeled you a, you know, a failure to launch. But today. You're basically the new blueprint for adulthood.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's a staggering transformation, honestly. We're witnessing this complete uncoupling of adulthood from the material milestones that defined it for the last hundred years.
Speaker #0
And if you're listening to this, whether you manage Gen Z employees or you're trying to market to them, or maybe you're raising one or you're just navigating this reality yourself, you really have to understand this shift.
Speaker #1
You really do.
Speaker #0
So we are jumping right into the first part of a new 20-something series, and we're tackling a massive question, which is, how is Gen Z entirely redefining adulthood? Because we are moving away from those old visible markers of growing up towards something that's just, well, much more internal. The old roadmap is just gone.
Speaker #1
It really is gone. And, you know, the conversation we usually have in the media about this, it's completely backwards. Society just keeps asking, like, why is Gen Z taking so long to grow up? But when you actually look at the data, whether that's a across Europe or globally, we really shouldn't be asking about delays. I mean, that just misses the point entirely.
Speaker #0
The structures are changing, right? Yeah,
Speaker #1
exactly. The very structures of adulthood themselves are changing. Gen Z isn't like failing the test of adulthood. The test itself has basically been rewritten.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And I think to really get our heads around this new test, we sort of need to look at what the old one was. I mean, for practically the entire 20th century, growing up had this highly predictable Totally widely accepted sequence.
Speaker #1
A literal checklist.
Speaker #0
Right. You finish school, then you found a job, moved out of your parents' house, you found a partner, you got married, bought a house, had kids, boom, It was a standardized checklist.
Speaker #1
And that checklist was incredibly powerful, largely because it was legible.
Speaker #0
What do you mean by legible?
Speaker #1
Well, anyone, your boss, your neighbor, your bank, they could look at your life at age 25 and instantly grade how quote unquote adult you were based on those visible markers.
Speaker #0
Oh, right. Sure.
Speaker #1
Now, obviously, it's important to note that this sequence was never completely universal, like class, geography, cultural background. They always played a part. But the cultural dominance of that sequence was undeniable. It was the gold standard.
Speaker #0
But today, that sequence is just completely scrambled.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
I mean, looking at the source material from Benoit van Kallenberg, it provides these really vivid examples of what reality looks like on the ground right now.
Speaker #1
Yeah. The data paints a very different picture.
Speaker #0
Like you, that 29-year-old international manager with roommates. Or, you know, you have a Gen Zer living in their childhood bedroom, but they're building a highly profitable tech startup from their laptop.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Or even a couple who has been in this deeply committed shared bank account relationship for like eight years, but they are married.
Speaker #1
Or individuals who desperately want children, but they feel nowhere near financially stable enough to even consider it. The milestones themselves, they haven't vanished from human desire, you know, but they have completely stopped arriving in a predictable order. And that lack of predictability, it forces this fundamental question. If you don't have a mortgage or a marriage certificate to point to, how do you actually know when you've become an adult?
Speaker #0
Which is a million dollar question. And to answer that, we have some really fascinating research. Let's pull up the 2023 study by Anna Walsack. So she surveyed 303 young adults ages 18 to 29 in Poland, and the researchers simply asked them, what does adulthood actually mean to you?
Speaker #1
And the answers were just entirely divorced from what older generations would expect.
Speaker #0
Totally.
Speaker #1
The defining factors for these young adults, they weren't marriage. They weren't having children. They weren't even about completing their formal education.
Speaker #0
So what were they?
Speaker #1
Responsibility and independence. But specifically, the internal ability to make their own decisions. to take responsibility for the consequences of those decisions, and to achieve financial economy.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, and here's the kicker. Even having independent housing wasn't seen as the ultimate deciding factor. For them, adulthood is internal. It's an operating system. It's not a physical destination.
Speaker #0
Okay, let's unpack this, because I think the best way to visualize what's happening here is actually to look at video games.
Speaker #1
Oh.
Speaker #0
So the old path to adulthood was like playing a linear video game. Like the original Super Mario, you had to beat level one to unlock level two. You finish school to unlock the job. You get the job to unlock the house. You get the house to unlock the family. It was a totally straight line.
Speaker #1
Right. Very rigid.
