Two trends help make millennials seem lazy to their elders | Hacker News Reader

Two trends help make millennials seem lazy to their elders

arstechnica.com

> Schröder’s findings showed that younger individuals (regardless of what generation they’re from) tend to find work less important and that the importance of work has been going down over time.

Uh, isn't that exactly what you'd find if newer generations find work less important? What's the difference between "newer generations find work less important" and "attitudes towards the importance of work are trending downward?"

I feel like the main difference is that my generation looks at the purpose of the work they do and realize that it doesn't improve the world. And when you are aware of the climate crisis we are living through, and have been our entire lives, how do you convince yourself to care about making someone else's line go up and to the right? Not like a majority of millennials will see any real benefits of making the stock market go so high, while the necessary actions to make a sustainable future are lagging behind where some of the brightest scientists say we should be.

Depends on the person. Alot of people don't really care about the macro. They go to work to add value, seek the admiration of their peers, not get fired (etc) and then go home and do something else. Living your entire life without really worrying about geopolitical bullshit that you have no agency over may very well be the optimal strategy. We have people for that.

> Living your entire life without really worrying about geopolitical bullshit that you have no agency over may very well be the optimal strategy.

But they do have agency. For example, if you don’t like the deal being offered where you have kids and then work to the bone to skirt by so that someone else’s line goes up, you can choose to not have kids.

Eventually, this will impact the other person who wants their line goes up.

i'm not sure many people would deny themselves the self-actualization / biological urge of becoming a parent for something as nebulous as sticking it to the man. People certainly didn't stop having children when we all where subsistence farmers or worked in glided aged era sweatshops to save them from the burden of being alive under the boot of capitalism.

A comparison cannot be made between times when women did not have access to contraception / financial independence to times when women do have access to those things.

And from my mid 30s cohort and younger acquaintences, I think that while they do not explicitly say their decision is about someone else’s line going up, the implication is there that if they cannot afford their kids a certain minimum quality of life, then they are willing to go without kids.

More specifically, if they are going to have to deal with living in a cramped apartment (in their preferred location) and the volatility of rents or a giant mortgage, then they are willing to forego having kids.

The disconnect is that your parents' and grandparents' generation was working significantly less and considering work less important than you when they were your age.

> He thought that cohorts that did not share such an experience could not form a generation

And this is exactly what a problem is with the concept of "generations": they only work as far as they take into account geographical circumstances in different parts of the world. For example, a generation who lived through the 90s in the USA and Western Europe will have a very different experience from the same one in the Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans.

So the article and study argue that millennials aren't actually lazy, because it's young people in general that are lazy (about work). Literally. It's a dystopian argument. They're saying that it's nothing specifically to do with a certain generation of people, it's just that young people on average are more lazy now. So millennials aren't lazy, definitely, only young people are, which millennials are, but millennials aren't lazy. It does your head in trying to follow their "logic".

No, the logic is that milennials, and any other generation, are lazy (about work) when young.

It makes sense to me.

The point is that every generation is lazy when they're young. Silent Generation was lazy when they were young. Greatest generation was lazy when they were young. Boomers, Gen-X, both lazy when they were young.

Millennials are still (relatively) young. Of course they're lazy.

This is strange.. Maybe I'm too tired and didn't pick up on something but is he really saying the trends are "getting older" and "having a higher appreciation of work when growing up?"

Those youngins. They don't understand the value of something I devoted 40 years of my life to.

This is an example of fitting the data to the (counter-)narrative, to create a novel thesis.

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