Boomers, Gen X Are Also Fed Up with Their Employers | Hacker News Reader

Boomers, Gen X Are Also Fed Up with Their Employers

businessinsider.com

29 pointsMulticomp30 comments

> Someone else wrote, more gently, "While I feel you're spot on with most of your facts you've got gen x all wrong." They added: "My generation leads in workplace dissatisfaction and realized 2 decades ago that there was no more corporate loyalty."

this was exactly my thought as I was reading through the article.

Every generation has complaints about the next generation, one of the "faults" for my generation (Gen-X) was no workplace loyalty. But my generation watched what loyalty got our parents. If companies want loyalty they need to be loyal.

> We're used to hearing 20-somethings complain about the state of corporate America today. But I didn't expect to receive such an outpouring of dismay and disillusionment from seasoned workplace veterans. I'd written the story for young people, as a defense of their decision to rebel against the notion that we owe our employers a debt of gratitude.

The author is seriously missing a lot of historical context. the younger generations have moved even further in this regard, but this isn't an age-based phenomenon, it's a reaction to how businesses have acted. Used to someone would work for 40 years for the same company and retire with a pension. Nowadays you're more likely to be fired a year or two before your pension, if you're offered one at all.

Is there anything Americans are not mad about?

The rest of the world is not like this. Europeans are not any more mad about their employers than they already were. Asians are not any more mad at their employers than they already were (small exception might be the lying down movement in China, but I’m not sure how widespread that is, and for the most part Chinese dissent appears to have come from a radical retraction in economic prospects rather than being mad at employers).

If there is something unique about employers that has changed why isn’t this extreme anger not being reflected elsewhere? Especially now since most of these companies are multinational and many probably employ more people in Europe and Asia and follow similar policies there than they do in the U.S.

Americans are mad about everything. They’re mad about their commutes. They’re mad about their jobs. They’re mad about their neighbors. They’re mad about politics. They’re mad about homeless people.

I think it’s actually time to consider that there’s something else that’s driving general dissatisfaction in the U.S. (maybe social media?) to try and understand whether this general dissatisfaction actually exists, and if so, which issues are attributable to this and which are issues Americans are mad about in of themselves.

Americans have zero social safety net.

A job is our shelter, out healthcare, our food, our everything.

If you lose your job youre on the streets.

So shit hits a lot harder here.

In 2022 the US spent 1.2 trillion dollars, or 19% of the US budget, on our safety net, spent on: EITC and child credits for people without income, SNAP (food subsidies), housing subsidies, SSI (subsidies for disabled/seniors), grants (subsidies for education), TANF (subsidies to transition people into a job), child nutrition programs, head start (preschool subsidies), job training, WIC (food subsidies), child care subsidies, lifeline (utility subsidies), phone subsidies, and medicaid (health care).

Literally one fifth of our entire federal budget goes to providing safety nets.

This doesn't include state-specific programs and charity.

"A job is our shelter, out healthcare, our food, our everything." - The programs listed above cover every single one of these categories. If you can not pay for these things the government will give you money for them.

https://federalsafetynet.com/welfare-budget/#:~:text=The%20w....

Yet, the need is more.

You're shifting the goalposts. I was replying to someone that said the US doesn't provide safety nets. It does. It massively does, to the tune of 1.2 trillion per year. That's more spent than the entire income of any European country.

Wrong.

In true midwit fashion you eagerly copied and pasted Wikipedia numbers including children, seniors, and disabled into a discussion about working age Americans.

You shifted the goal posts.

Other than food stamps there is no safety net available for average working age Americans.

I wonder how advanced the human race would be right now if we didn't have to suffer the tide of midwits.

Its easy to be disingenuous with statistics by lumping in categories that the majority of working age Americans dont qualify for.

Most of what you copied and pasted from Wikipedia goes to seniors,children, and disabled.

The most surefire way to identify a midwit is inability to infer context from a discussion.

> I think it’s actually time to consider that there’s something else that’s driving general dissatisfaction in the U.S. (maybe social media?) to try and understand whether there is a general dissatisfaction factor affecting the U.S., and if so, which issues are attributable to this and which are issues Americans are mad about in of themselves.

I've wondered about this too. Someone said Anger is Unmet Expectations or something better than that, and using that model to think, what are we not meeting?

Is it strictly economic? Cost of living prices going up? The collective consciousness believing that the Hollywood image of the American Dream boom times, plus the constant highlight reels of social media, convinced a lot of Americans that if we work hard, if we hustle, if we strive, we get a reward?

