I see you’re somewhat fixated on the “attitude problem” bit, but you’re conveniently leaving out the circumstances. The labor situation right now is starting to swing back to how it was in say, the 19th and 20th centuries.
Oh yeah, they’re trying to bring back all the classics: Smashing unions, company towns paying in company scrip, child labor, inhuman working hours, dangerous factories, you name it.
That you had the opportunity to decide you were sick of things sucking and just go do something about it, is a privilege you didn’t have control over. You did have control over recognizing and seizing those opportunities. But this can be an uncomfortable distinction because it somewhat undermines the “I did it all by myself with sheer grit and chest hair” narrative.
I’m what they’d call a "millennial " and I see lots of your points in my experience. I see younger people who are absolutely mind boggling with being unable to problem-solve, for instance, and I also see oldies who, in 2025, have avoided learning anything new since they graduated highschool in the 70’s or something, and simply get mad or frustrated that things have changed instead of doing something about it. I’ve also seen complete geniuses that were like 12 years old repairing their own electronics.
My point being, there have always been pragmatic people and helpless-by-choice people.
I agree there’s lots of avenues to funding for school that don’t involve a loan, but that’s not cut and dry either. If a decent school isn’t in their neighborhood they can’t crash with mom and dad, for instance. If it’s out of state? Man, how the heck couldn’t you take out a loan?
There’s also the time factor. To work enough to get you through school without taking a loan, if you didn’t get SIGNIFICANT grant money, you wouldn’t have time for school, unless maybe you were okay with your Bachelor’s being a 6-8 year degree.
Ah. Time.
People are working earlier now too. They can’t just “defer adulthood” to go to school instead. Heck, some states were bringing back child labor shortly after COVID! I wonder how many of those kids will afford school with money or time.
They’re on a treadmill they can’t step off, because their family probably needs the money they pull in, because so many jobs disappeared, and education is so abysmal people can’t shift their skills when that job disappears.
To add to that crap-sandwich, their hours are worth less, and they’re expected to do more work with less coworkers because labor is expensive and management is cheap.
Nowadays the reward for hard, exceptional work, is more work and a higher expectation, and if you’re REALLY convincing, like $.08+ an hour. I’m not even kidding. Statistically, you are an expendable “human resource”, not a valued asset.
Observe how the common knowledge now is “The best way to get a raise is to switch jobs.” Loyalty is punished.
Overtime? Ha! Most jobs put a lot of effort into making sure you work really hard right up to that line, and will actually penalize you if you try to go over it. Other jobs find ways around it, like slapping you with a laughably low (they’ll call it “competitive”) “exempt” salary.
Maybe, just maybe, in the 90’s, workers were still somewhat respected and valued. Today they’re a cost to minimize in any way possible to please shareholders with upward-jaggy lines.
People have a shitty work ethic because they see through the crap. Working a job in the modern age is what business folk would call “a raw deal.”
If we look at this through a Great American Entrepreneurial lens, going by numbers and common sense…working a job is foolish, and only marginally better than not having one at all.
If anything the younger generations are getting more clever about sourcing income from wherever they can, with endless “side hustles.” Because their bosses sure as hell won’t pay them.
(Fun fact: Wage theft is the most prominent form of theft!)
Sadly there’s a cost to that hustling “work ethic” to keep everything together. Skyrocketing lonliness and suicide rates.
It’s easy to jump on “doomscrolling zoomers” but we also need to consider that the Internet is merely a communication platform, and look at WHY we have a world that causes literal children to develop a sardonic collective humor about “burning oceans (again)” and “dying in the climate wars”, and never retiring, or owning a house, and that having a family is not only out of reach, but cruel and irresponsible hubris under a world of rapidly decaying empires locked in constant bloody conflicts at the behest of private interests.
So, I’m glad things worked out for you. I’m being sincere here. I’m glad loyalty paid off, and you could do something with your life. May the rest of your days be long and prosperous and full of love and cheer.
But I also warn that you’d be taking a path of intentional ignorance to refuse to acknowledge that most of those escape ropes you had to improve your situation are either terribly frayed or long-rotted for a vast majority of people now, and it’s simply cruelty to call them lazy for struggling to adapt without the societal tools of their ancestors, or to call them ungrateful and entitled for telling their wanna-be-lord bosses to go screw themselves after being exploited over and over, whilst everyone calls them “lazy.”
Wow that was a lot. Forgive me for not replying with as much. I don’t have the time.
My only question to all of this is, what is your solution to these problems? If it involves the government, then I have news for you. The government isn’t going to help anybody. My point being if these problems you say exist and are such huge problems, then what is the answer? How does society solve it? I’ve tried to answer these questions myself and it always comes back to asking myself one question. What can I DO TODAY, to make things better for myself and my family?
