Disengagement as a Rational Response

 

M I D O R I   I N S I G H T S

Disengagement as a Rational Response

Why Generation Z is not rejecting work, but a psychological contract it has watched go unhonored

 

1. The wrong indictment

The dominant discourse on Generation Z fits in one sentence: they no longer want to work. They stand accused of laziness, of fragility, of a dilettante relationship to effort. The case has been built for the prosecution, and it has been built on the wrong charge. Because what we observe in the field, in organizations as in the available surveys, is not a motivational deficit. It is a far more interesting behavior: an audit.

A long essay published in July 2026 in The New York Times by the journalist Emi Nietfeld, a former Google engineer and a figure of American meritocracy, offers striking material. She set out to interview young graduates across the United States and came back with a finding that reaches well beyond the American context: these young people no longer believe that work, in the traditional sense, leads to a reliable return. They are entering what she describes as a casino economy, where gains arrive as windfalls and vanish just as suddenly, and where preparing for tomorrow seems to have lost its meaning.

One of the graduates she interviewed puts it with remarkable lucidity:

“Our generation recognizes a bad deal when they see it.” (quoted by E. Nietfeld, The New York Times, July 2026)

This sentence deserves to be taken seriously. It does not say “I do not want to work.” It says: I have examined the terms of the contract, I have watched how it was honored for those who came before me, and I am drawing the consequences. This is exactly the reasoning of a creditor who refuses to lend again to a debtor in default. Let us name things as they are: this generation’s disengagement is not a pathology of the will. It is a rational response to an unhonored psychological debt.

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2. The ledger observed: a generation that audited the psychological contract

Let us recall the mechanism. When a person commits to an organization, an implicit psychological contract is formed: I give my time, my energy, part of my identity; in return, I receive more than a salary. I receive a sense of reality, of usefulness, of belonging, and the credible promise of a better future. When this contract is broken, promises unkept, contributions unrecognized, transitions skipped over, the organization accumulates what I call psychological debts: emotional liabilities that generate compound interest and eventually trigger a default, in the form of disengagement, departure or collapse.

What is singular about Generation Z is that it did not need to live through this rupture itself. It observed it. Psychological debts are transmissible: they circulate between generations the way liabilities circulate between heirs. These young people watched their millennial elders burn out in companies that promised meaning and delivered exhaustion. They watched wages stagnate while housing costs made ownership improbable. They watched the cardinal promise of the degree, four years of effort in exchange for a guaranteed job, cease to be honored: according to the data cited by Nietfeld, nearly half of recent American graduates are unemployed or underemployed.

The result is measurable. Still according to the surveys reported in this essay, eight American high-school graduates of the class of 2022 out of ten do not expect work to be an important part of their lives, nor their job to be particularly interesting. This figure does not express indifference. It expresses a provision for doubtful debt: one does not invest emotionally in a debtor whose default one anticipates. The relationship to work becomes transactional not out of cynicism, but out of accounting prudence.

A second finding illuminates the mechanics at a deeper level. A landmark longitudinal study led by the psychologist Timothy Judge and his team, published in 2012 and following more than seven hundred people over seventy years, shows that ambition develops above all in the middle classes: enough security to dare, enough scarcity to desire. Ambition is therefore not a character trait distributed at random. It is the product of a balance between protection and promise. When the middle class contracts and the promise of upward mobility disappears, ambition contracts with it. No one created this situation intentionally. But its effects are perfectly logical.

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3. Beneath the debt, a crisis of ontological security

We need to go one level deeper to grasp the gravity of what is at stake. Work is not merely an economic exchange. It is one of the great mechanisms through which our societies regulate existential insecurity: it provides an identity, a usefulness, a place in a collective narrative, a capacity to project oneself forward. This is what I call the ontological validation function of organizations. When this function goes dark, motivation is not the first thing to collapse: the first casualty is the feeling of having a grip on one’s own existence.

Nietfeld’s essay cites a troubling observation on this point by Professor Stephen Nowicki of Emory University: in 2024, the students in his seminar reported a lower sense of control over their lives than the average prison inmate reported in 1966. I cite this finding with caution, it is a reported observation rather than a study I have been able to examine, but it converges with everything research has otherwise established: the sense of mastery over one’s destiny, what psychology calls an internal locus of control, is one of the most robust predictors of health, perseverance and the capacity to bounce back. A generation that no longer believes today’s effort improves tomorrow has not lost its work ethic. It has lost access to the anthropological function of the project.

