An Off-Meta Millennial New post Raised by dinosaurs

Some of my teachers grew up playing with live ammunition. As kids they found leftover explosives and cartridges while roaming around outside, in a country still digging itself out of a war, and they told us about it the way other people talk about their first bike. Then came the school stories: drilled for obedience and discipline, the cane on standby, punishment as a teaching method. Not a complaint, though – a recipe. That’s what had made them who they were, and by implication, that’s what was going to make something out of us.

That generation built my idea of what work looks like long before I had a job, and the job, when it came, didn’t really disagree. Two apprenticeships at the same marketing agency, each with its matching Berufsschule (the vocational school that runs alongside a German apprenticeship); bosses and clients who mostly owned family-run businesses and agencies; later the managers, owners and stakeholders of the German yellow-pages business (and its connected publishing landscape), whose digital branch I worked for. Conservative, older, white, male, very sure of themselves – and a few of them from the post-war generation, the same one that taught me in school. My colleagues, meanwhile, were mostly young: a little older than me, my age, or younger. Two generations sat in the same office running on completely different operating systems, and only one of them signed the paychecks.

I quit both apprenticeships right before the final exams and never picked up either certificate, more or less on purpose: even back then I believed that what matters is what I can do, not what’s printed on a piece of paper – practice over theory. I figured I had enough skills to always find something to work on, enough for a subsistence-level income at the very least. I still believe that today, just in a more elaborate version: character, soft skills, hard skills, critical thinking, curiosity, humanity and a not-too-serious mindset (a grown-up child, basically) are what I value in myself and in the people around me. It’s worked out so far, which proves exactly nothing about whether it’s the right approach; survivorship bias is a hell of a drug.

Old meta, new patch

Gamers have a word for the dominant way to play: the meta. It’s whatever everybody agrees works, rules aside, until a patch drops – and then half the strategies stop working while the people who mastered them keep playing like nothing happened.

The old meta of German office life was easy to read: the office is the hub, and the hum of small talk, check-ins and hallway chatter is simply what work sounds like. You defer to the boss because the boss is the boss. You go above and beyond your contract to prove your loyalty and master your craft. And when you’re young, you suffer: Lehrjahre sind keine Herrenjahre, roughly “apprentice years are no gentleman’s years”, which in practice meant menial tasks, the grind and a steady dose of mild humiliation as the entry fee to a career. Anybody expecting respect on day one obviously had an ego of Olympic proportions.

The new meta – the one my young colleagues played back then, and the one the young crowd plays today – reads every one of those rules as a bug. They don’t buy that suffering builds character. They want to learn the job, and they refuse to be oppressed while doing it; baseline respect is the starting point, not a reward, and old-school hazing is just brainrot with a pension plan. Nobody curtsies for a title anymore: authority gets earned through competence, and older managers who failed upward into leadership without the skills for it get the eye-roll they’ve earned.

That failing-upward thing has a name, the Peter principle, coined by Laurence J. Peter in 1969: people get promoted until they land in a job they can’t do. A study of sales workers across hundreds of US firms found it’s real – and that tenure has nothing to do with it. Companies promote their best salespeople, and the best salespeople turn out to be worse managers; their teams sell less under them. The Peter principle is what you get when you promote for competence, just competence at the wrong job, so “authority through pure skill” is the exact mechanism that produced the bosses everybody’s rolling their eyes at. Patch notes: working as intended.

The extra mile is the same story with a pay slip attached. German apprentices in companies with collective agreements averaged 1,209 EUR gross a month in 2025, and grinding unpaid overtime on top of that is a shit trade – everybody under 30 can do that math. The logic is strictly transactional: minimum pay, minimum effort, or “act your wage”, as TikTok calls it. The old crowd reads that as a lack of work ethic; the young read the old crowd’s version as a scam they’re expected to fall for.

And the office? Here the stereotype trips over its own feet. The cliché says the young want to mute the office like a noisy lobby and hide at home, but Gallup found that 71% of Gen Z employees prefer hybrid, the highest share of any generation, while only 23% want fully remote, against 35% of everyone older. They want the office for mentorship. What they want to mute is the lobby around it: the meeting that could’ve been a message, the hallway chat that nukes a flow state, the manager who says “keep me in the loop” and means “you carry my mental load now”. And when leadership turns condescending or authoritarian, they don’t take the heat; they walk.

