Work was kind of the point. Whether because it was fulfilling or put food on the table, much of our world is directed toward the goal of a career. Hopefully a good one, but few would argue that the goal is to do…nothing. Unless you subscribe to the notion that the point of existence is “lying flat.”
By June, American news outlets were describing the “lying flat” trend as a natural consequence of China’s hypercompetitive middle-class culture, where employees often report working “996” weeks — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — a lifestyle praised by the founder of the online shopping giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, and other captains of commerce.
China, which might have a few cultural and political differences that push its citizens to an extreme beyond human endurance, is where the concept arose. But that’s not where it stayed.
It’s not just Chinese millennials who are figuring out that work is a false idol. I should know because I’m lying flat too, holed up in my parents’ house in West Virginia. Earlier this year I quit my job producing an NPR program in Boston, and I haven’t been able to stomach rejoining the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle. I’m far from the only one: A recent tweet that proclaimed “i do not want to have a career” racked up over 400,000 likes. Instead, proclaimed the tweeter, @hollabekgrl, “i want to sit on the porch.”
It probably didn’t occur to @hollabekgrl that she couldn’t twit her brilliance if nobody made her iPhone, Twitter and the internet. Plus, she might get hungry and thirsty sitting on the porch if no one made Cheetos and hard cider. Indeed, there would be no porch on which to sit if no one built it.
And it apparently didn’t occur to Cassady Rosenblum, former NPR producer of “Here & Now,” who has retreated to her parents home in West Virginia, which they likely bought with the money they earned from, wait for it, working.
The lying flat movement, or tangping as it’s known in Mandarin, is just one expression of this global unraveling. Another is the current worker shortage in the United States. As of June, there were more than 10 million job openings in the United States, according to the most recent figures from the Labor Department — the highest number since the government began tracking the data two decades ago. While conservatives blame juiced-up pandemic unemployment benefits, liberals counter that people do want to work, just not for the paltry wages they were making before the pandemic.
There is a well-publicized post pandemic shift in the American workforce, as people who were unemployed due to the pandemic and surviving on handouts from the government decided not to go back to work as jobs became available and went begging. The assumption was that people didn’t return to their crappy, low-paying, unpleasant and unfulfilling work because they were making more money on the dole than they would get from work.
But there may well be another influence at work here (pun intended) that is keeping people out of the workforce and on the porch. They just don’t wanna. They don’t want to work at unpleasant jobs. They don’t want to work with people they don’t like. They don’t want to work.
In the United States, Black activists, writers and thinkers are among the clearest voices articulating this spiritual malaise and its solutions, perhaps because they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism more than other groups of Americans. Tricia Hersey, a performance artist and the founder of the Nap Ministry, an Atlanta-based organization, is one of them. Ms. Hersey says she discovered the power of naps during a draining year of graduate school at Emory University, an experience that inspired her to bring the gospel of sleep to fellow African Americans whose enslaved and persecuted ancestors were never able to properly rest. She argues that rest is not only resistance, it is also reparation.
Does she not realize that eventually, she’ll get hungry, or that if everybody lies flat, nothing gets done? Of course. She’s not stupid.
Me, now, in the hills.
To be clear, there is immense privilege in lying flat. But it’s worth noting that Mr. Luo acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a “career,” a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.
Given her perspective, it seems fairly clear that she will achieve her dream of not having a career. But is this the new dream for the future, a nation of slackers, the Slackoisie, who only bother to get off the porch if they’re hungry? Is ambition, aspiration, achievement and, yes, sacrifice to get there, now a bad thing, an old thing, that’s run it course?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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Man’s search for meaning is eternal and existential, though it manifests in different ways in different generations.
The pandemic is like a long winter and gives some people the urge to hunker down and wait for it to be over.
There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.
Sounds great, as long as your parents still have room in their basement and money left in their retirement accounts for you to sponge off. When that’s gone the kids might find it a little harder.
