'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore' Meme Cites Real Newspaper Articles
snopes.com
snopes.com
> Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs.
- Socrates, ~400 BCE [1]
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/?amp=1
[2] previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426
God knows most jobs out there are hardly of earth shattering importance.
By Zeus! Kids these days...
So, no clay tablets from me, but that as a datapoint on how long the youth is terrible.
The Papacy.
The Roman Catholic Church had quite significant swings in power over time.
I counter your Protestant Reformantion point with the Catholicization of Latin America.
Total membership is up, total wealth is up, actual power isn’t.
It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907."
From your link.
What does it say about us that we look back 150 years and say that it's unacceptable that children were engaged in dangerous work and that people worked pretty much as long as there was daylight six days a week, but we look back 30 years and say that people back then had a strong work ethic because they worked unpaid overtime?
However, it does show up frequently, and my view of it has generally been that it could have originated as a loose translation of the Superior/Right Argument character from Aristophanes' Clouds, who does make similar claims:
>And so, young man, that’s why you should choose me, the Better Argument. Be resolute. You’ll find out how to hate the market place, to shun the public baths, to feel ashamed of shameful things, to fire up your heart when someone mocks you, to give up your chair when older men come near, not to insult your parents, nor act in any other way which brings disgrace or which could mutilate your image as an honourable man.
This is very problematic in that, first, Clouds is a comedy mocking Socrates, second, Socrates' views at that point in the play are supposed to be represented by the Inferior/Wrong Argument character, not the Superior Argument character, and third, Aristophanes is mocking the claims of both characters.
In a fashion typical of Aristophanes, the Inferior Argument wins the debate with a joke about the audience's sexual proclivities that convinces the Superior Argument that its cause is hopeless.
For reference I'm white upper middle class, and all the people spoken about above are college educated.
...Is this not working?
Is that gross, or after paying income and Social Security & Medicare tax, like wage earners do?
There is more to a job than just money. The lonely financial gig is not for everyone
It’s a great way to lose money while you think you’re working though.
They don't even have to be directly taking out loans to do it themselves, only taking advantage of economic conditions created by cheap money.
"Stocks" haven't been a great source of passive income this year, and "real estate" is showing signs of having just passed its peak. These easy jobs may not survive these things contracting.
Of course, if they're walking off with cash rather than debt, they may still be among the winners of the whole 0% interest regime.
It takes time and dedication, but I didn't work myself into the ground doing it. But I did have part time jobs when I was starting out.
I think its something you create for yourself that grows over time, when you work at a job, you are enriching someone else's vision. That's ok if your visions are aligned, but if you are working at a job that doesn't align with your value system, there is only so much of that you can take.
I'm talking more about the Amazon drop-shipping businesses where "you can earn $5K/week!!1!" where if it's really that easy the market should already have been consumed, or even the ones you just plain can't figure out where the money is coming from. There's a lot of "businesses" that work in a 0% interest environment that won't work in a 5+% environment. If you've been doing it since 2004, you are almost certainly not in such a space because you started in a non-0% interest environment.
I mean, basically, it's just like how the crypto business space is completely collapsing now. They are the first big things to topple over in a non-0%-environment. Smaller analogs to that can happen too, it just won't make the news that Joe-down-the-street's business of importing bulk cheap IP-pirated stuff from China and distributing it to local parents who want cheap Disney-branded stuff went out of business because it turns out that even though he didn't take loans himself, every other company involved in his business was offering subsidized, not-truly-sustainable prices because of the cheap money environment. (If you don't know, that's a real thing, not an outrageous fake example I'm making up. I have a particular acquaintance in mind who did that as a side hustle for a while.)
In Western culture, and probably others, your job is closely tied to your identity. Even if you don't feel so yourself, it greatly affects how others perceive you. After all, when you meet a new person, one of the first things you ask them is, "What do you do [for a living]?" If you're living off passive income, answering that question can be complicated. So you just make up something like "being a consultant" or "doing online sales."
