Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

1843magazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 535 posts

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#101

Post by alphonsegaston »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #58

What is the labor market, if not an interminable, poorly designed MMORPG? Most of us will be alive by the time there's enough economic incentive for all the things humanity needs, with only a token labor force. Many of the world's richest countries are already there, at least when it comes to their own citizens. In the future (i.e. the present, in the software world), to the extent that employers need workers, they g…

I imagine it's going to be more like a handful of kleptocrat authoritarians, a small class of knowledge workers, and the rest are the shock troops of the above or the people who's heads their cracking for even thinking about rebelling.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#102

Post by jazoom »

nitemice wrote: post #73
_m8fo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with the sentiment, but isn't your own comment being dishonest? There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention. That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).

The same is true out here in Australia. Places like Melbourne and Sydney are crowded and expensive, but the cheaper properties are all out in rural areas, where your choice of employment is slim, especially if you made the "mistake" of training in any tech sector job.

You don't need to go rural. Just don't expect to live in a great house in a city.

Source: was a uni student for 10 years and survived.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#103

Post by closeparen »

_m8fo wrote: post #52
65827 wrote: post #19

I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game" where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations, blaming an individual for dropping out and not wanting to really participate in that trainwreck is being dishonest at best.

I completely agree with the sentiment, but isn't your own comment being dishonest? There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention. That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).

>There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention.

It doesn't matter how cheap the land/housing is if you can't get a job while living on it.

I'd love to be in a world where geography doesn't matter and everyone can work remotely. For now, only a small and elite subset of software engineers can pull US cost of living (even rural cost of living) from remote work.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#104

Post by kcdev »

psyc wrote: post #35
pbkhrv wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> provided we're able to keep the scarcity problem solved (which I'd bet we'd be able to pull off). I'm curious as to how we can pull that off given that an ever increasing percentage of young smart capable people are opting out of solving real world problems in favor of "toiling over their virtual realities"...

I really dislike the romanticizing of employment as "solving problems." The effect of employment is that somebody's problems get solved, but as the employee, they aren't my problems, and subjectively it feels like mostly solving a lot of meta-problems like how to follow somebody else's process and get along with all kinds of coworkers. If employment felt like object-level problem solving, I'd be employed.

Your objective is to get a paycheck. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Then, use your off time do things more important to you.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#105

Post by projektir »

ajross wrote: post #78
ganfortran wrote: post #57

That is how you got alt-right. Bad job market and on the other hand portrayed as oppressor and reminded to check your own privilege. Video game is just the surface of the underlying illness. It is cheap(per hour), and accessible source of pleasure.

You're saying... feminists invented sexism?

You can't invent something like sexism, but some feminists did contribute to generating extra hatred towards the male gender.

The hate on all sides is understandable, but in the end, we all lose.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#106

Post by astrodust »

ehnto wrote: post #59
deelowe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really hits home for me. Seems like every older family member I have just has tons and tons of useless stuff. I dont get it.

They also have the useful stuff, like property that was reasonably priced at the time of purchase.

How else do you think grandma stores her priceless porcelain dolls and collectible thimbles? In that giant house that cost a year's salary when she got it, that's where.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#107

Post by notthemessiah »

diogenescynic wrote: post #79

Good paying jobs are scarce and video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them. It's escapism. They are confusing correlation with causation.

> Video games are relatively cheap for the amount of time you can spend on them.

This has far-reaching consequences. With most goods, the consumer has to keep consuming (and thus creating demand). There's major concerns whether or not we can keep enough people working (and buying things) to keep the economy going, and video games don't contribute as much to aggregate demand. With an economic system that depends on continuous growth, we are trying to simultaneously squeeze more labor out of people while reducing the value of what people get out of it. This contradiction doesn't come with new luxury goods, but is a contradiction within capitalism that has been well described for almost two centuries: the dual nature of labour as capital and labour as a commodity.

>They are confusing correlation with causation.

Actually, this is one of the biggest questions of the paper cited, so the authors are not oblivious.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#108

Post by RangerScience »

When you look at UBI, you can consider it as the government supplying a "default job" to everyone, in the same sort of way it provides a few other "defaults" - mail (USPS) being a good example.

This provides a "minimum competition" against which any company must compete - FedEx is always going to have to be better than the USPS.

So notionally - if UBI provides a "default job", companies will have to offer better jobs than that, in order to attract any employees at all.

Except this article is pointing out that for a chunk of the population, that effect is already here, supplied by video games. The job (compensation considered) must be less shitty than playing video games all day.

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#109

Post by yorwba »

ocschwar wrote: post #47
TOMDM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting conclusion you have come to. Is this because you believe people playing these games are not able to separate the fantasy of the game from real life? If so, what differentiates them from pornography?

6 hours of running around a fantasy world, rescuing damsels in distress who fall out of their dresses and embrace you. Or 10 minutes watching real people having sex, knowing those people use aliases so that after the camera shuts down and the paper towels come out, they can go and live their own real lives. That's the difference I see.

I think you underestimate the time someone who would play a game for 6 hours would spend watching porn (hint: it's probably closer to 6 hours).

Would you rather have your daughter date a guy who has skewed opinions on how to impress a girl, based on video games, or a guy who has skewed opinions on how enjoyable anal fisting is on average, based on pornography?

Re: Young men dropping out of the job market to spend time in an alternate reality

#110

Post by astrodust »

pbkhrv wrote: post #95

On a cynical note, "young men immersed in alternate reality" is also an opportunity: - It's a rapidly growing market - those people will eventually need financial support systems beyond family - new forms of annuities? - more demand for "gig economy" type jobs - demand for jobs that can be done inside virtual realities that are better suited for humans instead of robots - this one is a stretch - more demand for on-de…

This is what happened in Japan in the mid 1990s when it firmly entered the post-industrial age. There's an entire sector of society that's given up on getting ahead because the old model of employment is broken, and there's no point in fighting to get ahead since there's no winning.

Console games and ramen noodles until you die.

Post reply on HN