Is Your Team Burnt Out? Unrealistic Expectations Might Be the Real Culprit
As young professionals demand purpose over routine tasks, leaders are facing a new kind of mental health crisis. Here's how to realign workplace culture.
Do you have employees who believe they should earn more, work less, and spend their days doing meaningful work instead of filing expense reports on time? You're not alone.
Deloitte's Gen Z and Millennial survey found that the overwhelming majority of both generations say a sense of purpose at work is central to their job satisfaction and wellbeing — and it isn't just talk. Many have turned down job offers over a company's ethics, and most say their current role lets them contribute something meaningful to society.
So why is this generation struggling with mental health?
They're seeking purpose, and by most measures they're finding it — yet their mental health is in worse shape than that of the generations before them. Researchers have noted that Gen Z, broadly those born between 1997 and 2012, is facing a level of psychological distress, diagnosis, and functional impairment with no clear precedent in recent public health data.
There's debate about why. One theory: Gen Z isn't necessarily struggling more — they're simply more willing to name the struggle and seek help. That may be part of the story. But it's also true that mental health difficulties have climbed across every age group. Globally, anxiety disorders and major depressive disorder now rank among the most burdensome conditions out of hundreds studied.
Inevitably, that reality follows people into the office — and it's a hard thing for companies to manage. You can offer every wellness benefit your budget allows, and people will still struggle. So what can a business owner or manager actually do?
Maybe what's missing is a dose of realism
Author Jason Pargin made a point recently that stuck with me. Asked for his most "radical" opinion — one that doesn't fall on the usual left-right spectrum — he argued that much of our collective depression and anxiety comes down to one thing: unrealistic expectations of what life is supposed to look like.
He pointed to people who struggle to find a partner but are never told, gently, that they might be aiming above their realistic prospects. Or parents who spend far more time with their kids than previous generations did, yet still feel it's never enough, because the bar keeps rising.
I see a version of this in hiring. People insist that companies should judge candidates purely on skill, not appearance — and in principle, that's fair. But it also creates the impression that a company will be just as likely to hire someone with blue hair and face tattoos as someone dressed conservatively. When that expectation collides with reality, disappointment follows.
Convince people that every problem lies with someone else — and that they themselves have nothing to adjust — and frustration is the natural result.
Social media pours fuel on this fire. Scroll through Reels long enough, and you'll start to believe everyone else your age has already built three venture-backed startups, or that logging off at 5 p.m. sharp and working remotely from a hotel in Peru is simply owed to them.
When employees expect every part of their job to feel meaningful — rather than accepting that a solid chunk of any day is boring but necessary — they end up anxious, depressed, and convinced their coworkers have it better.
If we want to make a dent in this as a society, we need to reconnect with reality. Purpose at work is worth pursuing, but only if it's grounded in what's actually possible.
This isn't a new problem, either. More than a century ago, Jenkin Lloyd Jones wrote something that still holds up:
Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just like people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is just like an old-time rail journey — delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.
How to help your team build realistic expectations
You can't ban social media. But you can shift the culture around it. A few places to start:
- Talk about your own path. The long hours, the unpaid dues, the slow climb — sharing that history gives people a sense of scale.
- Be transparent about career timelines. If people know from day one that a certain role typically takes ten years to reach, they're less likely to feel cheated at year three.
- Break down silos. Encourage employees across teams to actually interact — especially in remote settings, where isolation creeps in fast.
- Keep your own expectations grounded. Demanding the impossible from your employees makes you part of the problem, not the solution.
None of this will single-handedly fix society's mental health crisis. But it can ease the damage caused by expectations that were never realistic to begin with.
And it's worth turning the same lens on yourself. Chances are, you're carrying just as many unrealistic expectations as the people you manage.
