The bottom line
Different generations bring different expectations about technology, work, consumption, institutions and personal priorities.
Why it matters
The impact is visible in workplace design, product expectations, leadership models and adoption patterns. The useful strategic response is to understand the shift without reducing complex generations to stereotypes.
From the foresight archive
Jim Carroll first published this as Megatrend #23 on 2025-07-28. He revisited it one year later on 2026-09-04, using the retrospective to test the original call against what had happened since.
In that retrospective, Carroll’s own shorthand assessment was: Right on the shift, underestimated the churn — and underestimated how AI anxiety would freeze people in place instead of pushing them out. The resistance is fading. It’s just being replaced by turnover at the entry level, and paralysis everywhere else.
This page treats the 2025 article as the original foresight call and the 2026 article as the first evidence checkpoint. Later signals and scorecards can be attached without rewriting the historical record.