Once upon a time, brother would happily have murdered brother to wear the crown. Families were ripped asunder in pursuit of it, pretenders to the throne routinely met grisly ends, and even marrying into the proximity of royalty could be lethal.

How puzzled Prince Harry’s ancestors would be, then, by the interview he has just given in America explaining that nobody really wants to be king any more. The royals are, he explained, only still in business now “for the greater good of the people”, not because they actually enjoy the gig. “Is there any one of the royal family who wants to be king or queen? I don’t think so, but we will carry out our duties at the right time,” he told the US edition of Newsweek.

Like celebrities who tire of fame, or titled families moaning about the cost of maintaining the ancestral pile, princes gloomy about one day having to be king do not exactly invite instant sympathy. After all, if the burden of all that unearned wealth and privilege is so terrible then they could always give it up. Renounce the throne, hand back the keys to Kensington Palace, and see if the life of a commoner – forced to earn your own living but free to wander down the street on a sunny day without trailing clouds of close protection officers and paparazzi – really is as appealing from the inside as it must sometimes look.

Hell, why not go the whole hog and come out for an elected president instead of a monarchy? Let the cursed burden fall to someone who actively wants it – although, as ever, the glaring flaw in this argument is imagining the sort of person who might want it. (President Blair? President Richard Branson? God help us, President Farage?)

But constitutional implications aside, there is a human story here that will be recognisable to many distinctly un-regal families, and that’s the creeping renunciation of what previous generations have unquestioningly assumed work should be. William and Harry are certainly not alone among millennials in not wanting to slog their guts out as their parents did, and choosing to allow more space for relationships and families. And instead of dismissing them as spoilt brats, older generations might usefully reflect on what it could possibly be about their burnt-out, grumpy, professionally insecure parents that they don’t wish to emulate.

It’s true that the vast majority of young people can’t afford to be so picky. Thousands would be grateful for a job full stop, let alone a crown; others are busy stringing together several precarious half-livings to make the rent, and the great whoosh of twentysomething rage unleashed at the last election is testament to how very far from professionally secure they feel.

But it’s precisely that insecurity and anxiety, rather than laziness, that seems to be increasingly shaping attitudes to work. If the payoff for doing well at school and slogging through a good degree is a pile of debt, a starter job that could have been done by a school leaver and zero chance of ever having a mortgage, then why pour every ounce of energy into work that seems to offer so little back?

Exposure does have consequences; it changes the nature of any job, and who is likely to be attracted to it

Even among those lucky enough to be on relatively secure career paths, something is clearly changing.

Only a third of trainee GPs, according to a survey carried out recently for the King’s Fund, plan to be working full-time even straight after qualifying. They’ve seen the stress older doctors are working under, taking life or death decisions, back to back, all day and then catching up with paperwork late into the night, and they’re afraid of burning out if they do the same.

Further up the career ladder, the NHS is struggling in some parts of the country to find hospital chief executives because of the pressure that comes with the top job; the knowledge that you’ll be held very publicly accountable if anything goes wrong, in a funding climate where things may be increasingly likely to go wrong. Stay one rung below the top, and at least you’ll sleep at nights. Governors looking to recruit headteachers, especially in challenging neighbourhoods, report similar problems in getting junior teachers to step up. Why take the professional risk of trying to turn schools with deeply entrenched problems around, when it will be your head on the block if Ofsted deems you to have failed?

All this may be horrifying to older doctors and headteachers, driven by a strong sense of public service and self-sacrifice and a desire to put something back. But younger professionals who want to work like this aren’t necessarily shirking their duty to those they serve, so much as interpreting that duty differently; wanting to be rested enough to take good decisions rather than lurching into sleep-deprived mistakes for which they could find themselves in court. It’s failure they may fear, more than hard work.

Obviously, the job the young royals are so gloomily contemplating – a bit of light ribbon-cutting, plaque-unveiling and Christmas message-filming, rather than anything life or death – is infinitely less demanding by comparison. But again it’s the intense public scrutiny to which the princes seem to object, rather than the workload; the daily intrusion into their private lives that is the price now paid for privilege, but which didn’t apply in the same way to a previous generation of royal babies. And before dismissing that as whingeing, it’s worth remembering that their mother blamed anxiety induced by marrying into the spotlight for fuelling her bulimia, that she died in a car crash while being chased by paparazzi, and that as bereaved children they were expected to walk behind her coffin under the open gaze of millions of strangers. It would be more alarming in the circumstances if William hadn’t chosen to hide his children away in rural Norfolk, if Harry hadn’t grown up with deeply conflicting feelings about the family business.

There’s no going back to a time before public servants were held publicly accountable for their mistakes, any more than it is possible for the royals to retreat to an era when all we expected them to do was smile and wave. But exposure does have consequences; it changes the nature of any job, and who is likely to be attracted to it. Princes William and Harry have a perfect right to grapple with these questions, publicly as well as privately. Even if they would be wise to expect precious little sympathy for doing so.