It's pretty similar with generational wealth. I know someone who has been working doing script reviews in Hollywood for 10 years now. It's definitely paid work, but maybe a few thousand a month; the rest of their lifestyle is financed by their parents, who run a real estate business. But it's a lot easier, socially, to say "I'm a script writer and reviewer" than to say "I don't work, my parents pay for everything."
If you actually sat down and did the math, it'd be obvious. But most people don't think that hard about it, and will accept an answer of "I'm a script writer" in the context of e.g. telling a Tinder date what you do for a living.
I grew up poor, most of my friends are not college educated and they come from dirt poor areas and have never had a decent job. Yet they fall into this category as well. It’s really easy to make money hustling in the day to day. For instance one friend builds picnic tables, scraps metal and does the occasional moving/painting job.
The key difference is that if you offered any of those people a $100k/year office job they would take it in a heartbeat. The kind of people we're talking about can support their upper-middle class lifestyles without a fulltime job because of passive income or generational wealth.
Not in my part of the US. I've rarely been asked, and have never asked unless it was pertinent to an ongoing discussion.
In my experience, the "experiences" that single, underemployed people of working age (20s to 40s) have are largely watching shitloads of Netflix and YouTube.
After all, even if they aren't working a fulltime job, most of their friends are. And even if they find friends who are also underemployed, finances will be tight for both of them, so what exactly can they do together? Usually just hang out at each others' places and watch Netflix and YouTube.
Admittedly this could look a lot different for those with kids, though.
My kids graduated and I moved to SW CO. I have a lot of friends in their early 20s and look at them with the perspective of someone with children that age.
I know a whole lot of ski bums, dirt bag climbers, rafting guides, semi-pro slack liners or whatever. Sound healers and yogis.
To be clear, I'm sure there are plenty of folks watching shitloads of video, but I don't know them because of selection bias. And I know that some of them are trustifarians and others are sociopathic scammers.
Personally, I like my remote coding job. I'm also underemployed but the job is easy and has gentle requirements on me. So I'm a bit removed from what these folks are doing.
However, the folks I know are generally having a much better time than just sitting around watching netflix, and the comment about having experiences taken from us by having full time jobs is a real thing from my position:
being able to just go on a 3 month climbing spree sounds really fun and I know folks doing that, I just don't want to have to re-acquire a job in the aftermath.
Much less so for the underemployed 30 year old making $5k/month off passive income, or a mom&dad stipend, who still has to occasionally look at their bank account.
Pretty common for people in these situations to fall into depression and/or alcoholism.
That's the part I find most fascinating. I just can't fathom how that will work out down the road.
Women in the dating market know "the odds are good" (that he is a good provider) and that the "goods are odd" (this guy interacted with 5% of the women that his peers did in university)
The phenomenon of the lonely cringy dating posts on blind will only get worse.
The freelancers and small businesses owners and workers were forced to shut down and isolate while the managerial class could remote work on their laptops near the pool side or in their chalet.
Who was the most targeted and impacted? Who benefited the most? Who enacted, supported and profited from the measures?
Really makes you think.
They don't have to work conventionally, with a micro-managing boss from hell, with a rigid 9-to-5 ass in seat mentality, no way of ever getting that wage raise carrot their upper management holds in front of them for years, dystopian corporate bullshit (anything from spyware on the computer to waiting days for a simple IT ticket to be resolved) and most importantly: large parts of the profit they generate never ever ending up in their own pockets.
Instead, they work on their own risk, have a way better ratio of "amount of money per profit generated" and have a way better quality of life.
That would be true, if we lived in a world where your gross salary corresponded linearly to the amount of work you did. In that world, the hardest-working CEO would make 3x (maybe in some extreme cases 5x) what the laziest server made. But instead we live in a world where the "successful" make 100x-1000x, because that money isn't coming from their effort, it's coming from a combination of government subsidies (you may not be using the NHS, but the poor people who make your job possible certaintly are) and extreme power imbalances in market conditions that allow them to pay the people on the ground creating the value very little.
Worker is contracted to work 9 to 5. Regardless if they WFH and put their feet up for the entire year doing nothing, or they work their bottom off, the majority of time they are required to commit is paid to the tax man.
That sounds like working to me.
