Work is a verb. 

As the Colorado legislature reconvenes for another 120-day session, there is a chance for bipartisan cooperation if members focus on the current trendlines showing a growing culture of dependence and embrace a strong, sustained economic opportunity agenda. 

This requires an intense and sustained focus on measures that open the door to family-sustaining job opportunities with a path toward earned success. It also means stepping back from the annual parade of proposals that are little more than millstones around the economy, and Colorado workers. 

Here are some trendlines that should alarm Democrats and Republicans alike. 

A recent media report detailed an entire swath of American society — men and women in their 30s and beyond — are choosing to not leave home, with some still sleeping in their childhood bedrooms. 

It’s what scholar Richard V. Reeves — who has powerfully chronicled the crisis facing American boys and men — calls a “permanent state of arrested development.”

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“The longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all,” he states. 

The numbers are troubling. According to a study by Bowling Green University, one in five Americans aged 25-34 live with parents or parents-in-law. Half of those will hang around until 40.

Compounding this trend is that many young people, who too often live in online gaming worlds with easy solutions and constant virtual “do overs,” believe the niceties of life, including a capacious home, are low-hanging fruit, ripe for the taking. They are in denial about the daily reality of producing sweat equity to earn what was once called the American Dream.  

These outsized expectations combined with the soaring cost of living are contributing, for example, to a significant percentage of men in their prime working years choosing to simply drop out of the workforce. In late 2024, 14% of American able-bodied men were opting out of work. This is double the rate from the 1950s. 

Sadly, 57% of these men, according to a CNBC report, claim a physical or mental disability that prevents them from joining the workforce. Many report using opioids daily for relief. 

At the same time, economic statistics show 1.7 million job vacancies that, without question, a significant portion of these men could fill — if they were willing. Having so many unfilled jobs is much more than a drain on the economy and on productivity, but opportunities forgone for many men to seize the chance to jumpstart their lives. 

But it requires a recommitment to work, from individuals and from policymakers. In session after session, left-leaning lawmakers introduce proposals that demonstrate a lack of faith in individuals to rise and flourish.  

Some bills would make it easier to not work. Others threaten existing jobs or discourage job creation, especially among entry-level jobs. Still others have hampered private-sector apprenticeship and training programs in favor of preventing competition for organized labor.  

And don’t even suggest an education overhaul that would guarantee high school graduates have the skills they need to get on the first rung of the economic ladder. Would school districts provide a warranty that every graduate is ready to go to work?

Martin Luther King Jr. once said “all work has dignity.” And the message that young people need to hear, particularly from progressives, is the necessity of earned success through work. 

Arthur Brooks, a Harvard economist and former president of the American Enterprise Institute, has defined earned success as “the ability to create value in the lives of others and yourself through hard work and merit.” This is not about the surface prestige of a certain job title but how you spend your day and how it produces a sense you are valuable and valued. 

This means incentivizing, not stigmatizing, work. It means reminding those who need a hand up from government there is a social contract to eventually — but certainly — look for work or pursue the training to get back to work. It means restoring respect for difficult, physically demanding jobs that, in decades past, were valued because they sustained families.

It would be good for young Coloradans to hear elected leaders fundamentally understand, and will promote, the notion work is indispensable to an independent, flourishing life. And just as we expect individuals to choose the challenging path of earned success, so must politicians make the choice to set aside ideology and confront a crisis sapping the future from far too many good people among us. 

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.