No problem, I’m aware that I tend to essay-out into a ramble on these tough topics. Thanks for hearing me out!
So, “my solution”: idealistically? Worker organizing. I see a resurgence of unions which is very inspiring, and they’ve been effective at winning decent pay and benefits. The news has been quietly ignoring and underplaying strike waves across the nation (and the world), because it makes their bosses nervous. They’re also ignoring the absolutely blatant retaliation against strikers from corporations.
(Remember 19th and 20th centuries all over again? Thankfully they’re not bringing in PMCs and riot cops for strikers…yet.) If anybody is “entitled without earning it”, it’s the corpos who feel entitled to cheap complicit bodies for their profit machines.
The government isn’t going to help anybody.
Especially not this one. God help us.
Reagan’s measures to prevent certain industries from striking, like air traffic controllers, and recently seen with railway workers, is just one of many ways the pro-capital government keeps the workers from getting too “uppity.”
Returning to a New Deal economic policy would help immensely. But 50’s red-scare and trickle-down propaganda is still sunk in deep.
What can I DO TODAY, to make things better for myself and my family?
Short answer? Band together and survive. The “screw you, got mine” individualism/exceptionalism myth has destroyed our culture and made us a nation of suspicious strangers. Perfect for selling garbage to and farming labor from.
So we need to involve our neighbors and coworkers in mutual support. You’re right, the government won’t help, your boss won’t help. Who’s left?
Just “keeping my head down and looking out for me and mine” is how we get picked off. This is also why media thinktanks love to stoke identity politics. It gets people infighting instead of massing.
So I’m just doing what I can to do my own thing, and survive, and getting people talking, and loving my neighbor as myself as much as I can, and trying not to feel powerless against overwhelming apathy and oppression from all sides.
Interesting. I used to have some involvement in a union. In fact, I was a regional VP for a huge union at one point and time. And while I agree with the union premise of organizing, I believe it’s an antiquated solution. The union I belonged to also delved a lot into social issues which I didn’t believe had any place in what I was fighting for…which was fair wages, decent working hours and getting the tools we needed for our jobs.
Instead they focused on social issues that had nothing to do with my work environment. They ran me out of that union. I used to be excited about going to meetings and getting people involved. They quickly showed me what their ulterior motives were. I figured out what the leader of that union was making. I saw how they wined and dined me at fancy dinners and hotels at Las Vegas hotels and casinos. I could see how they were grooming me. All they cared about was membership numbers. They don’t care how I signed them up. Tell these employees anything they wanted to hear. Sign that card.
Eventually, I had enough. I resigned my position and took an early retirement (I’m working in a different field now). Not a single one of them asked me why. Not a single one of them were sorry to see me go. Not a single one of them gave shit. I wasn’t useful to them anymore. I had a big influence on the workplace. They knew that and they exploited that. I do feel bad for the people I misled into signing up for that union that I believed in (brainwashed) at the time. Meanwhile I was being flown across the nation and being wined and dined on their dime.
So yes. While I believe organizing and pushing back on employers to make working environments better, I also believe that unions have become the very thing they claim to fight against.
I’m curious to know what your opinion is on unions today. Because in their current form, I don’t believe they are beneficial to everybody. We were actively told that if they weren’t with us then they are against us. I wanted to show the non union members.what we were capable of. However, I wasn’t able to due to holding this hostile attitude towards non members. Plus, we were not able to show any real progress. Basically just “sign up and you’ll see. Be in the club.”
TBH I get what you are saying about unions. They are hard to do right. The problem is that without them we’re pretty much cooked. It’s not even management in most cases, but the owners.
At one company, I contributed to cancer research, we were saving actual people. But the owners decided that selling the whole thing to the Americans who can put it into their ponzi scheme of health insurance makes more money. That’s because the average American pays 50x as much for this particular service than an EU citizen.
The people who were contracting and were thus not covered by the union were immediately canned. The rest we could fight and get a dignified way to leave for.
And I was one of their hard working people. I got one particular process that took days down to taking minutes. And not even for the money, but for the satisfaction of getting shit done. Someone from the new owners who probably didn’t even know what we were doing was trying to outsource everything to India, so everything we did went in the trash.
And this was one of my better jobs. I’ve had way worse. And I’m not the kind of person to wallow in my shit either, so I went and got therapy and changed careers so let’s see how that works out.
But going back to the original argument, I know a ton of people who would make something nice for the sake of it, like the GoldenEye devs. They are usually on the younger side, they usually get punished for it, and they usually end up needing and usually not getting therapy. Workers in general get absolutely no input into their work by policy.
The solution is to stop working for shit companies or only provide what they pay for so they have trouble finding help and pay more. The very thing you are bitching about. The free market right?
