The 24-year-old at the end of the table has just said, in a normal speaking voice, that she turned down a job because the company wouldn’t tell her the salary until the third interview. Her uncle makes a face. Her grandmother changes the subject to the stuffing.
Two hours later, driving home, the uncle admits to his wife that he stayed at a job for eleven years without once asking what the guy next to him made. He doesn’t admit this to his niece. He probably never will.
That’s the shape of the thing. Older generations complain about Gen Z in public and take notes in private. The habits that get mocked over pie are very often the same habits that, in a quieter moment, a 60-year-old will describe as “honestly, kind of smart.”
There’s a difference between conceding that Gen Z is right about something and wishing you’d done it yourself. Being right is an argument. This is envy, from people who would rather pass the gravy than say so.
1. They ask what a job pays before they apply for it
They won’t fill out the application if the range isn’t posted. They tell coworkers their number. They tell their friends their number. To someone who came up under the rule that salary is between you, your boss, and God, this looks like a lack of manners.
It’s also how they find out they’re underpaid before a decade goes by.
The generational gap here is enormous.
In a Bank of America survey reported by Forbes, 27% of Gen Z adults said they talk about their salary with friends, compared with 12% of Gen X and 3% of boomers. Bank of America’s Holly O’Neill, who is Gen X herself, told Forbes she didn’t do that at their age.
Most people over 50 learned the hard way that secrecy about pay benefits exactly one party, and it isn’t the employee. They just learned it too late to use it.
2. They drink far less than their parents did at the same age
The Thanksgiving bar cart is mostly for the adults over 45 now. The younger cousins have a seltzer, maybe one glass of wine, and they’re the ones who remember the evening clearly.
Boomers and Gen X came of age when drinking was the default social skill. Not drinking required an explanation. Their kids treat it as a choice, and increasingly the choice is no.
The numbers moved fast.
Gallup found that the share of adults under 35 who drink fell from 59% in 2023 to 50% in 2025, the first time young adults have reported lower drinking rates than middle-aged and older adults. Gallup’s own earlier analysis credits part of the long-term decline to the growing racial diversity of the age group, so it isn’t purely a virtue story.
Still, the parent who has spent 30 years managing a “just one more” habit can look at a kid who orders a soda without apologizing and feel something that isn’t judgment.
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3. They went into the trades while everyone told them to get a degree
The nephew who became an electrician at 20 is now the only person at the table with no student debt and a truck he owns outright. Nobody says it. Everybody has noticed.
Boomers pushed college hard because for them it mostly worked. Gen X pushed it because they were told to. Gen Z looked at the price tag, looked at the job market, and a meaningful slice of them walked into a welding program instead.
Enrollment data backs up what the family has already observed.
The National Student Clearinghouse reports that enrollment at trade-focused public two-year colleges grew almost 20% between spring 2020 and spring 2025, to 871,000 students, while four-year enrollment grew more slowly. Some outlets have flagged that the most viral “trade school boom” figures overstate the shift, so the trend is real but more modest than the headlines.
The quiet admiration isn’t about plumbing specifically. It’s about a 19-year-old doing the math on a $200,000 degree and coming up with a different answer than the adults in the room did.
4. They started saving for retirement in their early twenties
A 23-year-old mentions her Roth IRA and the table goes briefly silent. Then someone asks what a Roth IRA is. That someone is 58.
Older generations tend to remember their twenties as a time when retirement was an abstraction, something you’d get to once life settled down. For a lot of them it didn’t settle down until 40.
Gen Z didn’t wait for the settling.
A Nationwide Retirement Institute survey found that Gen Z savers began contributing to workplace retirement plans at an average age of 23, compared with 34 for Gen X and 40 for boomers. The comparison flatters the young a little, since a 25-year-old can’t have started at 40 no matter what, but the gap is still wide.
Every boomer who has run a compound interest calculator knows exactly what a 17-year head start is worth. That’s the part that stings.
5. They say they can’t afford something without dressing it up
The cousin says she’s not coming on the ski trip because it’s out of her budget. No fake conflict, no vague “we’ll see,” no illness invented the week before.
Gen X and boomers were raised to treat money trouble as a private embarrassment. You went on the trip and put it on a card, or you made up a reason. The one thing you never did was name the actual number.
Younger people gave the honest version a name and made it a trend.
“Loud budgeting,” which took off on TikTok in late 2023, is the practice of telling friends and family out loud when something doesn’t fit the budget, according to Axios, which also reported that personal finance experts expected the “no shame” approach to stick.
Bank of America’s 2026 study found 39% of Gen Z suggest free or low-cost activities when making plans with friends, and 29% host at home instead of going out.
The older relatives who spent years quietly overspending to keep up would have loved permission to do this at 26. Nobody gave it to them.
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6. They turn down work that goes against what they believe
The grandson says he passed on a project at work because he didn’t like what the client did. His grandfather, who spent 34 years at a company whose products he privately disliked, says nothing and reaches for the rolls.
For most of the twentieth century, the job was the job. You didn’t ask whether it aligned with your values. You asked whether it covered the mortgage, and it usually did.
Gen Z asks both questions, and acts on the answer.
Deloitte’s 2025 survey of more than 23,000 Gen Zs and millennials found that 44% of Gen Zs have left a role they felt lacked purpose, and roughly 40% have turned down an assignment or a potential employer over their personal ethics.
You can call that soft. You can also notice that the people calling it soft are often the ones who spent their working lives with a private list of things they wished they’d said no to.
7. They text their parents more than their parents ever called home
This is the one nobody expects to admire, because the complaint is so well rehearsed. They can’t get off their phones. They’re always on the group chat.
The group chat, in a lot of families, is the parents.
Boomers largely left home and called on Sundays, if that. Gen X had a phone in the hall and a long-distance bill to worry about. Their kids are in near-constant contact and don’t find that strange.
A Pew Research Center survey found that 61% of young adults text with a parent at least a few times a week, and 69% say they can be their true self around their parent most of the time.
The 62-year-old at the head of the table had a father she spoke to maybe six times a year. She has a daughter who sends her a photo of a weird dog every afternoon. She would sooner die than say which one she’d have picked, but she knows.
The admiration stays quiet because saying it out loud costs something
None of this is hard to see. The numbers are public and the behavior is on display at every holiday. The question is why the compliment never gets paid.
Part of it is a well-documented mental habit.
In a series of studies published in Science Advances, John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler found that adults tend to project their current qualities backward onto the youth of the past, so today’s kids always look like a decline. The effect was trait-specific: well-read people thought young people read less, respectful people thought they’d gotten disrespectful. Protzko has described it as a memory tic.
The other part is simpler and more personal. Every item on this list has a mirror image. If asking about pay is smart, then decades of silence were a mistake. If saving at 23 is smart, then starting at 40 wasn’t bad luck. If saying “I can’t afford it” is fine, then all those trips on the credit card were unnecessary.
Admiring the kid means re-reading your own record. That’s a lot to do over turkey.
So it comes out sideways. A comment in the car. A grudging “well, she’s not wrong” to a spouse. A quiet decision to finally ask what the guy in the next office makes, 30 years later than the niece would have.
The kids are getting the credit. They’re just getting it where they can’t hear it.
