For India’s professionals in their 30s and early 40s, the idea of a steady climb no longer holds. The promise they grew up with – work hard, stay loyal, specialise deeply – has collapsed.
In its place sits
a quieter, harsher reality. One where experience no longer guarantees safety and effort doesn’t always lead to stability. A growing number of mid-career workers now find themselves stuck in the middle of an economy that has moved on without them.
“This generation is facing the most complex squeeze in modern economic history,” says Vaibhav Jain, CFA, CMT, and founder of Capital Quill told NDTV. According to Jain, professionals in this bracket are caught between two forces that refuse to slow down: rapid technological change and relentless inflation. The pressure, he says, is quietly crushing them at the centre of the economic pyramid.
When experience stops being an advantage
On one side is a younger workforce that has grown up alongside automation and AI. Gen Z isn’t adapting to these tools; they’re native to them. “They don’t need to unlearn legacy processes they never learned them to begin with,” Jain explains.
For younger workers, AI is not a threat. It’s a shortcut. A 20-year-old using automation can create content, code, or marketing material that may not be perfect, but it’s fast and acceptable. “This renders the perfectionism of a 15-year veteran overpriced and obsolete,” Jain adds.
That shift hits mid-career workers hardest. Their depth, once rewarded, now slows them down in a system that values speed and flexibility over polish.
Peak responsibility, zero breathing room
At the same time, this age group is dealing with life at full volume. Children’s education. Aging parents. Medical expenses. Home loans that keep growing as interest rates fluctuate.
“Society keeps telling them to upskill. But upskilling requires bandwidth,” Jain says.
For professionals juggling demanding jobs and long commutes in cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, or Mumbai, that bandwidth barely exists. Evenings disappear into family responsibilities. Weekends are spent recovering. Learning entirely new paradigms becomes another burden, not a solution.
Jain argues that this cohort was raised on a rulebook that no longer applies. The belief in a “corporate ladder” shaped their decisions. But that ladder, he says, is “disappearing.” Loyalty no longer ensures protection. Job security has thinned. In many cases, experience itself has started to feel risky.
The financial math no longer works
Money only deepens the anxiety. Rising living costs and longer life expectancy have made old savings plans obsolete. “The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) numbers calculated even recently are already insufficient due to lifestyle inflation and global uncertainty,” Jain warns.
Older professionals, particularly those over 50, often sit on stronger foundations. Their children are settled. Their biggest expenses are behind them. Younger workers, still early in their careers, have more room to pivot.
The squeezed middle has neither advantage.
For India’s mid-career workers, the challenge isn’t ambition anymore. It’s survival in a system where, as Jain puts it, “experience is inflationary, but agility is deflationary.” The work didn’t just get harder. “The rules changed completely halfway through the match,” he added.
