Where Johnny Cash came from
neh.gov
neh.gov
JC's story reminds me a bit of my late grandfather. GF was a hustler, social, progressive, and had a heavy Texarkana accent. He grew up in the Dustbowl era and didn't have money or enough to eat. Then WW2 came around and it was a hard fought and interesting time for him. He was his CO's bookie and his company's loanshark. Post-WW2 was a bit difficult but there was continuity and security of remaining a professional soldier as an NCO. Rarely spent money on themselves, but moderately generous with friends and family. Never financially-insecure and had triple retirements. I have their pristine Telefunken radio console they had in Germany which held several Johnny Cash albums (vinyl). They're not in VG shape, but they're playable. In closing, one thing I think JC and GF shared is they smiled a bit smugly, defiantly, and warmly, something the world can never fade or take away and something that emanates from within.
We sure don’t live life like that anymore.
Sometimes one has to miss the days of physical books instead of constant screens.
If you want some sort of "definitive" edition, I hold the Legacy Edition [1] in very high regard as it to the best of my knowledge contains the two concerts in their entirety.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Folsom_Prison#Legacy_Editio...
Similar. I grew up in Arkansas for 6 years of my childhood working on a turkey farm until I was 11~. Hard work ,7 days a week for 6 years working with turkeys and cattle. Something is lost today by most kids being removed from hard work, I think. Defiantly brings a different perspective going from that to working in the largest tech companies
I was raised in middle-class suburbia, in the North East U.S. My family wasn't wealthy, but wasn't hurting either. I did well in school, but didn't have to try very hard to maintain grades in Advanced Placement classes. Outside of school, I worked easy lawn-care gigs with my neighbor and we made decent cash with 20-30 hours of work per week.
It afforded me a life of coasting, leisure, and throwing away my downtime.
I am nearing 30 years old and just realizing that I'd consider my behavior to be bad habits I need to kick. I want to work harder, and I have to teach myself what that means.
I had an odd life, I lived in the projects as a child until I was sent to my grandfathers farm for 6~ years, and after that, back to the violent city I had originally lived in. I was at a huge disadvantage compared to my peers but from the hard word I was subjected to in those 6 years (work ethic it taught me), pure luck of getting into computer science (thanks to John Carmack via doom/quake), and meeting the right people, I was able to work much harder than those around me and rise up quickly through the worlds biggest tech companies, make a ton of money to the point where I was able to retire at 40 (though I didn't and still work).
To answer your question, in my view, that's what was lost -- a connection to brutal hard work that keeps the world moving forward.
The explosive growth of the software industry over the last few decades has led to an abnormal situation where regular employees have enough leverage to capture a substantial fraction of their surplus. Most people are not so lucky. For most people, the system looks more like:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
I too found it easy to climb. I too enjoy the "free" money from real estate investments and a stock portfolio. But I know where it comes from. I do not pound my throne and launch spittle as I demand for those beneath me to work harder for my benefit.
You shouldn't either.
If you work hard to make a mud pie, you've created no value, and nobody will want it.
If you work hard to make an apple pie, people will be willing to give you money for it, because you created something of value to them.
I grew up in a restaurant, but my main lesson from it was that I didn't want to be forced to do that kind of work. People have praised me for my work ethic, but I'm not sure it came from doing anything at the restaurant, it came from NOT wanting to do anything at the restaurant.
Most people who get a desk job will not see this, in fact they will barely ever meet an end consumer (person who eventually pays VAT for example), and the money will have passed through a huge number of hands before getting into their account each month. Doing a slightly better or worse job makes no difference.
Could you say more about what era this was and how many how's a day?
But yeah, 7 days a week I'd tend to the turkeys, cattle, dig potatoes, pick tomatoes (we grew a lot of vegetables) , cut hay, rake hay, fluff hay, etc. Being 7 years old on a tractor cutting hay all day was extremely fun. We'd also make the square bales of hay and being 7 or 8, I wasn't strong enough to lift them, so I'd drive the truck with a trailer and my grandfather would be behind loading the square bales. We'd do this for hours in the heat (I had the easy part), he had pure raw strength. We had almost 200 acres of land.
I'm similar age and have been in paid employment since the age of 13, a lot of different things through farming, manufacturing, retail and catering before I started in tech.
I was always grateful for the work ethic but also important was the experience of being the most lowly employee being made to do the grunt work. I think that gave me the confidence to get on with the job without complaint or too much assistance, I feel that especially helped me progress early on in my tech career.
Still, I'm not sure how I'd feel about my own kids working so young. And in all honesty, don't really think those opportunities would be there for them now anyway.