Let us then reread this situation through the grid of the three dimensions of psychological debts. The dimension of Time: when the future becomes unreadable, projection fades, and with it the capacity to defer gratification; several of the young people interviewed explain that they no longer form any plan, not at ten years, not at five, not even at one. The dimension of Justice: the central institutional promise, effort rewarded, was broken visibly and repeatedly, and this breach was never acknowledged by those who carried it. The dimension of Place: belonging to the middle class, housing, stability, everything that once constituted an attainable social place has become, for many, a renounced horizon. Some say it explicitly: they have stopped desiring what they judge inaccessible, in order to protect themselves. Three debts, three dimensions, one and the same movement of withdrawal.

This withdrawal has its dignity. Refusing to exhaust oneself for a system that does not pay its debts is a form of health. But it also has its cost, and it would be naive to ignore it: a generation that gives up on projecting itself forward also gives up part of what makes a life inhabitable. Human beings are future-oriented creatures. Protecting them from a bad contract must not deprive them of any contract at all.

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4. What this asks of organizations: becoming solvent again

Faced with this diagnosis, the temptation of executive teams is well known: seduction devices, symbolic foosball tables, employer-branding campaigns. This is treating an adaptive challenge as a technical problem. You do not re-motivate a burned creditor with communication. You convince them by becoming solvent again. Concretely, four workstreams seem to me to be priorities.

First workstream: the discipline of the promise. An organization that wants to re-engage this generation must promise less and honor everything. Every implicit promise, career progression, training, balance, must be treated as a recorded commitment, tracked and settled. Trust is not declared; it is amortized line by line.

Second workstream: recognition. Our own multivariate analyses, conducted on several thousand employees in industrial and white-collar settings, converge on a result I consider central: recognition is the only lever that acts simultaneously on reducing suffering and on activating engagement. It is the lever with the best return, and it is precisely the one this generation has been served the least.

Third workstream: restoring control. If the deep ailment is the loss of the feeling of having a grip on one’s life, then every margin of maneuver handed back, over how one organizes one’s work, one’s schedule, one’s professional choices, is a direct repayment of the debt. Autonomy is not a perk. It is a treatment.

Fourth workstream: the capacitating narrative. An organization cannot make the future certain; no one can. But it can offer a narrative in which collective effort has visible effects, where milestones are celebrated, where transitions are ritualized rather than skipped over. This is the whole difference between a promise of ascent, which has lost credibility, and an experience of progression, which remains buildable. The question is not who was wrong. The question is: what do we do now?

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Generation Z has not killed the value of work. It has presented the invoice for a debt that others allowed to run. Organizations that hear this as a complaint will lose this generation. Those that hear it as an audit, and that have the courage to answer it with deeds, will discover a generation perfectly capable of commitment: provided the contract is, at last, honored on both sides. This, in the end, is what sustainable performance means: not extracting effort through pressure or seduction, but deserving it through the quality of relationships, management and governance.

References

Nietfeld E. (2026), “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. I Don’t Blame Them”, The New York Times, Opinion, July 23, 2026.

Judge T. A., Kammeyer-Mueller J. D. (2012), longitudinal study on ambition cited in the essay above; exact title to be verified before academic citation.

Lincke H.-J. et al. (2021), COPSOQ III, n = 257,236 German employees, Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology.

Poirot M. (2026), Les dettes psychologiques au travail, L’Harmattan, Paris.

Poirot M. (2026), Arrêtez de vous épuiser, Eyrolles, Paris.

Further reading

Matthieu Poirot, Les dettes psychologiques au travail. Prévenir et réguler les tensions psychosociales dans les organisations(Psychological Debts at Work: Preventing and Regulating Psychosocial Tensions in Organizations), L’Harmattan, Psycho-logiques series, 2026. Foreword by Thierry Chavel, afterword by Guillaume Lefebvre. In French.

 

About the author

Matthieu Poirot is a social psychologist and holds a doctorate in management sciences (Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas). Founder of Midori Consulting, he has been intervening for more than twenty years in acute psychosocial crises and advises executive teams on building sustainable performance. He is the author, in 2026, of Arrêtez de vous épuiser (Eyrolles) and Les dettes psychologiques au travail (L’Harmattan), and the creator of the ICI® methodology (Integrative Contextual Intervention).