Results date from yesterday to 10 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426116):
> Because it seems that once you declared basic income and nobody wants to work anymore
Now that it's happening (and has been for a couple decades) we only hear FUD from folks trying to get everybody back to work.
I have far more time with my kids than my parents ever had with us, partly because I simply do not grocery shop or merchandise shop anymore. Yes there’s still plenty of humans involved but both are heavily automated with AMRs.
This is hours a week of freed time.
Again, to each their own. But for me it’s huge and I love and cherish it.
But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.
I guess countries are becoming more of what they already were: the US gets more unequal and exploitative. Other, more socialist countries are getting more so. China is getting totalitarian using automated facial recognition and censorship.
The Ubers and doordashes and deliveroos of this world are predicated upon the growth of the precariat.
India had all this stuff 50 years ago, just without an app. I remember it not being unusual to have Starbucks delivered to your door in Buenos Aires in 2012. Again, no app.
When you sent a document to the printer, an employee called a "peon" would pick it up and bring it to your office. He would also bring around tea and cookies in the afternoon. Now that's service!
No matter how good automation gets, the government is going to lag way behind. I don’t foresee a transition to any sort of utopian era where everyone enjoys the fruits of automation. I think those at the top will continue to hoard the wealth because they own those systems.
IIRC, the breakdown was typically around 1% lords and priests, 9+% soldiers to protect the lords and priests against other lords and priests, and 90% unfree agricultural labor of one form or another (being a serf was slightly better than being a slave, but only a bit).
A UBI for instance could help with that. But there's nothing but FUD on that subject.
Now I can find phone numbers, share photos with family, watch movies on demand and hurl abuse at politicians, all without leaving my chair.
A movie rental place had more or less all blockbusters (pun intended) and a huge stack of old movies. Netflix today, not the old postal order Netflix, has nowhere near the assortment of a kinda crappy movie rental place of the late 90s.
Farming is highly automated both in terms of pre-made bulk chemicals and machines on the fields.
We mass-produce cars. Indeed, we have cars that we can leave months on end without maintenance. And they run both faster and further than a horse.
We have automated labs that can produce and test medicine in high pace.
We have seriously large industries (gaming, cruising, performing arts) that do nothing but give people something to do now that we don't have to worry about having enough food by end of winter.
Having an abundance of food and not relying on substance farming for the majority of your needs also has the knock-on effect of kids not being needed on a farm, but getting education instead. Which in term will eventually lead to more industrialisation etc.
...but what does Upstart do? https://youtu.be/WWxl4W_eVUA?t=110
You are mistaking a (large, obnoxious, all-encompassing) trend of the economic moment (albeit a moment that has existed for 1.5 to 2 decades now) for the greater direction of civilization. A mistake in scale.
But < 2% of Americans anyway work in agriculture. Down from 98% a century or two ago.
And US population grew by what, 50% in 30 years? But jobs by 25%. Manufacturing jobs dropped steadily as a pct of population. Because, automation?
It's often repeated that automation just allows people to get better jobs running the robots. Trouble is, 2 people run a robot that replaced 200.
Just ask Detroit how much automation benefitted jobs.
The additional problem to this framing is that anywhere between $0-[amount dictated to provide a stable life, including inflation] is a hellscape and has proven extremely difficult for majority of people to escape from for a variety of reasons.
But sure, the solution is everyone being their own boss hashtag entrepreneur... but wait if everyone is their own boss... who do the bosses exploit so they can nudge themselves further down the number line faster than others?
-- some idiot 50 years ago. Glad things have changed!
Becoming a billionaire is definitely from hard work and not at all luck and being born with the tight parents!
The issue is not people working or not working; The issue is the distribution of power. If it's not a problem of the people in power, then it won't get solved, easy as that. This is not something that can be solved on the individual level, because due to the population numbers, we now exist in a huge, global, interconnected system of societies, governments, and such. And these issues, at the end of the day, could be solved by evolving, changing that system. And the individuals follow, as their incentives dictate.
Hmm, not on-topic for OP, but oh well.
And those workers would get more money. And have more stuff, better medical care, more experiences.
And then someone would say “thats unfair they have more money than me”.