I wanted to have the option to lie flat, so I worked my ass off for 25 years. Now I lie flat for a couple months, get bored, and work my ass off for a couple more.
Lying flat used to be called retirement, and it was earned by working.
Oh My God!
The top secret fact that naps and porch lounging are in fact a very good thing is no longer under wraps?!
Them clever little bastards…
I might try that ‘job thing’, once I’ve got…
Darn! I waited for you to post Guitar Dave as I thought you and/or Howl would post… Lee Dorsey.. “ workin in a coal mine”..
So their goal is to be prematurely aged?
I’m mostly retired (one final court appearance to argue a capital appeal in October), but I’ve got three committee meetings, one board meeting, and one CLE presentation to give THIS WEEK. And that’s just criminal defense stuff.
I am, sort of, catching up on decades of sleep deprivation, but the idea of just vegging out (a term we old folks use) – hell, the work is what keeps me young old (as opposed to old old).
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back
To earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he’s dead?
She took a break from lying flat to do some work.
“Dad, can you believe the New York Times ran this shit? Also, can you make waffles. I’m tired of pancakes.”
Emotional labor is still labor.
And here I thought it was infrastructure…
I have to wonder whom these Millennials think it’s going to be working to provide all these things they now consider to be unalienable human rights: food, housing, health care, etc, if they aspire to “lie flat?” The Baby Boomers are withdrawing from public life, they’ll be drilling no gas wells and paving no roads going forward. I certainly hope they’re not counting on the generation that popularized eating Tide Pods to put in the work for their sake. That pretty much leaves Generation X, famous for being apathetic but otherwise unremarkable. None of these are promising choices for either a savior or a beast of burden.
One of my long time jokes is what will the millennial in mom’s basement do when he calls for more Cheetos, but mom has died and won’t be coming.
Mr. Greenfield that made me think of the lone Collyer brother helpless waiting for his deceased brother to bring him food.
GenX is not famous for being apathetic unless you confuse data with pop culture. We’re unremarkable because we are a small generation sandwiched between two behemouths.
Which reminds me, boomers should get on board with opening the borders soon because GenX will be too busy working to wipe drool and change diapers.
Fame isn’t always deserved, Jake, but it is defined by pop culture rather than data.
And last I checked, changing diapers and wiping drool constitute work.
> “they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism”
Oh Comrade Lenin!, I have to admit people sometimes turn me into an old-school hardcore socialist: “He who does not work shall not eat. You, go to Gulag!” I can hear you saying. Whatever, as long we don’t have to pay for their bills, they can bear the brunt of capitalism all they want.
Would you let them starve to death sitting on the porch or taking a nap? What kind of monster are you?
I am here singing “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can” with my grand white piano at my mansion while sobbing for the evils of capitalism. What else do you expect me to do for them?
He couldn’t help it that people threw money at him.
There have always been lazy people. Never before has laziness been lauded as a virtue by anyone who expects to be taken seriously.
Sophocles.
“Without labor nothing prospers.”
But what does he know. He’s some old European misogynistic patriarchal racist.
It isn’t a new problem:
“For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” 2 Thes. 3:10
The American Dream is a lie. We are all of us owned by only a few titans of technology and industry. Not all of us can be anything we want to be even if we work hard. The haves hoard so much wealth that what chutes and ladders there were between the classes are breaking down to the point that it may well not be worth trying. The fact that we are all rugged individuals who disdain working together for a common purpose means that most of us will fail and things will get worse before they get better.
Your and my parents’ generation have more, including basements for us to reside in, because the haves shared their wealth more back then. Businesses gave individual workers a stake in the company they worked for more than what occurs now. Robust benefits packages were a thing. Private unions, such as they were, were a thing. Labor had power and used it to benefit the masses. Business had the sense to invest in labor and seek long-term growth rather than short-term gain. Now we are each a brand unto ourselves.