Speaker #0
But for Gen Z, adulthood is like an open world game. You're dropped into this massive map and you can tackle any quest in any order. You might, you know, max out your career stats while still hanging out in the starter village, which is your parents' house. It completely breaks the old scoring system.
Speaker #1
What's fascinating here is how well that analogy captures the cognitive shift. We're watching a transition from visible proof to personal agency. For previous generations, adulthood was almost a physical object you could hold up to society. A house key, a wedding ring, a permanent employment contract.
Speaker #0
Visible proof.
Speaker #1
Exactly. But Gen Z has internalized adulthood. It's about your capacity to manage your finances, to set boundaries, and to build a life that's authentically yours. regardless of what your physical address is.
Speaker #0
I mean, think about your own employees for a second. If you're a manager listening to this, you might be evaluating the maturity of a 24-year-old on your team based on old metrics like how they dress, whether they own a car, their traditional career ambitions.
Speaker #1
Sure.
Speaker #0
Meanwhile, that 24-year-old is defining their own maturity by their ability to set a firm boundary on working over the weekend, you know, to protect their mental health.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
It's just a completely different language.
Speaker #1
It's a massive disconnect. And honestly, it explains a lot of the intergenerational friction we see in the workplace today.
Speaker #0
But hold on a second, because if Gen Z is internalizing all this and they feel like adults on the inside, why is the media narrative still so consistently negative?
Speaker #1
That's the real question.
Speaker #0
You read the think pieces and it's always, you know, Gen Z refuses to leave the nest. They're coddled. They have a failure to launch,
Speaker #1
which, I mean, brings us to the elephant in the room here, which is the economic reality disguised as a generational flaw. Let's look at the housing data. Yeah, it's so easy to look at a 30-year-old living at home and blame their work ethic, but that completely ignores the structural collapse of how wealth is built. Let's dig into the 2024 Eurostat data. The average age for a young person leaving their parental home across the European Union is 26.2 years old.
Speaker #0
Okay, 26.2.
Speaker #1
But that average hides these massive systemic differences. So in Finland, the average age for leaving home is 21.4. in Sweden It's 21.9.
Speaker #0
Okay, pretty young.
Speaker #1
But then you look at the other end of the spectrum. In Italy, the average age is 30.1. And in Croatia, it's 31.3.
Speaker #0
Here's where it gets really interesting. Because critics will look at that 30-year-old Italian living with his parents and loudly claim, Gen Z doesn't want to grow up. They just want to play video games and let mom cook.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
But a 21-year-old Finn is also Gen Z. They're the exact same generation consuming the exact same global internet culture.
Speaker #1
Precisely. The cultural narrative tries to pathologize the generation when it's really an economic issue.
Speaker #0
So what's the actual mechanism there? Why is there a nine-year gap between Finland and Italy?
Speaker #1
Well, it comes down to structural economics and the welfare state. In Nordic countries, you have strong social safety nets, you've got robust student housing subsidies, and just a system that's designed to spring young people into independence.
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
In Southern Europe, you have this potent mix of stagnant youth wages, high unemployment, and a structural reliance on the family unit to act as the primary safety net. When the state doesn't provide affordable housing, the family absorbs the shock.
Speaker #0
So we are basically mistaking a brutal housing market for a generational personality trait.
Speaker #1
Exactly. And the pressure cooker of that housing market, it is intense across the board. In 2024, 9.7% of Europeans aged 15 to 29 lived in households spending 40% or more of their disposable income on housing.
Speaker #0
Wow.
Speaker #1
That is a massive crushing chunk of your income just to keep a roof over your head. Furthermore, 26.5% of young Europeans are living in overcrowded conditions.
Speaker #0
That's like one in four young people living in a space too small for them.
Speaker #1
And if you look at long-term wealth building, the picture just gets even clearer. A 2025 OECD report showed that 52% of people born around 1980 owned a home by the time they were 29. But for the cohort born around 1990, That figure dropped to 41%.
Speaker #0
Wait, an 11-point drop? I mean, when you scale that across an entire population, we are talking about millions of young adults who are just priced out of a middle-class milestone that used to be a given.