And that whether that reward is financial stability, the 'celebrity lifestyle', the 'good life', whatever it is, we aren't getting it? Are our expectations too high?

How do you diagnose and turn off un-realistically high expectations in a healthy way?

> How do you diagnose and turn off un-realistically high expectations in a healthy way?

In the west we keep telling everyone we live in the best system ever designed yet the bottom 50% see their conditions worsening day by day, salaries are stagnating for a good 50 years now, services are getting worse and worse, retirement age keeps getting higher, obesity and diabetes go up, more and more jobs feel like being a useless cog in a dying machine, big industries that made entire communities proud were delocalised long ago, & c. The list is almost infinite at this point

The bottom line is that we can see our parents and grand parents had it better, which means the promise of the ever improving system is obviously broken, and with it goes the hope. Almost as if acquiring useless gadgets made in wherever it is the cheapest to make them for now isn't enough to inspire people...

Working for an American company in, say, Austria is nothing like working in the USA.

People may not know this, but their counterparts working at the Austrian subsidiary are without a doubt under union contracts. Add to this free university education, health care, decent unemployment benefits, social housing, great and fast public transport etc. and you really don't have as many reasons to be upset about.

This is just Maslow in action.

Complaining about your country is the most common thing ever, yet somehow people think it's unique to where they come from

If you want answers you can read that: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2022/09/18/inflation-socialis...

And an image is worth a thousand words: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/blog_...

The French seem to be pretty mad

The baguettes, croissants, wine, social security and strong worker unions with support from the public probably help.

Overturning and burning a car every few months also releases a lot of tension.

Go to Paris they'll tell you French trains are too expensive and always late, go to Berlin and they'll tell you the same about their own trains

It's the same about every single topic I can come up with, the grass is always greener

In America, we don't even have trains to complain about

Yep, at least Americans don't complain about the trains being late.

We have Amtrak, but that doesn’t even count.

We do have trains, but they are shitty and few people use them. I guess the east coast still has some adequate commuter rail, but Amtrak is a joke.

> Americans are mad about everything. They’re mad about their commutes. They’re mad about their jobs. They’re mad about their neighbors. They’re mad about politics. They’re mad about homeless people.

Isn't there a huge amount of selection bias going on here in terms of what is reported? You aren't going to get much in terms of per-capita madness from your standard "X is mad at Y" stories, they aren't accurate like that.

I've lived in two other countries (Switzerland and China) and there was always someone bad about something, I'm not sure if American exceptionalism is really at play here.

There's motive, means, and opportunity for rival countries, and agitators within the country, to keep the US internet constantly awash with demoralization propaganda to convince the US citizenry to hate their country, hate their society, to tear it all down, to destroy their country and its institutions for the agitators without the agitators having to fire a single bullet.

This is such a strange comment. Have you considered that they're mad for a good reason? Is every country identical, or do different countries have different labor laws?

Not to mention that people in other countries DO complain about things?

> Especially now since most of these companies are multinational and many probably employ more people in Europe and Asia

Yes.

> and follow similar policies there than they do in the U.S.

Generally, no. Multinationals follow local law, and, if they have any sense, also local norms.

Also, I mean, people outside the US do also complain about things, you know.

Hypothesis: degradation of human values

https://trendguardian.medium.com/why-we-are-dispensable-7a57...

Every generation makes basically the same complaints about the one before and the one after, and presumably has since the invention of complaining (we have written evidence of this going back a bit over two millennia, anyway). The idea that being discontent with your job was a specifically millennial issue was always absurd, and informed largely by the "moaning about other generations" phenomenon.

Gen X here, can confirm.

I'd love to hear from the Boomers and Gen Xers around here if you agree?

"Cynical millenial" is a common image and persona, but I'm curious for other perspectives, maybe find some hope beyond my own sense of precarity I get from reading this article. I don't think we're going to have another great resignation, not with all of these tech layoffs...right?

At some point something has got to give.

You're going to actually adjust your opinion on the issue off of what a single digit number of (supposedly real) people reply to you in response to your question? That's the data you're going to use to inform your opinion on an insanely large and complex and murky topic?

This happens with any discussion. Are you implying no one should ever ask for or consider other people's opinions?

On top of which following your line of reasoning he should ignore anything you say as well.

Either way your comment is 100% pointless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com