When the choice is between a hamster wheel or lying flat, I’d rather go prone. It’d be terrible to be just another sucker. I’m special. You told me so growing up. Why put myself out there and take risks and try to build something just so I can retire to lie flat when I can lie flat right now?
The salesman died a long time ago. It’s past time to reckon with the truth of the rat race. We aren’t special. We have more in common than not. Class distinctions are paramount. The world doesn’t need more Zuckerbergs controlling an outsized portion of our economy and lives. The world needs class consciousness. To accomplish this, I’m expanding my book club from ten to twenty seats. There are still nineteen bean bags without occupants. Any takers?
I had to take a stab as your resident Millennial and weird lefty. Someone mentioned Lenin too, which is a surefire way to motivate me to comment. As always, I’m sorry for not making you laugh or illuminating you and your readers with every word I write.
Zuck is a millennial. He did okay for himself.
Yep. Though the point is he is an outlier and what he achieved is ultimately bad for our society. Shame on us for not wanting to replicate his “success” even if we could.
“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.” – Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. This is for you, HG.
Zuck is an outlier, but so is Jeff “The Dude” Lewbowski. There is a whole spectrum of possibilities in between.
Hi Miles. Yes, a spectrum of sorts exists. Leftists have names for most spots on it, but the main distinction is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. You can be a “labor aristocrat”, for example, but you’re still a prole and perhaps a class traitor. That’s what makes me a “class reductionist” to some on my side of the aisle. I mean it when I ape the Manifesto and say, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Where you stand in relation to the means of production determines your class, if you weren’t sure.
Do you want to know more? I’m lonely, have bean bags to spare, and am obviously willing to dive headlong down any rabbit hole that gives me an excuse to talk about Marxism and especially historical materialism.
Sign me up for the book club.
Ouch, PK. That’s what you get.
There are explanations other than laziness or lack of ambition.
I’m a Boomer, and like Jeffery Gamso I was planning a retirement with less work, but enough to keep me young old instead of old old.
The rapidly deteriorating political and economic climate, coupled with deliberately placed obstacles to both work and activities of daily living, and the decisions driving those trends have me considering a good stiff Randian shrug.
Not so much lying flat as withdrawing consent and refusing to play along any more. There are plenty of things to do with whatever time I have left, even if they are not my best and highest contribution.
I don’t think this really applies to you.
It’s true that I’ve already done the ambition, aspiration, achievement and sacrifice. But there are certainly younger people who see the same forces and reach similar conclusions. They aren’t lazy or stupid. They just refuse to jump through that many ever-shifting hoops.
The difference is you made your fortune. The ones who are ambitious aren’t the ones who are choosing to lie flat. The ones who aren’t ambitious don’t have your vast fortune and legacy of accomplishment to fall back on.
The world is filled with opportunity. If they aren’t up for the corporate grind, then find a vocation that makes them feel less hoop-jumpy. Be a plumber. Be a cellist. Be an engineer (as in drive a train). But be something.
But to lie flat is lazy and stupid, and there’s no spin that makes that a viable alternative.
Now how do we prevent the people who get cancelled from enjoying this perk. It was supposed to be punishment.
my response to most of those lie-flat people is meh, go right ahead. I am in my mid-40s and went from being a geo-tech engineer, to being a stay-at-home dad, to now having a side hobby that pays for fencing and vacations. standing still was never a pleasant option for me, and lie-flat is what i intend to do in the coffin.
as far as the “kids” these days, the more lie-flatters there are, the easier it will be for my kids to stand out from the crowd and excel. if watching youtube and eating cheetos is your thing, have at it. as engineers like to say “Do Nothing” is still a decision, not always a wise one, but still a decision.
While it’s true that the ambitious and hard-working kid will have less competition, he will also have the additional burden of a generational cohort that demands a lot. If they aren’t working, then someone who is will end up paying for them.
Its hard to tell if the additional burden is a new (or coming) thing. I remember the welfare debates of the Clinton Era, as well as an uncle and aunt of mine bragging at a christmas dinner about how they eat so well since they went on food stamps.