I see you’re somewhat fixated on the “attitude problem” bit, but you’re conveniently leaving out the circumstances. The labor situation right now is starting to swing back to how it was in say, the 19th and 20th centuries.
Oh yeah, they’re trying to bring back all the classics: Smashing unions, company towns paying in company scrip, child labor, inhuman working hours, dangerous factories, you name it.
That you had the opportunity to decide you were sick of things sucking and just go do something about it, is a privilege you didn’t have control over. You did have control over recognizing and seizing those opportunities. But this can be an uncomfortable distinction because it somewhat undermines the “I did it all by myself with sheer grit and chest hair” narrative.
I’m what they’d call a "millennial " and I see lots of your points in my experience. I see younger people who are absolutely mind boggling with being unable to problem-solve, for instance, and I also see oldies who, in 2025, have avoided learning anything new since they graduated highschool in the 70’s or something, and simply get mad or frustrated that things have changed instead of doing something about it. I’ve also seen complete geniuses that were like 12 years old repairing their own electronics.
My point being, there have always been pragmatic people and helpless-by-choice people.
I agree there’s lots of avenues to funding for school that don’t involve a loan, but that’s not cut and dry either. If a decent school isn’t in their neighborhood they can’t crash with mom and dad, for instance. If it’s out of state? Man, how the heck couldn’t you take out a loan?
There’s also the time factor. To work enough to get you through school without taking a loan, if you didn’t get SIGNIFICANT grant money, you wouldn’t have time for school, unless maybe you were okay with your Bachelor’s being a 6-8 year degree.
Ah. Time. People are working earlier now too. They can’t just “defer adulthood” to go to school instead. Heck, some states were bringing back child labor shortly after COVID! I wonder how many of those kids will afford school with money or time.
They’re on a treadmill they can’t step off, because their family probably needs the money they pull in, because so many jobs disappeared, and education is so abysmal people can’t shift their skills when that job disappears.
To add to that crap-sandwich, their hours are worth less, and they’re expected to do more work with less coworkers because labor is expensive and management is cheap.
Nowadays the reward for hard, exceptional work, is more work and a higher expectation, and if you’re REALLY convincing, like $.08+ an hour. I’m not even kidding. Statistically, you are an expendable “human resource”, not a valued asset.
Observe how the common knowledge now is “The best way to get a raise is to switch jobs.” Loyalty is punished.
Overtime? Ha! Most jobs put a lot of effort into making sure you work really hard right up to that line, and will actually penalize you if you try to go over it. Other jobs find ways around it, like slapping you with a laughably low (they’ll call it “competitive”) “exempt” salary.
Maybe, just maybe, in the 90’s, workers were still somewhat respected and valued. Today they’re a cost to minimize in any way possible to please shareholders with upward-jaggy lines.
People have a shitty work ethic because they see through the crap. Working a job in the modern age is what business folk would call “a raw deal.”
If we look at this through a Great American Entrepreneurial lens, going by numbers and common sense…working a job is foolish, and only marginally better than not having one at all.
If anything the younger generations are getting more clever about sourcing income from wherever they can, with endless “side hustles.” Because their bosses sure as hell won’t pay them. (Fun fact: Wage theft is the most prominent form of theft!)
Sadly there’s a cost to that hustling “work ethic” to keep everything together. Skyrocketing lonliness and suicide rates.
It’s easy to jump on “doomscrolling zoomers” but we also need to consider that the Internet is merely a communication platform, and look at WHY we have a world that causes literal children to develop a sardonic collective humor about “burning oceans (again)” and “dying in the climate wars”, and never retiring, or owning a house, and that having a family is not only out of reach, but cruel and irresponsible hubris under a world of rapidly decaying empires locked in constant bloody conflicts at the behest of private interests.
So, I’m glad things worked out for you. I’m being sincere here. I’m glad loyalty paid off, and you could do something with your life. May the rest of your days be long and prosperous and full of love and cheer.
But I also warn that you’d be taking a path of intentional ignorance to refuse to acknowledge that most of those escape ropes you had to improve your situation are either terribly frayed or long-rotted for a vast majority of people now, and it’s simply cruelty to call them lazy for struggling to adapt without the societal tools of their ancestors, or to call them ungrateful and entitled for telling their wanna-be-lord bosses to go screw themselves after being exploited over and over, whilst everyone calls them “lazy.”
Just food for thought. Thanks for hearing me out.
Wow that was a lot. Forgive me for not replying with as much. I don’t have the time.
My only question to all of this is, what is your solution to these problems? If it involves the government, then I have news for you. The government isn’t going to help anybody. My point being if these problems you say exist and are such huge problems, then what is the answer? How does society solve it? I’ve tried to answer these questions myself and it always comes back to asking myself one question. What can I DO TODAY, to make things better for myself and my family?
