They are not apathetic. They are watching. And what they see is damning.
Jess is 26. She finished university with honours, carries a student debt she will be paying off into her forties, and works two jobs to cover rent on a flat she will never own. She votes. She reads widely. She does not watch the evening news because she learned during COVID that it was not journalism but compliance programming, and that the evening news was not informing her. It was watching her.
She is not apathetic. She is not disengaged. She is furious, quietly and precisely, at a class of leaders who have made it abundantly clear that the world she will inherit is not a priority.
She is also not alone.
The Death of the Statesman
There was a time when political leadership carried a certain gravity. You did not have to agree with a Billy Hughes, Robert Menzies or even a Gough Whitlam (in his early years) to acknowledge they operated from conviction and carried genuine intellectual weight. Whether it was Thatcher or Schmidt, Mandela or Lee Kuan Yew, the postwars generation of leaders, for all their flaws, understood something fundamental: they were stewards. The country was not theirs. It was borrowed. And the terms of that loan included a duty to hand it back in reasonable condition.
That model is dead.
What replaced it is not leadership. It is incumbency. Career politicians who entered public life in their twenties, built nothing, created nothing, risked nothing, and spent three or four decades learning one skill above all others: how to stay. Not how to serve. How to stay.
And the staying requires money. The staying requires patrons. The staying requires a willingness to serve interests that have nothing to do with the people who actually cast the votes.
This is not conspiracy. This is pattern recognition.
When a political leader consistently makes decisions that damage the welfare of their own citizens while advancing the interests of a global financial and industrial elite, you do not need a theory. You need a calculator. Follow the money, follow the appointments, follow the post-office speaking fees and board seats, and the pattern reveals itself without the slightest need for speculation.
The Information Asymmetry Has Flipped
The younger generation can see this. Not because they are smarter. Because the information is available. In real time. Unfiltered. Cross-referenced. In a recent speech before the National Press Club in Australia, the current Pinocchio Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, lamented the days when people got their news from one of three channels or the broadsheet and how good it was because it was controlled information. That should tell you enough about the relationship between politics and the press.
The previous generations that formed their worldview from three television networks and a single broadsheet now lectures a generation that can pull primary source documents, parliamentary voting records, donor registries and corporate filings before breakfast. The output of that is labelled misinformation. The irony is almost too generous to point out.
The Architects of the Current Mess
Look at the architects of the current global mess.
The men making the largest decisions about war, trade, sovereignty and the future of entire populations are overwhelmingly old, long-tenured, and structurally compromised. Not compromised in some shadowy, thriller-novel sense. Compromised in the structural sense. Their incentive systems no longer connect to outcomes for citizens. Their loyalty sits with legacy, donors, defence contractors, and a globalised power structure that treats national borders as accounting inconveniences.
Benjamin Netanyahu. Forty years in and around power. Whatever your view of the Middle East, no serious observer argues he operates in the interest of peace when conflict serves his political survival.
The Ayatollahs. A gerontocratic theocracy that has held an entire population hostage to the worldview of men who were already old when the revolution began.
The parade continues. Pick a continent. The faces change. The age bracket mostly does not. The donor class definitely does not; and the outcomes most certainly do not.
And if you are 22 years old, watching this unfold on your phone at two in the morning, what exactly are you supposed to feel? Respect? Deference? Gratitude?
No. You feel what any rational person feels when the people in charge of the building are the ones setting fire to it. You feel the urgent need to find the exit, or the fire extinguisher, or at the very least to stop pretending the fire is not real.
In Defence of Experience
Now, intellectual honesty demands a concession here, and I will make it willingly.
Age is not the problem. Corruption dressed in seniority is the problem. Those are very different things.
Experience has a compound quality that information alone does not replicate. You can read every book ever written on negotiation, but until you have sat across the table from someone who wants to take everything you have, and you have lost, and then sat down again the next time and not lost, you do not truly know negotiation. You have information. You do not yet have knowledge. Knowledge is information tested against reality, pressure and consequence. And that testing takes years.
The older generation, at its best, carries a depth of pattern recognition that no amount of internet access can replace. The ability to walk into a room and feel what is actually happening beneath the words. The ability to hold a position when every signal is telling you to fold, because you have been here before, and you know the pressure is temporary but the decision is permanent. That is earned. Not downloaded.
So this is not an argument against age. This is an argument against the specific abuse of seniority by people who have used their years not to accumulate wisdom but to accumulate immunity. There is a vast difference between a leader who has grown wiser with time and a leader who has simply grown more entrenched. The former listens more carefully as the years pass. The latter stops listening entirely and calls it experience.
The Generation They Love to Dismiss
Which brings us to the people they are so fond of criticising. The younger generation gets a rough ride in commentary. Entitled. Fragile. Job-hoppers. Unable to commit.
Some of that criticism has merit. Every generation carries its own blind spots and weaknesses. But there is something buried in the critique that the critics would rather not examine.
The reason younger workers leave jobs more readily is not because they lack loyalty. It is because they have a lower tolerance for being lied to. They grew up watching institutions lie. They watched governments lie through a pandemic. They watched corporations post record profits while telling staff there was no budget for pay rises. They watched banks get bailed out while their parents lost homes.
