Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

What's "up" isn't strictly generational, but a question of who's fallen into a black hole where they waste their time on social media and have no work ethic because they've never felt the slightest need or pressure to scrub toilets or bus tables. I'm thankful to be from a generation where we had to do grunt work, from well before 16, and where friends were people you hung out with in real life when your job was done. What we're really seeing is the halo effect of pampering and coddling of kids - via helicopter parenting in the '00s and then social media complaints about life going forward. This is different in a fundamental way: If anyone had complained they were too good to do hard work in the '90s, you would have risked being seen as an elite rich snob. In fact a lot of my friends rejected college and went into trades or trucking because it was "HONEST WORK"... because they were embarrassed to be the kind of lazy people who would put on a tie and sit at a desk. I always thought that was a little stupid and selling themselves short, but it was at least an honest emotional response to the idea of people who seemed to sit on their ass all day and make money by doing nothing. What's changed here is that the entire basic concept of that - the conceit that led to it - still revolved around an idea that making money was essential to having a complete life. That's been obliterated by a tidal wave of political viewpoints you're supposed to adopt about capitalism and labor, which you can spend your time scrolling through and parroting on Twitter while they sell you ads to spend (presumably your parents') hard-earned cold-eyed capitalist money on toys, instead of facing the reality of showing up for a job that isn't "good enough for you".

The boomers did a real bad job of raising their kids.

> What's "up" isn't strictly generational, but a question of who's fallen into a black hole where they waste their time on social media and have no work ethic because they've never felt the slightest need or pressure to scrub toilets or bus tables. I'm thankful to be from a generation where we had to do grunt work, from well before 16, and where friends were people you hung out with in real life when your job was done. What we're really seeing is the halo effect of pampering and coddling of kids

'rants' like this scare the shit out of me. minimum wages have not kept up with inflation and gig work platforms and zero hour contracts have killed unions. financialization of the housing market means working class people are becoming lifelong renters. you see this and tell me people are lazy and that we are coddling children? huh?

> If anyone had complained they were too good to do hard work in the '90s, you would have risked being seen as an elite rich snob. In fact a lot of my friends rejected college and went into trades or trucking because it was "HONEST WORK"... because they were embarrassed to be the kind of lazy people who would put on a tie and sit at a desk.

> The boomers did a real bad job of raising their kids.

i think you'd benefit from applying a marxist/dialectical materialist lens that recognizes that real power coming from belonging to the propertied class. you seem to be close to it yet you are still using a term like 'boomer', which is in my opinion a useless term as it suggests that all folks from the baby boomer generation have much in common; which is not the case as some are born into the propertied class and have a lot of opportunities and chances to fail and get back up again. most boomers are born working class and thus without those chances (on somewhat of a scale of course, but more often than not it means a much tougher path in life).

Well. I didn't mean to give a scary rant. I really do think people just need to work harder, and their conception of what's too hard now is incredibly weaksauce. Yeah: A lot of boomers ended up propertied without even trying; Yeah: it's somewhat harder to own property now than it was then, but mainly because the boomers are still sitting on it, and in the next 15 years an enormous amount of housing stock is going to be available, possibly so much that we'll have to shrink the suburbs back to the cities, which would be a good thing.

I do think people have become lazy. I don't see the work ethic of my parents or grandparents in anyone anymore. I can't claim I have it either; but at least I'm not hypnotized by social movements (or, for fucksake Marxist dialectics) into thinking I'm a victim of circumstance. My grandparents were victims of circumstance (and they were solid communists from Russia who gave that shit up and became store owners in America). My father was the first person in my family to go to a university. I don't need a fucking marxist lens to explain to me why my friends in PDX going to BLM/anti-cop protests and getting pepper sprayed are doing what they do. I just think they're putting their energy in the wrong place. But at least they actually give a shit about something, unlike most of the rest of their generation in America who sit on their thumb and tweet about it.

Im at an age when people talk of my age group like that, and my age group talk of young adults like that. I started working at 14 carrying furnitures on the weekend and im a pampered millenial :D

In fact, I read a little essay wrote during the 18th century by a grumpy old guy that, if modernized a little bit, could pass for your little essay.

I think your reaction is an effect of aging more than an objective view of the world. It's probably very similar to what a pre WWII adult would say of the pampered boomers born around the 40s: children are treasured by their parents, fathers want their child to surpass them and parents are disappointed by the new path their offsprings carved, on average.

Basically, your comment is as useless to trigger change in the youth as it is interesting to study aging. Instead of wondering how to whip the youth into aging faster, I d ask you: how to comfort the elders into aging slower ?

We can go back much further in time and find the same lamentations:

'The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.' -Socrates

Well look what happened to Athens.

My comments here (or anywhere) don't aim at utility, let alone triggering change. What kind of fool thinks he can change nature by an internet comment? No, friend. This is a simple howl. But I do think we who grew up with rotary phones and building the infrastructure of the shit that's called the internet now should get a little extra weight when we criticize the social media generation than, for instance, old time cowboys should get for criticizing hippies. Their criticism was about style. Mine is about substance. Yes, it's normal to see youth as callow and fickle the older you get, nothing in the whole of human history has prepared us for the utterly vapid emptiness and mindlessness of the current generation.

But I am your future generation, probably: I m 33, so a millenial. I'm starting to feel the same way about my own future generation.

I think it evolves with age and you exaggerate the old time. How many people finish high school in your country, how significantly has this changed ?

In mine,France, it's a bit better, but most people still stop abstract study around 14 and start practical and will never produce a refined thought or have a noble hobby in their life and that's fine. That's always been so and there has always been noble grumpies to somberly bemoan the vapid frivolities of the next generation - but they compare perhaps their fancy upbringing to a base mass that never changed in the first place.

Look take an exemple: I'm the first of all my ancestors to speak and write English, that's a generational progress in a huge sample of my age group they would never judge us on positively.

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