Hi Zee. Allow me to introduce myself.
Since this isn't a problem we can figure out overnight, I should explain why you should listen to me all.
Dear Zee. So, just who the hell do I think I am? The truth is, I’m nobody.
I’m not a celebrity CEO. I don’t have a podcast. I’m still not a billionaire founder with a huge social media following, posting from my yacht. I’m just a self-proclaimed operations nerd who somehow became deeply fascinated by how humans work, how systems break and why modern life feels simultaneously more advanced and more exhausting than ever. Oh, and I give a shit about you.
I guess I’m a technically a Millennial (though I’ve always related more to Gen X). I am one of the fortunate ones who remember a world before the internet swallowed everything.
So, going way back, my first job was at a tiny community newspaper in rural Alberta. And Zee… it was super old school.
We had those giant colourful Mac computers that looked like they belonged in a kindergarten classroom. We physically printed articles and ads, glued them onto giant layout sheets by hand and someone literally drove the pages to the press for printing. We had to wait for film to be developed to get pictures, then scan them (and pay for them all!) There was no taking 74 photos and picking the best one.
Everything took longer, but I think it was good for me. It taught me something your generation rarely gets the luxury of experiencing now: patience, craftsmanship, thoughtful pacing and systems that had to actually work before you hit publish.
I eventually left my small town and got my first “big city” job in the world of advertising agencies. If newspapers taught me process… agencies taught me chaos. Deadlines, clients, creative teams, office politics, big personalities, bigger egos, last-minute pivots and impossible expectations. I spent years inside those environments working in project management, operations, systems and process design, essentially trying to answer one question over and over again: Why do some teams function brilliantly while others slowly descend into madness?
At the same time, outside of work, I was also raising a child as a single parent for most of my adult life. This meant my career wasn’t a clean, linear climb up a corporate ladder. Life was a constant juggle between her priorities and my own and I was forced to learn and embrace some semblance of balance out of necessity.
For a long time, like a lot of my generation, I wore burnout like a badge of honour. It sounds ridiculous now, but exhaustion was weirdly aspirational for us. Somehow, you weren’t working hard enough unless you were truly grinding it out. Now I look at your generation and I see something different. You’re more self-aware. More open. More willing to say, “This doesn’t work for me.” I admire that.
Through all of this, the newspaper, agencies, leadership roles, burnout cycles, rebuilding seasons, parenting and systems work, I noticed a pattern I couldn’t ignore. Most workplace problems are not actually people problems. They’re system problems. Broken communication. Misaligned expectations. Incentives that reward the wrong behaviour. Leadership structures that don’t scale with reality. Definitions of success that no longer match how work actually gets done. And I wasn’t the only one seeing it.
That’s where Jane comes in. My business partner, and the other half of MatterBetter.
Jane and I are very different kinds of observers. I tend to gravitate toward systems, structure and pattern recognition. She leans toward people, language and the emotional reality of work. Put simply, I look at the machine and she looks at the humans inside of it. Somewhere in the middle of the overlap, things started to click. Not in a ‘we have all the answers’ kind of way, but more of a ‘we can’t un-see this anymore’ way. So we started MatterBetter.
At first, I’ll admit, it was a bit impulsive. A shared frustration turned into a shared question: why does work still feel so unnecessarily hard for so many people? Once we started really digging, it got more complicated. Fixing work isn’t one problem. It’s a whole layered system of trades-offs, history, incentives and deeply embedded habits that no single person (or even two very opinions moms with a lot of thoughts about the world) can solve alone.
We want to explore this with you, Zee and not just talk at you. We’re definitely not going to sit here and pretend we’ve figured it out. You’re living this in real time, and you have a lens we don’t have from the outside looking in.
What we’re trying to do here is understand why things are the way they are. And what might actually need to change. Where we sit today, the cracks are getting harder to ignore. A generational shift in leadership is already underway. AI is now part of everyday work and the systems are straining. The old career playbook doesn’t seem to hold up the way it used to.
I see Gen Z in a bit of a ‘quiet revolution’ and if nothing shifts, things are going to get messy.
That might sound negative, but I’m not pessimistic about it. I’m quite the opposite actually. When systems start to show their flaws this clearly, it usually means they’re ready to be rebuilt and there’s a lot of opportunity that lives there.
We want to make work more human. More flexible. More honest about how people actually function inside it. That’s why this publication exists. It’s not another guide or lecture. It’s an ongoing attempt to understand the game you’re playing so you can build the skills nobody explicitly taught you, and find your footing in a world that refuses to stay still.
And yes… somewhere in the background of all of this is the hope that the next generation (and the one after that) doesn’t inherit quite so much unnecessary damage. No pressure though. :-)
From that middle-aged mom who gives a shit,
Amanda
P.S.
You’ll hear more from from Jane in some future posts. She brings a really cool energy to things and really likes to challenge the status quo. I think you’ll like her.
Me? I like to write, so you’re stuck with me as the primary voice of Dear Gen Z…