Rinse and repeat.
It's more galling when you realize these shortages, at least of housing, are artificially created in order to make sure people keep working as much as possible.
Mostly just homeowners voting in their self interest, and unintended consequences.
Even with rent increases, I can live in 500 sqft apartments and basically retire in my 30s/40s.
If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time.
The price of single-family detached homes is so out of line that it is absurd.
How will you pay for the ever-increasing rent on apartments when you're 70 and beyond?
Owning a house is short-term pain but allows you to lock in a "rent" (mortgage) which will never increase and will at one point go to zero, hopefully before you retire.
Today's luxuries becomes tomorrow's bare necessities.
Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more.
This makes sense though -- I think it's somewhat natural for people to want growth/progress. I've found that working towards goals is one of the things that makes me the happiest and most fulfilled in life.
Not only do we always want more, we also want more than other people.
Just look at nurses. They are chronically underpaid, yet still do their jobs.
But they wouldn't feel that way working just anywhere. They have found a great match with an employer who treats them well.
Although, I don't think work is the default for humans. Evolutionally speaking I'd think taking care of the self, the partner, and the immediate next of kin would come first, and would take most of the day. In this light, a 9-5 is really unnatural, because you give "your best" to a completely different context. I see the point in it personally, but I also understand why it could feel unnatural and undesirable.
I've learned that this sentiment is somewhat uncommon, though.
Things can be both enjoyable and necessary[0]. I could imagine that early humans may have enjoyed the "work" of hunting (given that some modern people still seem to), even though it was also necessary for feeding themselves.
[0]: Money being a stand-in for "necessities" here.
The people saying Nobody Wants to Work Anymore are the ones who truly don't want to work - they just want to tell other people [what|how|when|where] to work.
There's also those who don't want to work by telling others they can generate currency/value using computers to generate some semi-random numbers and writing it down, declaring the random number has value.
/s
Alternative interpretation: 20% of executives are bad at hiring. Like this very much seems like a case of blaming the general public for their failings.
To be clear, I think the statement "nobody wants to work anymore" is incorrect. But that's irrelevant, I'm talking about the quality of the argument.
Then you hear stories about Japan or Korea and I think to myself "those countries aren't even richer than we are what the HELL are they doing all day at the office?!".
Truth to be told, the same happens in gene natural selection. All animals are insects, other than a rounding error.
- advertising say you can make millions just doing some comfy fun things like having sex on cam (OnlyFan and co), or publishing some casual videos about nail arts etc;
- other advertising say you can just make money, not that much but still more than many classic jobs just running a bit on a bike (Just Eat, Uber Eat, Foodora, Glovo etc the "raider platform");
- in the past IF you worked hard you got something in return, nowadays on one side many advertising tell "in 2030 you'll own nothing and being happy", the reality again tell that working poor do exists, that even if you work hard inflation makes money value less faster than the income growth etc.
Long story short YES, it's true almost nobody want to work for starvation wages. The real meme should then be the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg
Such memes only prove the people spreading them don't understand selection bias and cherry picking. "Nobody learns statistics anymore."
And you are missing the point of my rebuttal: that by the same method anything can be made to appear like a constant meaningless refrain, regardless of actually being one.
It should be clear to anyone with even lacklustre intelligence that finding recurring instances of the phrase "there are not enough jobs" throughout history does not rule out that there were times when that concern was indeed warranted.
If you want to get people to work, you have to compensate them appropriately, and not what you think is appropriate, but what they think is appropriate.
If you have a system that degrades wages (via currency regularly), and its increasing in velocity and you don't meet that, of course you will lose people because its more economic for them to grow their own food or do some other more productive effort.
What's sad is, there are many books that are well respected, that cover exactly what has and is happening, and they are willfully being ignored by the people that could make a change but don't.
Labor relations is not new subject material, anything that interferes increases costs, and if its not worth their time to do the work in the first place, workers won't do it because they have options and there are fundamental limits to how far wages can fall below their real productive value.
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1778) is just one such example, and the Wealth & Poverty of Nations by Landis, is another.