Then there’s the body: the old meta treats a sick day as a character flaw and toughing it out as a virtue, while the new one stays home when it’s sick, to protect itself and everybody else in the room. Germany runs this debate at the very top: Chancellor Friedrich Merz complained publicly about the country’s sick-leave numbers – 19.5 calendar days per DAK-insured employee in 2025 – and business voices dusted off the idea of not paying people for their first sick day at all. The data doesn’t even point at the young, mind you: older workers call in sick less often, but they stay out longer. A man born in 1955 scolding the workforce for being sick too often is the old meta speaking from the top of the leaderboard.

The older crowd had its crises too, the Cold War, Chernobyl, but by their own account those stayed abstract, a kind of background radiation (sorry) that didn’t wreck the daily routine. The young today get inflation, impossible rents, climate doom and a job market that AI is quietly rearranging, all at once and all the time. And the single-income household that once carried the life admin is gone: in 1997 the most common German setup among parents was dad full-time and mom at home, and by 2022 it was dad full-time, mom part-time, so somebody still handles the household, just on top of a job now. Small wonder the 2025 Jugend in Deutschland study found 49% of young Germans stressed and 34% exhausted. The twist is in the same study, though: 60% of under-30s look ahead with optimism, against 30% of 30- to 49-year-olds and a grim 6% of everyone over 50. The doom, it turns out, lives in the boardroom.

Not a generation, an era

Well, here’s the thing: I’m not Gen Z. I was born in December 1988, a millennial by every definition, raised by people who played with ammunition – and I’ve stood on the Z side of this table for as long as I can remember.

Sociologist Martin Schröder has an explanation that flatters nobody. He ran the survey data through the test generational talk usually skips, separating age, historical period and birth year, and found that work matters more to people as they get older, then less again, and that it matters less to everybody as time moves on. Those two effects make every younger cohort look work-shy, while the birth year itself explains almost nothing. He even said a literary agency once dangled a book deal in front of him if he could prove Gen Y was different – and he couldn’t find anything. So what looks like Gen Z versus boomers is mostly 22-year-olds versus 60-year-olds, both living in a time that values work less than it used to.

That explains me better than any label does: I didn’t defect to another generation. The timeline moved and I moved with it, while the bosses I grew up under stayed exactly where they’d planted their flags.

I’ve met a few of those flags in person, at the bar, more than once, in both Frankfurt and Sài Gòn. Managers and CEOs – Western, white, older than me, every single one – who couldn’t accept that somebody might see work differently, and who heatedly tried to convince me that their way was the holy grail and that I ought to be ashamed of mine. The cringe of those evenings still sits in my teeth. One of them, I know for a fact, has burned out since and aged at a speed that would make a time-lapse jealous. No comment.

Same speech, different lore

In Sài Gòn I hear the same speech with a different accent. Vietnamese builds hierarchy right into its grammar: at work you’re em (little sibling) to anybody senior, they’re anh or chị (big brother, big sister), and every single sentence carries the org chart in its pronouns. German at least lets you pick between du and Sie; Vietnamese doesn’t let you opt out.

So when a young employee pushes back on a superior in what they consider a normal debate, the superior hears hỗn, talking back, and local media has even coined a nickname for the whole cohort: bóng ma công sở, office ghosts. One HR survey says 75% of Vietnamese employees run into generational friction at work, mostly over hierarchy and feedback, and Gen Z here stays about 2.2 years per job, against 3.2 years for millennials and 4.3 years for Gen X. The stories going around Sài Gòn’s tech offices sound familiar, too: the same terrible “keep me in the loop” phrase, the same loyalty sermons, delivered in Vietnamese, in imported Western management English, or in that American-tech dialect where grinding is called “ownership”.

Same speech, then – pay your dues, don’t talk back, loyalty first – but the lore behind it couldn’t be more different. German boomers ground their way through an economic miracle; the Vietnamese generations above today’s twentysomethings worked to survive, and as one IT executive put it, they picked the job they needed over the job they wanted because nothing else was on the table. That’s not a dinosaur mindset – that’s a scar. And the law still runs on the old meta: the private-sector standard is a 48-hour week with overtime capped at 200 hours a year (300 hours in some industries), while public servants have had a 40-hour week since 1999.

