Comment by justonceokay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justonceokay | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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