# “Why Even Try?” — What My Son Told Me About Gen Z’s Future Shocked Me

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112/why-even-try-what-my-son-told-me-about-gen-z-s-future-shocked-me
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112/why-even-try-what-my-son-told-me-about-gen-z-s-future-shocked-me.md
Podcast: [AsianDadEnergy's Substack Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112)
Published: 2026-03-07T20:37:52+00:00
Episode link: https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/p/why-even-try-what-my-son-told-me
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/190226700/d7d042cefd26b5f09fecacaae02951a3.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112/episodes/why-even-try-what-my-son-told-me-about-gen-z-s-future-shocked-me
Duration seconds: 883

## Resource

Hello world. I’m an unemployed former Big Tech software engineer with 25 years in the technology industry. These days I joke that I’m in “involuntary early retirement.” One unexpected side effect of that situation is time, a lot more time with my kids. Recently, that time turned into a long and surprisingly heavy conversation with my teenage son. It started casually.It ended with a question that kept me awake most of the night. My son and his friends believe the future is going to be bad no matter what they do . So why bother trying? My First Reaction: Annoyance If I’m honest, my first reaction wasn’t particularly noble. I felt irritated. My instinct was to tell him to toughen up, to get out there and compete, to fight for opportunities, to stop whining about hypothetical problems. In my mind I was thinking: You’ve been given so many advantages. Why wouldn’t you take them and run? And then something uncomfortable hit me. I had heard this tone before. It was my parents’. Becoming Your Parents Growing up, whenever I struggled with something in life, the reaction I often received was blame. If something went wrong, it meant I had been: * Entitled * Ungrateful * Lazy * A disappointment Every major decision I made as an adult was judged as some level of mistake. Even now, my layoff from Big Tech, something that happened amid mass industry layoffs is seen by them as my greatest personal failure. I love my parents. But I’ve always believed that style of parenting is deeply counterproductive. And in that moment I realized I was about to repeat it. So instead of lecturing my son, I asked him a simple question. “Why do you think the future is hopeless?” What he told me was… remarkable. Fear #1: There Won’t Be Enough Good Jobs According to my son and his friends, the future job m…

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