To be honest my bigger fear for my boys is the Title IX crap in colleges today rather then being taxed for being successful (and having lazy cohorts).
Most people weren’t exactly proud of getting food stamps (your aunt and uncle being the exception, perhaps). In contrast, lying flat is being presented as a virtue.
Very few are ashamed.
To give a millennial’s perspective, I think an undiscussed aspect in this thread is how high the climb to the traditional middle class life currently is for most people in my generation. My dad paid for his college tuition plus a little beer money with a summer job, something that is just not possible today, so the average student graduates with debt amounting to a big car loan to a small mortgage. Home prices are also much higher as a percentage of the median income. And since you have been paying a student loan from the day you graduated, you now have to finance a car instead of saving up and paying cash. So even under what used to be the average middle class dream of a house, a white picket fence, and two cars, you end up paying 5 loans a month (1 house, 2 cars, and two student loans). And that is only doable with both people working, so now childcare is a must which brings in another monthly bill or two into the equation. And then we look at the growing national debt and unfunded liabilities and wonder how much of the payroll tax we have taken out of our paycheck every month will be there when we retire. Is it that hard to empathize with a generation that doesn’t see the same limitless future for America that the previous generations, especially the boomers, did?
For me personally, my wife and I grew up in upper middle class households, graduated with 0 debt, have advanced degrees, and both have jobs that pay well above the median wage. So we are at least in the top 20% of households in our age group, if not higher. Yet even we had to move out of a high cost metropolitan area to a smaller, less cool, lower cost metropolitan area to be able to afford a house and childcare for our children. We have a couple friends who are in similar financial situations, but most are still renting, and the thought of buying a house and having a couple kids seems like a fantasy to them. And all of us who are in the fortunate group, without exception, needed a cash infusion from our parents to afford our first home’s down payment.
So your generation’s downfall is the inexplicable increase in tuition costs and the loans people willingly took to pay for it? And yet these dots remain unconnected?
I think it’s part of it, and I think “willingly took loans” is not an accurate description since we were beaten over the head our entire childhood about how only losers don’t go to college. I agree with you and others in the comments that there are other problems with our generation. The self esteem movement was a total disaster and produced many of the pathologies of the millennials and gen Z. Most of us don’t know how to do something as simple as change a tire or sow a button. We complain that about how workplaces don’t conform to our needs instead of thinking about how we can provide value as employees. I get it. But there are legitimate complaints, and it’s not just tuition. The proportion of our paycheck that goes towards childcare, housing, and healthcare have also gone up significantly from past generations. Here’s a graph of the wealth accumulated by generation: https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/12/graph-of-the-day-the-staggering-millennial-wealth-deficit-to-catch-up-to-gen-xers-millennials-would-need-to-triple-their-wealth-in-just-four-years-to-reach-boomers-their-net-wor.html. Do you really believe that the gap is mostly due to the boomers having more get-up in their step and boot-strap pulling ability than the millennials and gen X-ers?
I don’t disagree that you were sold a lie, particularly since that’s something I’ve been saying for a very long time. Yet, take a hard look at the push for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in higher ed, bringing an entirely new demographic of suckers into the mix of cost/benefit failure? Which millennials are calling bullshit on the Educational-Industrial complex? Which of the voices you heed are saying “your grievance studies degree is crap” and there’s nothing wrong with being a plumber? Or a garbage man, for that matter.
You can blame your parents, your teachers, your profs for lying to you, but at some point millennials have to grow up and take responsibility for their own choices rather than point at some amorphous oldsters and use that to justify lying flat.
By the way, woke millennials are at the forefront of demanding higher pay and benefits for child care. Did they not realize that if the providers are paid more, the money has to come from somewhere? How do you think all the things you demand happen?