The majority of people these days are either adding to the noise, not addressing the problem, or are actively making it worse because they personally benefit from doing so at everyone elses expense.
Actually going out and doing something, is in the minority, because that's how most people alive today were raised, ideologically through the public school system.
Snopes is, supposedly, a neutral Mythbusters site for the Web.
"Urban street gangs initiate members by making them drive at night with lights off and kill anyone who flashes lights at them" -- busted!. Great stuff.
Instead, they bend over backwards to cite irrelevancies about political figures they like: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-us-mexico-border...
> But we were unable to find a documented Biden visit to the U.S.-Mexico border during his presidency. We reached out to the White House to learn more and will update this post if we get more information.
> We should note, however, that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Texas border in June 2021 and toured immigration facilities. In December 2019, before the presidential elections, Jill Biden also visited asylum seekers in camps on the Mexican side of the border.
How is relevant that Harris went to El Paso? The press secretary said Biden went there. We "reached out to the White House to learn more" -- what more is there to learn? They already busted it.
.. and investigate, scrupulously, anything favorable to their side:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walker-texas-resident/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-musk-could-threaten-fr...
It's fine for Snopes to be a "fact checker with an agenda." They just need to disclose the agenda.
It helps that I'm paid for work that I'd otherwise been doing, but I have a decent history of working less great jobs because I find the prospect of overcoming challenges, that I'd not put upon myself, satisfying.
Nature is a harsh mistress and we've abstracted a lot, but not all, of that away.
And of the ones who wouldn't, what would their reasons be? For some, I can imagine a great taste for art and travel and appreciation, which isn't "productive" per se, but is self-motivational. For others, perhaps trauma of various kinds makes the prospect of producing anything and subjecting it to scrutiny overwhelming.
I'm sure there are some people who truly are just plain lazy, but I think if people truly don't want to do anything, there's usually a reason, and if that reason were overcome, most people, just because they're humans, would want to do something.
Not everything is about abstrac economic value. Humans have other needs which need to be met, like social interaction and leisure.
Now maybe that price is indeed worth it, but I think that's a decision that should be left up to each individual, not imposed at the societal level via UBI or something similar. If any particular person decides it's worth taking the economic hit in order to work less, or on something that's less economically valuable, that's completely up to them.
I have to disagree about hobbies, though. I think a lot of people intentionally choose not to monetize their hobbies, lest the pressure of making money infect the joy of the hobby itself.
I really wonder too. I like UBI for example for this reason. I'd think addictions would wreak havoc among these people too though, because addictive things wait around every corner of society, promising to make the bad feelings go away. Nevertheless I think it would be a worthy effort to have a system that doesn't let people stoop down below a specific level.
Don't think it's a capitalist thing.
I'm almost 50, and have been working full-time since I was 17. Yes, full-time, even during my five years as an undergraduate. Even when I hated the work itself, I have always made the best of it. I worked in over 30 restaurants around the US for about 10 years, and had a great time of it, even though the work was horrible, grueling, and often with people I could not stand.
Now I work in software development, and love my job. It's stressful as heck, often frustrating, but rewarding in many ways.
Check out Karma Yoga - it's close to how I've always felt about work. Incidentally, I have no personal connection to Hinduism:
> a brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages.
by providing references to quotes from a pastor, a home owner, a few small business owners, a former labourer, and farmers. If these are the evil capitalists that socialists are railing against then I think they'll have a hard time recruiting.
They used to be sort of a fun Mythbusters for the Web. Now they're just a site trolling for clicks from left-wing users.
Well, in this particular case, they seem to have expended a lot of effort to painstakingly search newspaper archive to support a meme posted by... "the Great Socialist Cat Memes Facebook page". I'm not sure they're necessarily lazy, they're just suspiciously specific about where they're willing to put in any effort.
Generation 1: each child kills 1 people on average. G0 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 2: each child kills 2 people on average. G1 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 3: each child kills 3 people on average. G2 comments that kids are killing more people these days.
Generation 3 points out that "lol people have been saying that forever. Nothing is happening. Our generation aren't that bad, because previous generations had the same narrative."
Please.
(Societies crash)
1000 years later:
"People have always been saying that!"