Modern governments actively endure that working before 18 is like chilf exploitation or something which is ridiculous as you learn much more by doing than by watching videos or reading books
> All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, > All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.
I don't think the laws have changed that much from when I was young.
There's more focus on remaining in education sure (which is generally a good idea but often poorly implemented) but I think there's wider societal explanations as to why you see far fewer kids working outside school hours than you once did.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-children-yearn-for-the-mi...
I'm not sure I agree.
The work was hard and you didn't get anywhere.
You worked the farm, the mill, the mine, etc. just like your father did and his father did. You didn't get rich. You didn't even get comfortable. You were still poor, and your children were going to remain poor.
The window where labor unions made mill, mine, and factory jobs something livable was quite short--1960 to 1980, roughly.
Yeah, shitty, excruciating work was a good way to beat you kid over the head with "go find ANYTHING else to do as a career." Worked for my dad. Worked for Joe Namath's dad. etc.
Not sure I count that as anything "being lost" though.
I'm sorry, what? What do you think 2023 mills, mines, and factories look like in the United States?
Here's a tour of a wheat mill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYP6AnNQjNo
Here's a modern coal mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwo3slH1wsk
And here's a modern factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr9kK0_7x08
For example: the Natrona Heights steel mill now employs roughly 100 people on a shift vs when it employed somewhere between 5000-10000 on a shift. Automation killed a ton of employment. Those are the kind of jobs I am talking about.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to bring all those jobs back. They were terrible jobs.
However, claiming that working those kinds of jobs somehow makes people better is quite suspect, at best.
I will say, I'm a 100% knowledge worker, and work from a laptop, but hard labor is good for you (within reason). We have all sorts of illnesses and obesity in modern society because our bodies were built for stamina that we no longer make use of.
There are folks who turned that into habits that unlocked productivity and happiness in life. There are others who just got exploited.
To me, what's important is building the intuition for the connection between practice and achievement, which is a subtly different thing. It's not hard work for as a thing that's morally admirable. It's a means to an end.
I would add to that a sense of collective responsibility, tempered with self-assertiveness.
I think these things are the bright side of valuing "hard work", but without the dark sides of exploitation and workaholism.
The whole "kids should work harder and enjoy it" take is entirely Western. Kids are working very hard in other parts of the world, for pennies, no health care, and have next to zero economic mobility. Kids should be willing to work for their own benefit, to enrich their own life, but that is not what we see in practice. Kids work to survive.
I think, to some extent, there’s been a broadening of the set of people clued in that the connection between hard work and money isn’t just weak, but often nonexistent.
You don’t get real money doing farm work 7 days a week, after all. Real work, but not real money.
If it was previously common for children to be exploited and lose their childhoods, then I can certainly see how that led the older generations to be such seemingly spineless adults with no self esteem. Abuse does that to people.
Fortunately, it sounds like they (well...most of them...) recognized the damage done by their upbringing and sought to raise their own children better than their parents raised them. Breaking out of the cycle of abuse is a hard thing to do; good on them.
If the current economy persists, people will have to adopt new expectations, eventually. Many people already have, as they experience a much tougher time finding new jobs.
Any time I see this I always wonder "what does the speaker consider a large salary?". Do you mean a living wage where one doesn't have to live with three other people in a rat/roach infested slumlord apartment?
My childhood was spent on a farm, we all worked or we didn't eat. It was fucking miserable. I wouldn't wish that on anyone who doesn't want it.
Of course, whether it'd actually be better for everyone or it'd actually be stable is another can of worm entirely.
Fuck that
Post-scarcity and post-work society takes a formal effort for people to find purpose. It requires that we really try to find things that are valuable and that we enjoy.
But I do not believe we will live, as a society, to see the end of scarcity or jobs. We'll kill ourselves way before we get to that point.
You're right - some may "do nothing", but the kind of people that would "do nothing" if nobody were forced to work to live are the kind of people, by and large, that do just enough to get by.
Even if we instituted a generous UBI, people would still have to work to live because landlords/real estate speculator aren't going to let all of those money slosh around freely - they want theirs too.
A childhood of workin outside, whether that's working with animals or working in the soil, teaches entirely different lessons than living in video games or social media and eating food that magically shows up on grocery store shelves.
I obviously don't know you or your children and am picking on video games and social media only in a general example of many children's common experiences today.
Of course does hard work shape the mentality in a way that you value the amenities you gain, either in exchange or later in life.
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I hold my pants up with a piece of twine
If you are mine, I'll pull the twine.