I agree with all that. One caveat is that the woke stuff really started with the second half of the millennial generation’s time in college. I graduated undergrad in ’09. I remember the social sciences faculty being left of center, some political clubs on campus, but in general the environment was not super political. I was there during the ’08 election, and although most of the students were pro-Obama I never heard anyone having any hatred towards McCain voters. Even people who were against gay marriage weren’t thought of as irredeemable evil people. But when I went back to get my MS a few years later, the diversity stuff was all over the place, a law school professor was canceled, and I didn’t feel that any centrist or right of center views were anywhere to be found in public on campus. It was crazy how much the campus environment changed in just a few years.
I was asked in college in 2007 by an RA if I thought the school was doing enough to promote diversity as part of some survey or another. I asked if I could disagree with the idea that diversity was a worthy goal. She said no. I said the school wasn’t doing enough then. She didn’t like my response because it’d make her look bad, so I changed my answer to yes to be polite and save her the hassle. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so polite.
I’m annoyed our Host supports diversity for diversity’s sake and couldn’t see the path we were headed down. To be fair I didn’t think it would get as bad as it seems now at the time either. Anyway, my experience aligns with yours. Political sure, but not to the point of being suffocating.
I think another point I neglected to mention, but is related, is that my generation was sold a lie: we were told that if you went to college and got a bachelor’s degree, you were set for life. I remember going to a college prep meeting run by our counselors in high school in the mid-2000’s and being told “get into the best college you can, and don’t worry about price. Any loans you take out will pay for themselves in higher earnings.” We were told that you would be looser in life, who would at best manage a McDonald’s, if you didn’t go to college. Was it our fault for listening to what every adult told us?
Not every adult. You’re still not seeing a theme here, eh?
I don’t remember any adult telling us to re-consider going to college. Everyone of my classmates who was even slightly academically competent went to college. There was no one of prominence pre-2008 who was questioning the common wisdom. The Thiel fellowship didn’t start until 2011, and even then he was considered an irresponsible lunatic for paying kids to not go to college. To pretend that anyone who is in the older half of the millennial generation could reasonably understand the downside risk of taking out student debt as a teenager is disingenuous. Do you really expect the average 17 year old to reject what every “responsible” adult around them tells them is the only path to success in life?
The bar isn’t stuff you remember. You aren’t the center of the universe, though it’s understandable why you wouldn’t know this.
Can you point to anyone of prominence telling people not to go to college in the mid-2000’s?
Probably, but why would I waste my time doing so? This is your issue and as already explained, you’re not the center of the universe.
You’ve made a common mistake of narcissistic youth, thinking that convincing you matters. Others aren’t replying to you because you’re fascinating and they desperately want to spend their time engaging in a conversation with you.
It may be the case that it’s just hard for some young people to see the light at the end of the tunnel, or to find meaning in what they are doing. In my day job, I meet a lot of young people working their butts off as medical students, even though every time I biopsy their attitudes about life, or read the letters and petitions they sign, they seem to be as left/woke/daft/prone-to-anomie as all people 24 years of age. They are members of the hard-working Slackoisie, if there is such a thing.
Also, the comment “My dad paid for his college tuition plus a little beer money with a summer job, something that is just not possible today” reminds me that the service job SHG described the other day, or the even worse one I had (ready for a 4 Yorkshiremen competition any time!) was made tolerable by the fact that the work was not futile; it covered a meaningful fraction of the college budget. These days, one cannot work one’s way through school by licit means (especially now, with the new OnlyFans business model). Rolling yourself up and off the couch has a Sisyphean flavor for most young people.