So yes, they leave. Because leaving a situation that does not serve you is not disloyalty. It is self-respect. And self-respect is the one quality the current leadership class cannot afford to see normalised, because self-respect is the precondition for refusing to comply.
This generation is not perfect. They are often brittle where they think they are strong, performative where they think they are principled, and too quick to confuse opinion with action. But they are awake. More awake than my generation was at the same age, and certainly more awake than the people currently running the world would like them to be.
So What Does This Mean if You Run a Business?
Everything. Because this dynamic is not confined to politics. It plays out in every boardroom, every leadership team, and every organisation where the people at the top have been there long enough to confuse tenure with legitimacy.
The CEO who dismisses younger employees as "not getting it" is running the same playbook as the career politician who dismisses voters as "uninformed." The executive team that hoards decision-making authority while claiming to value innovation is operating from the same structural dishonesty as a government that holds consultations it has no intention of acting on. The leader who responds to challenge with "I have been doing this for thirty years" is not offering experience. He is offering a wall.
And the commercial consequences are already visible.
The businesses losing their best young talent are not losing them to competitors. They are losing them to disillusionment. The same disillusionment Jess feels about the political system, her peers feel about organisations that talk about values in the annual report and then behave as though people are interchangeable production units.
If you lead a team, a division, or a company, here is what this moment demands.
First, stop conflating loyalty with compliance. A younger employee who challenges your strategy is not being disloyal. They are doing the thing you claim to want when you say you want "people who think." If you punish the thinking, you will keep the compliant. And the compliant will never tell you when the building is on fire.
Second, earn your authority daily. Positional power is the weakest form of leadership and the most expensive to maintain. If the only reason people follow your direction is that you control their salary, you do not have a team. You have a hostage situation with HR paperwork. The leader whose authority is built on competence, clarity and genuine care for outcomes does not need to remind anyone of their title. The work speaks. And younger people can spot the difference between the two faster than any generation before them.
Third, share the room. Not as a gesture. As a structural commitment. Put younger leaders into real decisions with real consequences and real support. Not a mentorship programme that meets once a quarter over a sandwich. Actual proximity to power, with actual permission to use it. If you are unwilling to do that, examine why. The answer is usually that you do not trust them. And if you do not trust them, the follow-up question is whether you have built an environment worth trusting in return, or are you simply crap at hiring the right people for the right roles?
The businesses that will thrive in the coming decade are not the ones with the best technology or the deepest pockets. They are the ones that have resolved the leadership legitimacy question. Where people follow because the direction makes sense and the person setting it has earned the right to set it. Not because they have been in the chair the longest.
What Happens When the Valve Stops Working
The question is not whether the disillusionment is justified. It is.
The question is what happens when it reaches critical mass.
History is not ambiguous on this point. When a governing class becomes so disconnected from the governed that its decisions consistently serve a different population than the one it claims to represent, the gap does not close through conversation. It has never closed through conversation. Every meaningful transfer of power in human history, every genuine correction in the relationship between the ruling and the ruled, has come not because the powerful were persuaded, but because the cost of maintaining the arrangement became higher than the cost of changing it.
That is not advocacy. That is observation. And the observation carries a weight that should concern anyone currently sitting in a position of authority, whether in government or in a corner office.
The younger generation is doing what it can within the civil structures available. Voting. Organising. Building alternative media. Starting businesses outside the legacy system. Running for local office. These are legitimate, necessary, and to be encouraged.
But let us not pretend that civil engagement alone has ever been sufficient when the system it engages with has been engineered to absorb dissent without changing. When the consultation process is theatre. When the vote produces a choice between two versions of the same captured class. When the regulatory framework protects the incumbents and penalises the challengers. When that is the reality, and it is increasingly the reality, then civil engagement becomes a pressure valve, not a solution. It lets enough steam out to prevent the rupture while the temperature underneath continues to rise.
What happens when the valve stops working is not a question I need to answer. History answers it repeatedly and consistently.
The people currently in charge would do well to read some of it.
What Jess & Her Generation Actually Wants
Jess does not want a revolution. She wants a home she owns, a government that does not treat people as a commodity or her generation as an afterthought, food security and future opportunity, and leaders who can look her in the eye without lying.
That these things feel revolutionary says everything about the distance between the people in charge and the people they are charged with serving.
The gerontocracy has lost the room. The question is whether it will leave the stage with whatever dignity it has left, or whether it will wait, as it always does, to be shown the door.
The young are watching. They are not apathetic. They are taking notes.
And they have very long memories, very little patience and a very very low tolerance for bullshit.
Paul Lange advises owners, executives, and boards on the decisions that define commercial outcomes and organisational character, and on what a working board actually contributes. He has spent close to four decades across finance, technology, hospitality, professional services, and operating roles, in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, on both sides of the table, with private equity and venture capital one part of it, and has taken five of his own companies through to exit. He is the creator of the Total QX™ and TILE Theory™ frameworks, and the author of The 20% Leader, Mis(très)s Entrepreneur Manifesto, Evolve or Be Remembered, and The Inheritance Manifesto. He runs his advisory practice, Manolutions, from the Gold Coast, Queensland. He writes Conviction because leadership without accountability is just theatre.