Speaker #1
Millions. So when a young person is renting forever or living in their childhood bedroom, it is rarely a rejection of independence. It's the simple mathematical fact that the economics of independence have completely changed.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And this economic instability, it doesn't just delay these milestones. It fundamentally rewires how young people imagine their future.
Speaker #0
But how so? Because, I mean, if I can't afford a house at 27, maybe you just buy it at 32. That's a delay. It's not a rewiring.
Speaker #1
Well, it's more complicated than that. A 2024 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research by Rubin, Chen, and Tung, they looked into this. They found that adolescents and early emerging adults see economic instability and rising living costs as literal restrictions on their ability to become independent.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
They aren't just adjusting their timeline, they are adjusting their aspirations.
Speaker #0
Ah, so they just stop wanting it all together.
Speaker #1
Right. If you start to internalize the belief that homeownership is this fantasy that might literally never happen, the milestone itself loses its psychological power. You stop using it to define your own adulthood. You start looking for other ways to feel like a grown-up.
Speaker #0
That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker #1
And we see this reflected in the 2025 EU Parliament Youth Survey. where a staggering 40% of 16 to 30-year-olds said the number one thing they want the EU to prioritize is rising prices and the cost of living.
Speaker #0
And that has huge implications for brands. I mean, if you're a bank trying to sell mortgages or a furniture company trying to sell dining room sets to young couples, you are basically marketing a dream they've already deemed impossible. It's not that they woke up one day and decided they hate houses. It's that the economic backdrop dictates what feels possible. If they can't buy a house, Maybe they spend that money on micro-treats or travel or premium experiences just to feel some sense of agency.
Speaker #1
That's a very sharp business insight, actually. The disposable income is being rerouted to things they can actually control.
Speaker #0
But this leads to a really messy reality on the ground. Because if the traditional milestones are economically out of reach, how is Gen Z actually achieving this internal independence that the Polish study said they value so highly?
Speaker #1
It's complicated. Right,
Speaker #0
because independence used to be like a simple switch. You were dependent on your parents, you moved out, boom, independent. It was totally binary.
Speaker #1
Today, independence is anything but binary. The pathways into housing and financial independence have become highly varied. Like, you can live completely alone in your own apartment in a major city, appearing incredibly independent, but your parents are quietly paying half your rent. Are you independent?
Speaker #0
Good question.
Speaker #1
Alternatively, you could be living in your parents' basement. But you are completely financially independent. You're paying your own bills, buying your own groceries, saving aggressively. Are you dependent?
Speaker #0
So it's not a straight staircase anymore. It's like a web. You move away for college. You move back home to save money. You move out with a partner. You go through a bad breakup. And you move back into your childhood bedroom at 26.
Speaker #1
Exactly.
Speaker #0
The whole concept of a failure to launch is wildly inaccurate. Because launching is no longer a one-time event. It's a series of launches and landings.
Speaker #1
And this brings up... Violetta Tucci's 2024 research in the Journal of Youth Studies, which really pulls back the curtain on how this web actually functions. Tucci's work shows that parental socioeconomic background heavily dictates this entire process.
Speaker #0
Oh, wow.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it dictates not just when you can afford to leave home, but the quality and stability of the housing you can secure once you do leave.
Speaker #0
Let's break that down for the listener. Walk us through a concrete example of what these socially stratified pathways actually look like in real life.
Speaker #1
Sure. Think about this scenario. You have two 28-year-olds. They work at the exact same company, they have the exact same job title, and they earn the exact same salary.
Speaker #0
Okay, so on paper, they are equals.
Speaker #1
Right. But one of them has parents who can help with a deposit on a starter home, or who can comfortably cover a sudden $2,000 medical emergency. The other one does not.
Speaker #0
So employee A is building equity in a home and has this psychological safety net. While employee B is trapped in a cycle of skyrocketing rent and lives in constant like low-grade financial terror, despite their on-paper equality at work.
Speaker #1
Precisely. If we connect this to the bigger picture and return to your video game analogy, it's an open-world game, but it has become completely pay-to-win.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's brutal.
Speaker #1
The invisible safety net of the bank of mom and dad is what makes the modern transition to adulthood playable for some and impossible for others.