Ok…
While I sympathize with this (the price of tuition is out of control, the signaling effect of a college degree has been considerably degraded by rampant grade inflation and letting in too many students), “underwater basket weaving degrees from a tiny liberal arts college” have been a joke for over 25 years. I don’t think anybody seriously believed, “Just go to college, any college, get a degree, any degree, pay whatever, it will all come back to you” was a viable path, and if you did you were consciously fooling yourself to justify messing around for four, five, even six years. My boomer parents, both of middle class background, are both community college grads, and even they knew that I shouldn’t do a humanities degree in literature or something similar, even though my school was an elite private institution. I saw the limitations of a college degree alone after about 6 months in the corporate workforce, and elected to go to law school (no jokes, please); not much sympathy for many people in my generation who treated their four, or likely more, years in college as “high school, but we all live in the same building and there are no parents” or like a short-stay country club for young people, with education much a secondary consideration.
What else but law school could you do with your gender studies degree?
I may just be a humble restaurant manager but my dream one day is to “read the law” in the great state of Vermont. That’s how I plan on being admitted into this profession.
I remember being told by our teachers and counselors in high school to major in whatever interests you, because you’re not going to use it anyway and getting the degree is the most important thing. Our US History AP teacher gave us an article about how getting a history BA is just as useful, if not better, than a STEM or Business degree because of how great of a reader, writer and critical thinker you will become. Thankfully I didn’t take his advice, and majored in a STEM subject.
Of course I’m old, and things were perhaps different in the dark ages, but when I was in graduate school in English at Michigan State (and, as an aside, I’m a better lawyer for the years I spent studying Renaissance literature than I would have been without them).
Anyway, MSU’s English Department would regularly bring in a personnel guy from GM who’d explain to undergraduates that they weren’t looking for students majoring in business. They’d teach that stuff to the people they hired. They were looking for students who could read and write and analyze – things they’d learn through a focus on the humanities – and to a lesser extent the social sciences.
I remember those days, when a liberal arts education was still a serious and rigorous education.
I was going to post a long message about how much better life is here in the USA than my native Ireland, even though Ireland has free university (no longer free but still way cheaper than here), welfare state, free healthcare and it’s frickin IRELAND! People dream about going there.
But I deleted it because this is pretty simple for me. People who want to work will work and bloody hard. Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and living is much harder than it needs to be. But as our noted host repeatedly points out, only recently has indolence been seen as not only viable, but virtuous. My parents were on “welfare” after we moved back to Ireland from the UK in the late 80s. But I watched them over the next 10 or so years deteriorate from people that scrounged every day to feed and clothe us into broken people unable to do things they could do with ease a decade before. They “retired” themselves into early graves.
There is something about going to work every day that seems to keep the reaper at bay. I think we “retire” ourselves at our peril.
Completely agree with this, and FTR, I also think it’s true of my native Germany. You can lower your hours worked to European standards, or do Potemkin work for some instance of government, and live a healthy and long life. It’s true! But doing so comes at a cost. It makes it nigh-on impossible to really excel in life, and at least as importantly (because not everyone will be able to excel), there’s a soul-crushing aspect to the reactivity and dependence produced by “lying flat” that’s best countered by working hard.
Maybe I’m biased here because I got a scholarship from the evil Kochs, but I thought the Koch management philosophy was really good at articulating the dignifying aspect of work, while I’m surprised by how consistently this real, important phenomenon is ignored by the sort of people who call Amy Wax racist for endorsing “bourgeois values.”
And as evidence that I’m being nonpartisan about this, I think conservative populists like Senator Rubio are just as ridiculous, talking about the need for America to restore dignity to work while endorsing every federal sugar subsidy in sight for his Floridian patronage system.
Wait, I thought the scholarship was from Ed Koch.
Hey, if he came back from the grave to offer me one, I’d totally accept. I like Ed Koch. What were you guys trying to do when you elected a decent mayor?
The New America: 330,000,000 people complaining about the lack of room service.
I don’t know a less obnoxious way to state the obvious, so trigger warnings all around:
Go ahead, Lie-flat. Don’t be surprised when those who are more than willing to escape starvation or advance their brand of totalitarianism show up determined and well muscled with bayonets or RPG’s to shove up your flabby butt. Stupid and lazy has it’s own set of rewards.