What surprised me most, though, were the interns: eighteen fresh graduates I’m currently buddying for, and their hunger is contagious: nobody in that room thinks effort is a scam. What they won’t swallow is the disrespect and the dead ends that effort used to come bundled with – and that’s a better version of the new meta than anything TikTok ever came up with.

Paid for by the dinosaurs

Gen Z and I end up in the same spot, working to live instead of living to work, but we got there from opposite ends. Their stance comes from scarcity: when rent eats everything and a house is a fantasy, grinding for a future you’ll never afford is just bad math. Mine comes from having enough. In 2017 I ran the numbers on my own (German) salary and found myself in the top 10% in Germany and the top 0.34% of humanity – rich without a plan, without a degree, without a single finished apprenticeship. My salary has changed since then and is now in line with Vietnamese standards, though it’s still above average there (but below the German average). I’m a wealthy, privileged white guy by accident, born in Germany toward the tail end of the boom years, and that boom was built by exactly the kind of people who drilled me; my “life first” is partly paid for by their “work first”.

That’s also why I rarely complain. Looking up at the richer and more successful is easy, but looking around, and down, at where most of our species actually lives is harder, and it’s what I try to do. What I see makes me more than satisfied – with what I have, with my life, and with less, if it comes to that. And it makes me mad at the same time, about what all of it costs: a “good life” out of reach for the global majority, built on the backs of countless people around me and around the globe, inside a system I keep feeding because it feeds me back. I don’t want to be rich, and yet I am (not talking about being super rich or even overrich, btw); I don’t want to prop up this machine, and yet I eat from it every single day.

A few thousand feet

So do I always go the extra mile? Depends on the mile. Anything that genuinely excites me, AI and anything creative, gets the full marathon, at work and around it, because I’d run it anyway, contract or no contract. Everything else gets handled to the best of my knowledge and belief, which is mostly satisfactory and, well, not always.

And not every extra mile that looked like one actually was – some people see a few thousand feet and believe they just watched you run a whole mile; I won’t confirm it and I won’t correct it, unless somebody asks. The old meta runs on how things look, and I’ve learned to work inside it without ever believing in it – probably the most millennial skill there is.

Hit the brakes

Corporate culture measures time in efficiency, productivity and profitability: output per hour, hours per quarter, quarters per career. That constant push to accelerate burns through resources faster than the planet can regenerate them, and it burns through people at the same rate, against every natural rhythm a body or an ecosystem needs to recover. More, faster, now – and both the planet and the people on it are running out of breath. Sometimes the healthiest move is to hit the brakes and do nothing at all, because a whole lot of harm, and more than a few disasters, never happen simply because somebody chose not to act. I spent an entire post on what we did to boredom; doing nothing on purpose is its grown-up sibling.

Bronnie Ware worked in palliative care and wrote down what the dying told her they regretted. Nobody mentioned efficiency. They wished they’d had the courage to live their own life instead of the one others expected of them, wished they hadn’t worked so hard, wished they’d said what they felt, kept in touch with their friends and let themselves be happier. It’s a nurse’s memoir, not a study, and it doesn’t need to be one: picture yourself at the end, and the line between good time and wasted time draws itself – right where living meaningfully and living sustainably meet.

At 28, I published the meaning of my life on this blog: life exists to keep life going, and wealth, power, honor, family, happiness and joy were all too shallow to count. Nine years later the first three are still out, but the other three came back in through the front door, and they brought cake.

When I run Ware’s exercise on myself, what shows up is Jayden, my fiancé, and me. The dumb joy of a night with friends. The respect I feel for nature and its endlessly interwoven mechanics and niches, a really good piece of cake (again), a song that hits, the infrared radiation warming my skin on a walk below a brownish-blueish Sài Gòn sky on a hot afternoon. And whatever small dent I managed to make for the people after me and for our home planet, even if it costs me something, because that part of the 2017 answer never left: keep life going.

Life first; money and career second – or third, if family and friends count as a set of their own rather than a subset of life.