Speaker #0
So what does this all mean? I mean, if everything is so expensive that you have to rely on your family to hit these milestones, isn't there a massive irony here? We have a generation that values independence and autonomy above all else, but they are completely tethered to intergenerational wealth just to survive.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Doesn't this make the new adulthood incredibly unequal?
Speaker #1
That is the defining inequality of this generation's transition. Adulthood is becoming more flexible, yes, but it is simultaneously becoming dangerously stratified. Two people can work just as hard, but their outcomes are dictated by their parents' bank accounts. The real question we need to stop asking is, why are young people taking so long to grow up? The actual question we should be asking is, what does it actually cost to become independent today?
Speaker #0
And if you're an employer, that financial anxiety doesn't just disappear when they log on to Slack. I mean, that impacts performance, loyalty, burnout. It's a chilling question when you really look at the numbers. But I want to pivot to the psychological toll this takes. Because if you pull the Super Mario analogy all the way through, if you're dropped into this massive open world map without a compass, no wonder there's cognitive overload.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
You don't know if you're supposed to be fighting the career boss or doing the side quest of finding an apartment or just wandering around. When you separate adulthood from its traditional symbols, you're left with this really heavy burden of choice.
Speaker #1
It is a tremendous cognitive load. Gen Z is separating adulthood from its traditional symbols, right? Marriage and kids are now seen as choices or expressions of personal commitment. They are no longer societal obligations required to prove you are a legitimate adult.
Speaker #0
Which sounds great. I mean, on paper, it looks like this ultimate liberated utopia. You don't have to get married or buy a house by 25 to be respected.
Speaker #1
But without that fixed roadmap, young people are facing paralyzing decisions amidst massive economic uncertainty.
Speaker #0
It sounds absolutely exhausting to me. You're waking up every day and you have to invent your own metrics for success. You ask yourself constantly, you know. Should I buy a tiny place? Should I rent forever and invest my money? Do I settle down now or do I emigrate to a country with better pay?
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
Am I prioritizing my career hustle or my mental health? You basically have to invent the finish line every single day, all while the economy makes you feel like you're permanently falling behind.
Speaker #1
It is exhausting and we really shouldn't romanticize it. Gen Z is not refusing to grow up. But they also haven't discovered some magical, stress-free version of adulthood either. They're simply trying to build a stable life, while the very structures that previously defined stability are crumbling around them.
Speaker #0
You're trying to build a house in an earthquake.
Speaker #1
Exactly. The ultimate conclusion we can draw from all the source material, from Walczak in Poland to the Eurostat data to Tucci's research, is that for Gen Z, adulthood is something you feel capable of long before you can afford to show it.
Speaker #0
Wow. Capable of long before you can afford to show it. That per- perfectly encapsulates the shift. The visible proof is lagging years behind the internal maturity.
Speaker #1
And that reality is deeply going to impact how this generation views specific milestones moving forward. If you feel like an adult without a house or a spouse or a child, what do those things actually mean to you now? Why would you pursue them?
Speaker #0
Right.
Speaker #1
And that's exactly what the rest of the series will explore as we dive into how Gen Z approaches love, housing, and family in the future.
Speaker #0
It changes the entire paradigm. Which brings me to a final provocative thought I want you, the listener, to mull over as you go about your day. We've talked deeply about how Gen Z defines adulthood and maturity by these internal metrics. Agency, decision making, setting boundaries, responsibility. Rather than visible milestones like a mortgage or a marriage certificate. But what happens when this generation ages into senior leadership, into management, and into political power? Will they evaluate the maturity and the readiness of their own employees or even their own children? Using completely invisible internal metrics that older generations can't even recognize. If the game is shifted from a linear Super Mario checklist to an open world experience, the people writing the rules of society are about to change the scoring system permanently. Are you ready for how they'll keep score?
Speaker #1
That's a great question.
Speaker #0
Free X for listening to the Gen Z Shift Audio.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About The Generation Z Shift: Conversations

An audio series extending the ideas behind Benoit Vancauwenberghe’s bestselling book, The Gen Z Shift: Why Today's Leaders Keep Acting on the Wrong Signals

How are Gen Z and Gen Alpha reshaping the way we work, lead, and build organizations?

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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