Every generation has its own story. My parents’ generation grew up with very little and spent much of their lives building. My generation was somewhere in between. We were expected to work hard, create something of our own, and leave some behind for the next generation.

I recently came across the term “bed rotting”. For those who haven’t heard of it, it is essentially spending long periods in bed doing little. Not sleeping. Not necessarily recovering. Just lying there, scrolling, watching something or opting out of the world for a while.

This is Gen Z’s way of dealing with stress and exhaustion. Fair enough. Everyone needs to switch off. Life can be exhausting, and there is nothing wrong with taking a break. But it got me thinking about something much bigger than bed rotting. Are we slowly raising a generation that is becoming a little too comfortable with comfort?

Interestingly, on the one hand, I see young people out on the streets demanding accountability. They question institutions. They challenge authority. They speak openly about things earlier generations suffered through silently. That is what a healthy society needs. But then I see instances where the very same “Gen Z” identity is almost used as an excuse for not having to deal with inconvenience or responsibility.

Remember the young woman whose video went viral after she got into an argument with Army personnel over traffic restrictions in a highly sensitive area? One of the arguments she used was, I am Gen Z and I am uncomfortable with the regulation. I could not help wondering when did being Gen Z become a new category of exemption? Sounds ridiculous. Being Gen Z is a generation. It isn’t a special pass. Of course, one individual does not represent an entire generation. But then I ask myself if it has anything to do with an emerging attitude that will become more visible soon. They should be able to question everything, but they should not necessarily be questioned themselves. That is where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

An ecosystem for doing nothing

My generation also had its share of doing nothing. We listened to radio, we hung around with friends, and wasted afternoons. But we didn’t have an entire digital ecosystem designed to keep us there.

Today, one reel leads to another. Food comes to the door. Shopping comes to the phone. GPS tells us where to go. Algorithms increasingly tell us what to watch, what to buy, and even what to think. Convenience is wonderful. But let’s ask while we are removing so much friction from life, are we also removing some of the experiences that build resilience. We do not develop resilience by being comfortable. We develop it by dealing with things that are not.

We parents are partly responsible. Many of us have told our children, “I didn’t have what you had. I want you to have everything.” We meant it with love. We gave them better education, travelled with them, bought them things we couldn’t afford and paid for experiences.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a better life for your children. But somewhere along the way, we confused giving them opportunities with removing every obstacle. A child who is allowed to fail learns something. A child who is rescued every time could learn something else. Experiences are great. But what do they lead to?

I hear the phrase “invest in experiences” often these days. Yes, by all means. Travel, explore, meet people, see the world, and experience different cultures. However, an experience should leave something behind, a perspective, a skill, a memory, an idea or a little more maturity. Otherwise, experiences can just become another form of consumption. There is a difference between experiencing life and consuming life.

I have seen young people whose parents funded sabbaticals, travel and every possible experience, only for them to struggle when financial independence arrived. I have also seen the opposite, young people given family money as seed capital, who took the risk, failed, tried again and then built something of their own.

Same privilege. Very different outcome. For one, parental support was a safety net. For the other, it was a launchpad.

The flip side

Then there is AI. I am a big believer in technology and AI. Anything that saves us time and allows us to do more is progress. But every convenience comes with a small danger too.

If we stop doing something because a machine can do it for us, we will also stop developing the ability to do it ourselves. We stopped remembering phone numbers as our phones remember them. We stopped navigating as GPS does it for us.

The question is not whether we should use AI. Of course, we should. The question is whether we become so dependent on it that we stop exercising our own curiosity and judgment. The greatest danger is not that AI becomes smarter than us. It is that we become comfortable being less smart because AI is available.

Discomfort isn’t always a bad thing. Every uncomfortable situation is not toxic. Neither is every difficult boss a bad one, nor every rule that inconveniences us is unreasonable. Sometimes we simply have to do something because it needs to be done. Sometimes we have to wait. Sometimes we have to fail. Sometimes we have to get out of bed.

That isn’t an argument against mental health or rest. Rest is important. Recovery is important. But recovery has meaning as there is something to recover for.

What will Gen Z do with what it has been given? I don’t think Gen Z is lazy. There are remarkably driven young people out there starting businesses, building careers, creating art, and doing things many of us couldn’t have imagined at their age. But another section seems to have inherited a great amount of comfort without necessarily inheriting the urgency earlier generations had to develop.

Losing hunger

That is the part that worries me. Not because they are Gen Z. But because too much comfort can quietly take away the hunger that makes us build.

We parents need to accept some responsibility for that. We wanted our children to have everything we didn’t have. What we should also have given them was a little more of what we did have, the need to earn, the ability to wait, the freedom to fail, the responsibility to stand on their own feet and the satisfaction of knowing “I did this myself.” Gen Z has something previous generations never had in this combination, extraordinary access, connectivity and a voice. They can challenge the world like never before. But with that voice comes responsibility.

You cannot demand accountability from everyone else and ask for an exemption when it is your turn to be accountable. You cannot demand freedom without accepting responsibility. You cannot question authority without also questioning yourself. And you cannot spend your life avoiding discomfort and expect resilience to magically appear when life gets difficult.

That is the real lesson behind bed rotting. It isn’t about lying in bed for a few hours. It is about what happens when comfort becomes a lifestyle rather than a pause. Every generation needs to ask itself what it is doing with what it has inherited. Our parents gave us something or nothing. We built on it ground up. Now we have handed something much bigger to our children. The question is not whether they will have a more comfortable life. They almost certainly will. The question is whether they will use that comfort to build more, contribute more and become more, or simply consume more.

Generations are not remembered for what they were given. They are remembered for what they did with it. That to mind is the uncomfortable question Gen Z, and those of us who raised them, should be asking, when comfort is no longer the problem, what will give us the reason to get out of bed?

yesudas@ynatransformation.com