Hi friend, welcome back.

If you're new here — I'm May, and this is The Sprezza Diary, a bi-weekly letter about books, slow living, wine & food, and the quiet questions that come up when you're trying to figure out what comes next. Glad you're here.

Elena was born in the 1940s. She was born in a country where her socio-economic world was defined by agrarian style work, extreme corporate dominance of arable land, and physical labor as survival.

A country where over 60% of the population lived in rural poverty. There was limited infrastructure, you walked everywhere on dusty unpaved roads or rode mules, electricity and potable water were luxuries. Social mobility was basically non-existent. For a woman, this meant that labor was heavy, continuous, and uncompensated. Outside the home, women worked as laundresses, cooked for plantation workers, were seamstresses or market vendors.

Elena, rather than thinking about work as a “passion” or “self-fulfillment” it was more of endurance and survival where she needed to do whatever she could to keep her family fed.

Growing up in these conditions, she came to view rest as lazy or a luxury reserved for the rich.

The few times she was able to enjoy leisure, it was more of a communal activity where she would listen to the radio, or gather with the neighbors around the porch at dusk.

Carlos was born in the 1960s, where the country was going through political and social turmoil. Mass urban migration, the rise of factory work, and the emergence of a “middle class” characterized this period.

Carlos’ generation was the first to view work through the lens of upward mobility rather than pure subsistence. A formal paycheck meant you could plan for a better future, send your kids to school, buy a used car and build a home. Labor unions were strong during this time. It guaranteed the worker an 8-hour day, a holiday bonus and health care.

For Carlos, work ethic was seen more as duty. For him, a “good man” was a provider. He measured his self worth by his ability to work at the factory and bring in a steady paycheck. Work goes from survival to “making a tolerable sacrifice” for the family. Leisure is still somewhat communal but more consumer-oriented. Playing at billiards, watching soccer games, taking the family to the city park on Sundays.

Liz was born in the 1990s, to a globalized, hyper-connected yet fractured nation. Liz was told to go to college and so she did. However, work ceases to become a source of lifetime stability and becomes more fast-paced, digital, and often unstable.

Liz looks at the concept of work ethic from the lense of adaptability and self-branding. With formal jobs scarce or underpaid, the side hustle economy rises to fill in that gap.

Leisure is synonym to digital connection, pop culture, and shopping. Liz is able to go to the mall, connect with people on social media or scroll on a smartphone.

For Liz, work isn’t about sweating under the sun; it’s about emotional regulation. Smiling at customers, hitting daily KPIs, and dealing with burnout. To Elena, her granddaughter doesn’t look like she works a real job as she sits in an office all day. Yet, Liz is always complaining she’s constantly tired. To Carlos, her daughter seems unloyal to companies, as job-hopping becomes the norm.

What previous generations fail to understand is that Liz is navigating a system that keeps changing the rules. What Elena called laziness, Carlos called sacrifice, and Liz calls burnout might be the same thing wearing different clothes. A person trying to make sense of a system that was never fully designed around them. The difference is that Liz, for the first time across these three generations, has enough distance from survival to ask a question her grandmother and father never had the luxury of asking: what is all of this actually for?

For most of our history, work ethic has been about survival, duty, and keeping up. But what if it could be something more personal — an engine for building a life that actually reflects who you are, not just what the market needs from you?

Adaptability is the answer the current moment keeps pointing toward. The ability to work in transitions, to rest without guilt, to decouple your identity from a job title, and the ability to explore other interests.

Elena survived. Carlos provided. Maybe Liz's version of work ethic is simply this: to finally have the space to become.

The 100-year life by Linda Gratton & Andrew J. Scott

Gratton and Scott argue that the traditional three-stage model of education, work, and retirement is outdated and propose new phases and transitions to reflect the fluidity of modern life. They emphasize the increasing importance of intangible assets like skills and relationships, and argue that by developing flexibility, creativity, and lifelong learning, we can chart multi-stage career paths that meet both financial needs and personal aspirations.

Hijacked by Elizabeth Anderson

Anderson explains how work ethic got distorted historically. Her central argument is that the original Protestant work ethic split into two competing versions — a conservative, anti-worker ethic and a progressive, pro-worker one. The conservative version eventually won out and was weaponized by the wealthy against ordinary workers.

With range, always —
May