No problem, I’m aware that I tend to essay-out into a ramble on these tough topics. Thanks for hearing me out!
So, “my solution”: idealistically? Worker organizing. I see a resurgence of unions which is very inspiring, and they’ve been effective at winning decent pay and benefits. The news has been quietly ignoring and underplaying strike waves across the nation (and the world), because it makes their bosses nervous. They’re also ignoring the absolutely blatant retaliation against strikers from corporations. (Remember 19th and 20th centuries all over again? Thankfully they’re not bringing in PMCs and riot cops for strikers…yet.) If anybody is “entitled without earning it”, it’s the corpos who feel entitled to cheap complicit bodies for their profit machines.
Especially not this one. God help us. Reagan’s measures to prevent certain industries from striking, like air traffic controllers, and recently seen with railway workers, is just one of many ways the pro-capital government keeps the workers from getting too “uppity.”
Returning to a New Deal economic policy would help immensely. But 50’s red-scare and trickle-down propaganda is still sunk in deep.
Short answer? Band together and survive. The “screw you, got mine” individualism/exceptionalism myth has destroyed our culture and made us a nation of suspicious strangers. Perfect for selling garbage to and farming labor from.
So we need to involve our neighbors and coworkers in mutual support. You’re right, the government won’t help, your boss won’t help. Who’s left?
Just “keeping my head down and looking out for me and mine” is how we get picked off. This is also why media thinktanks love to stoke identity politics. It gets people infighting instead of massing.
So I’m just doing what I can to do my own thing, and survive, and getting people talking, and loving my neighbor as myself as much as I can, and trying not to feel powerless against overwhelming apathy and oppression from all sides.
Interesting. I used to have some involvement in a union. In fact, I was a regional VP for a huge union at one point and time. And while I agree with the union premise of organizing, I believe it’s an antiquated solution. The union I belonged to also delved a lot into social issues which I didn’t believe had any place in what I was fighting for…which was fair wages, decent working hours and getting the tools we needed for our jobs.
Instead they focused on social issues that had nothing to do with my work environment. They ran me out of that union. I used to be excited about going to meetings and getting people involved. They quickly showed me what their ulterior motives were. I figured out what the leader of that union was making. I saw how they wined and dined me at fancy dinners and hotels at Las Vegas hotels and casinos. I could see how they were grooming me. All they cared about was membership numbers. They don’t care how I signed them up. Tell these employees anything they wanted to hear. Sign that card.
Eventually, I had enough. I resigned my position and took an early retirement (I’m working in a different field now). Not a single one of them asked me why. Not a single one of them were sorry to see me go. Not a single one of them gave shit. I wasn’t useful to them anymore. I had a big influence on the workplace. They knew that and they exploited that. I do feel bad for the people I misled into signing up for that union that I believed in (brainwashed) at the time. Meanwhile I was being flown across the nation and being wined and dined on their dime.
So yes. While I believe organizing and pushing back on employers to make working environments better, I also believe that unions have become the very thing they claim to fight against.
I’m curious to know what your opinion is on unions today. Because in their current form, I don’t believe they are beneficial to everybody. We were actively told that if they weren’t with us then they are against us. I wanted to show the non union members.what we were capable of. However, I wasn’t able to due to holding this hostile attitude towards non members. Plus, we were not able to show any real progress. Basically just “sign up and you’ll see. Be in the club.”
TBH I get what you are saying about unions. They are hard to do right. The problem is that without them we’re pretty much cooked. It’s not even management in most cases, but the owners.
At one company, I contributed to cancer research, we were saving actual people. But the owners decided that selling the whole thing to the Americans who can put it into their ponzi scheme of health insurance makes more money. That’s because the average American pays 50x as much for this particular service than an EU citizen.
The people who were contracting and were thus not covered by the union were immediately canned. The rest we could fight and get a dignified way to leave for.
And I was one of their hard working people. I got one particular process that took days down to taking minutes. And not even for the money, but for the satisfaction of getting shit done. Someone from the new owners who probably didn’t even know what we were doing was trying to outsource everything to India, so everything we did went in the trash.
And this was one of my better jobs. I’ve had way worse. And I’m not the kind of person to wallow in my shit either, so I went and got therapy and changed careers so let’s see how that works out.
But going back to the original argument, I know a ton of people who would make something nice for the sake of it, like the GoldenEye devs. They are usually on the younger side, they usually get punished for it, and they usually end up needing and usually not getting therapy. Workers in general get absolutely no input into their work by policy.
The solution is to stop working for shit companies or only provide what they pay for so they have trouble finding help and pay more. The very thing you are bitching about. The free market right?