John Burn-Murdoch

And the other is the extent to which people have this sort of ethic, this belief that if I work hard, I'm going to get results, I'm going to get rewarded, which is also both of these things are things where we see young people in the English speaking world moving in a negative direction over the last 10, 15 years, which as I say, lines up with housing and

The reason I think this is interesting and is plausible, at least to be one significant factor for me, is that I think so much in life is about the gap between expectations and achievement and reality.

So someone who never expects much and their life doesn't amount to much, sure, you know, that...

They're still not going to be the happiest people in the world.

But there's no sort of sense of having been cheated, swindled along the way there.

Whereas I think someone who starts out feeling that, right, this is how the system works.

If I do my bit, I'll get what my parents got, what other generations have got.

And then they find out that despite putting the work in, they don't get that.

You can imagine how that can be particularly damaging to someone's psyche and certainly damaging to their sense of this sort of societal fairness that if you work hard, you get rewarded.

So I think what you have here is English speaking countries have made homeownership the sort of go to signal marker of having made it in life.

And you've had generations that knew this was the case, that climbed the ladder, worked hard, got a house.

Immediately, that's a bit of anxiety or stress reduced from their lives.

Sure, there's still a lot else going on, but they've now got a stable base to build from, sense of security.

And now you have a generation or two generations come along who start out with that belief.

They put the work in and they don't get that result.

So I think you can see how that could certainly shatter that sense that hard work is rewarded, but also can give that sense of constant insecurity that I'm still not there yet.

I'm still scrabbling.

Or even if that individual might have now gone onto the housing ladder, there are enough people around them, whether online or offline, who are still putting this message out that you can see how there could be a material basis for what we're talking about here.

Yeah, I think there's two ways of looking at this.

One is that there is a decent amount of evidence that people's personalities can change.