Just to make it worse, here’s the corollary:
Outside of a few members of you immediate family no one cares if you get another meal or take another breath. At the root those two items are fully your responsibility.. Anything from your family, neighbors or society at large that helps in those goals is gravy. Don’t get used to it.
Does no read the history of nations and warfare or human psychology any more?
Everyone on here, you included, seem to think that prone people don’t work. That’s not what the article says. Prone people only work odd jobs to survive and do not seek to make a career out of what they do for money. It’s a redefinition of success. It is not an excuse to do nothing. We are more than what we do for a paycheck, right?
You don’t know what other people care about or read, so don’t try and guess. Apparently you don’t give two shits about your neighbors, but you can’t say that your antisocial tendencies are universal. And what’s this stuff about nations and warfare? You’re some sort of nationalist nut aren’t you? If you are so into psychology, you should know you’re projecting your own vomit onto the rest of us. Be more neighborly, please. I care about you, comrade.
It is most definitely a “redefinition of success” into what used to be called failure. But hey, if that’s what fulfills you, PK. Your mother and I only want you to be happy.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough that I was laying down my observed base lines for human existence on this old globe based on decades of experience across several continents, often under duress and distress. The idea being that it is good to look at the foundation we are built on once in a while when determining a new course of action. Extrapolating my politics, my relationships with my neighbors, and the contents of my stomach from that as a response leads me to wonder if I hit a nerve.
If so, I’m more than willing to talk but if we are just going to shout “idiot” at one another I have livestock to feed.
Feeding your animals is undoubtedly a better choice than trying to talk to me, but I didn’t call you an idiot. You’d know it if I did because I’d type the words, “you’re an idiot”. Be thankful I didn’t extrapolate anything from your fascination with well-muscled people shoving things up other peoples’ butts. The temptation was there.
You didn’t hit a nerve exactly, I’m just a jerk in a particularly foul mood today. Thanks for caring. You did listen.
Been there, done that. Understood.
I wondered about the anal imagery but Afghanistan and friends lost has been on my mind these last few days, hence the connection.
Surely this is a peek through the door into the future we were promised in the 1960s. Robots would do all the work, we would work for maybe two days a week, and the whole human race would have time for leisure and art. Pretty much The Jetsons, according to the scientists and social commentators of the day.
So while it has taken a generation of two people working in a couple to get there, we are now making cars with robots, and the cars drive themselves, which means the mining machinery digging ore can work without drivers, the ships are already moving cargo without Captains and so it goes on.
Lawyers, accountants, politicians.. all the easiest to replace with a computer, so the rate of replacing people in jobs will go up. The work will still get done, but we will only need to oversee it.
If you’re complaining you can’t get workers, you’re looking at the wrong solution!
That would be a compelling story if it wasn’t completely counter to reality. Prior to Covid, there had never been more jobs in the United States in the country’s history. Maybe the robot fueled mass unemployment will come some day, but the evidence of it in today’s economy is non-existent. The 19th century innovations in agriculture drastically reduced the need for mass farm labor, yet those people ended up finding work in other fields.
” Is ambition, aspiration, achievement and, yes, sacrifice to get there, now a bad thing, an old thing, that’s run it course?”
No, it’s not. Just because some NY Times op-ed writer decides to “rediscover” taking a sabbatical doesn’t mean no one is working or wants to work. I don’t think this article describes a real trend.
I suspect that one of the reasons for lots of openings is that many of the people who once did part-time work aren’t able to return because of school/childcare issues. Another reason, at least around here, is an explosion of higher-paying warehouse and short-haul trucking work has left lots of lower-paying retail and hospitality jobs open.
It’s definitely been more difficult to hire people lately. We used to have at least ten applicants for every open position, now we’re lucky if we get two. And if you’re hiring truck drivers, forget it.
The extended unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium also make it harder to hire lower wage labor. If you’re not going to loose your apartment and are getting paid not to work, why would you get an unenjoyable job for a middling to low wage?