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Comment by gishglish | Hacker News Reader

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They’re finding out what millennials found out in their 30s and GenZ knew at an even earlier age.

They were teaching millennials at 18 or even before that it’s not like your parents age when you could keep one post college job forever.

What is that, precisely?

That there’s no gold watch and pension waiting for you if you invest your conviction and identity into a job. Companies are no longer made of people they are complicated manipulations of the stock market. Companies put employees in the liabilities ledger, not the assets ledger. Employees are an inconvenience to be replaced, removed, reduced, optimized, automated, and simplified at the earliest convenience. Believing in the importance of your role in such an inhuman environment is equivalent to believing dancing can bring the rain.

As a result most people that I know in the culture that I see in online spaces is to develop an adversarial relationship to your work, to your company, and to your boss. Even if you like your boss, they can be directed tomorrow to layoff half of their team, so why care at all?

I was actually just talking with a manager yesterday who is feeling pressure from the C-suite in their medium sized company to pass off their reports’ work as the product of AI because it is better for marketing. If that isn’t a perfect microcosm of the larger economy, I don’t know what is.

It is a general deterioration of culture and values: https://medium.com/@trendguardian/why-we-are-dispensable-7a5...

> That there’s no gold watch and pension waiting for you if you invest your conviction and identity into a job.

Anecdata, but middle of the pack Gen-Xer here and I never once believed that to be true.

No, silly. Millennials brought us these lessons from atop the mountain of hard knocks. /s

That's nothing new. Pensions are for Boomers. You're talking about Baby Boomer myths that GenX knew were lies eons ago. The Silent/GenX/GenY bloodline is always dealing with bullshit from the Greatest/Boomer/Millennial bloodline. Millennials are not GenY's allies.

I generally agree that GenX who don't understand that Boomers will never leave and that they're going to pass everything to their own kids (Millennials) are clueless. Most of GenX generally has known this since before Millennials could walk.

lol Millennials are the fortunate generation now? how the turn tables - all I remember growing up was the same narrative Gen Z plays now about how their generation was screwed over. But then Milennials grew up and now are the villain lolol.

That was not Gen X saying that—we don’t say anything, like our Silent parents—we just sulk in our rooms playing grunge to relieve the overwhelming dread and to root out whatever ear-worms Clear Channel has been feeding us. Baby Boomers were the ones who put out the narrative of the avocado-toast eating Millenial, to which we just said, “Whatever.”

In case it was not made abundantly clear, that was stereotypical GenX sarcasm, but as a Gen Xer I cannot figure out how to write a sarcasm tag into this stupid machine.

Millennials only care about GenY to the extent they can milk GenY suffering for their own gain.

That's why they called them "echo boomers" until about Y2k rolled around and the millennium became fashionable. Generational cohorts are as throwaway as they sound. Gen X,Y,Z... A? Just another lazy tool of oppression.

There is a fairly elaborate pop-psych theory behind it all (Strauss-Howe, "Four turnings" theory with generational archetypes: Boomers=prophet, Millennials=hero; GenX=nomad, GenY=artist)

Seems like the pandemic threw a wrench into the generational cohort theorizing game. We should focus on learning to connect with the people entering the workforce that experienced their high school years over zoom.

This kind of generational analysis is bizarre and, frankly, brain dead. Completely ignores class and what people have gone through the past 20 years.

Most people born at any point in this country are not rich or well off and will not have things to pass down.

Late (born in 79) gen-x here. I learned early on that I wouldn't have a reliable pension or retirement, I would not have the same level of upward mobility that previous generations would have, and that I had to think of my future and plan for it in a different way.

To have a basic skepticism or distrust of any promises made to me that came from either the government or any medium to large corporation. To save aggressively from an early age, and most importantly to educate myself on finance and finance related topics.

The most important thing I learned or made myself do is to get out of the mindset of spending more money to match the rise of income I experienced as I got older, basically to live below my means and evaluate really really hard if I need to buy the latest tech, or fashion, or transportation, or trendy food, or clubs, etc. etc. etc.

Also to have my credit card paid off in full each month every month. The only exception to that rule I've made in the last 20 years was when I bought a house and built up a balance I couldn't pay off right away.

To summarize, what I learned is to direct my life as much as possible so my future well being is, as much as possible, not reliant on the government being able to take care of me, or my job at Corp X or even small or medium business Y being a certain thing. Or that the skillset I had which was in demand in the job market would be in demand forever.

I completely understand the pessimism of generations after me, from my point of view they are facing the same thing but worse. The general situation is seemingly going to be harder for them than Gen-x.

Similar for me. One of my lessons was to invest my valuable time working for myself instead of somebody else, and getting lots of exercise and focusing on my health because, I learned early on, insurance companies cannot be trusted.

An earlier Gen X reporting in to agree with this eloquently-written comment. I only want to add that my Silent parents never tried to sell me on the Baby Boomer dream retirement, having been raised by Lost Generation parents still shell-shocked from the effects of the Great Depression. They taught me to save, invest, and, as immigrants, to always keep family in mind.

born in 76 and your experience is very close to mine. cheers!

Hard work and going the extra mile is no longer rewarded.

Corporations will post record profits and still enact salary freezes and say there's no money for promotions or bonuses for the IC's while the CEO gets an 8-figure bonus.

That's been reality since the 70s (when GenX was born)

Yeah, but it can take a while before it's acknowledged and recognized as being true. As it is, there are plenty of people that still don't believe it.

That the vast majority of companies do not even remotely deserve your loyalty as they would replace you without hessitation the instant you would require as much as a sliver of theirs.

That you should extract as much wealth from those corporations as possible, while standing up for other employees.

The first paragraph is what GenX knows. The narcissism and fuck everyone else attitude of the second paragraph is exactly what you would expect from children of Boomers.

You and I read that completely differently. Standing up for other employees is the explicitly "not narcissist" part of that statement. The statement is "Value people. Do not value soulless entities. They are trying to extract maximum value out of you and you should do likewise."

Thanks, this is how it was meant. It is important to not confuse the corporation with the people that make it up.

The problem is however that what you rightly called soulless entites tries to even abuse that empathy for your co-workers. So if you don't come in to cover the missing worker they have a shift from hell — "thanks to you".

The fact that they could have easily covered that shift if they just hired the adequate amount of personell shouldn't be mentioned tho. These days a good manager isn't someone that runs things smoothly, but one that squeezes out as much as possible from their workers, even if it leads to constant frictions and inefficiencies in the system.

What did you read there? How is it narcissistic to stand up for your Co-workers?

> Still hard to have sympathy for anyone that carried such a mindset with so many examples of it being false.

Except in the day, it wasn’t false.

Boomers and the Greatest Generation actually lived this reality, where working hard and paying your dues allowed even a modest income earner close to the minimum wage to earn enough to own a house, a car in the garage, and support a family with a SAH spouse. This really happened.

My own father saved a decent fortune (into the low seven figures) doing blue-collar work on a 5th grade education. Never started a business, never rose higher than the head of maintenance. And still managed to retire at 55 in the early 90s. The only reason why my mother even took a job in the 80s was to have something to do when my brother and I were in school.

So in the 80s and 90s GenX had only boomers and such to look up to for examples, and those examples largely held up to scrutiny. So that’s what they adopted as their work ethic. And once you internalize something, it’s damn difficult to dislodge. Most people will never be able to do so, and many will fight viciously to maintain it.

Now since then it has become bullshit, but no-one has been able to successfully read the future. So your mockery is wholly misplaced.

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