Comment by marcyb5st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcyb5st | Hacker News Reader

I think a good explanation of the phenomenon is detailed here: https://youtu.be/ZuXzvjBYW8A (it's a 50 min talk and targets the UK, but it's applicable to the Western world IMHO).

The summary is:

- People are working more and reaping less and less from their labor

- Social security is getting both worse and less accessible for people in the working age

- Working people in general have a much harder time entering the house market and when they do the bang for the buck is way worse than in the past

- Retirement plans are getting worse and worse

- Millennials and younger people will likely have to drastically reduce their carbon footprint by as much as a factor of 8 compared to the previous generations if we want to hit climate goals for the century

Apart for the carbon one, the others are things I am also witnessing both in Switzerland and Italy. And with these premises I don't find surprising that people consider "working hard" or even working not worth it.

> Apart for the carbon one, the others are things I am also witnessing both in Switzerland and Italy. And with these premises I don't find surprising that people consider "working hard" or even working not worth it.

It's interesting that in places like China, where conditions and pay are basically unimaginably worse, people still don't have as much problem getting motivated for entering the workforce.

I guess you've never heard of the "lying flat" or "let it rot" movement happening in China?

I've heard about it, but upon closer inspection it seems to be just a media fad. In China, most people simply can't afford not to work - their parents are struggling farmers and won't support a useless adult child, like is the norm in Japan (the Hikkikomori phenomenon).

Almost all of these are very short term trends at odds with this twitter thread.

The twitter thread is the observation that "nobody wants to work anymore" isn't a recent phenomenon; it's entirely likely that the reasons change with the years.

I imagine that a large part of the issue is that productivity increases seem to benefit the top and not the bottom. I haven't thoroughly reviewed all the snippets, but my casual view is that people are complaining that younger people aren't willing to do the work that the complainer used to do without complaining, ignoring the fact that the nature of work has changed significantly over the decades, with significant mechanisation/automation. IIRC one of the examples is that youngsters don't want to break rocks any more (I exagerate perhaps a little there).

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