Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life • Hacker News Board

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#231

Post by esens » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

CraneWorm wrote: post #143

esens wrote: post #37

Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped. You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies whe…

Post-scarcity cannot come fast enough; the (external) need to work hard should just die in a fire.

It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it.

I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#232

Post by myfavoritedog » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

Majestic121 wrote: post #163

frockington1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents? There must be additional information because this is just crazy. In 'flyover' country you don't see this. I'm assuming this is California or NY?

I think another component might be the major. It's a mistake to think all masters degrees are equally 'bankable'

The fact that the master degrees claim was made without specifying what degrees those masters were in is telling.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#233

Post by foobarian » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #91

wishigotitfree wrote: post #25

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

I'll never forget something a grade school friend's parent told us once when I visited their tiny communist provided apartment. Total blue collar worker barely making ends meet. "The times are fucked up, boys, you need to study hard"

That for me pretty much sums up that mentality. I don't know where it comes from - maybe the delta from no education to education, no matter how basic, is enormous, whereas things like public school vs private school, or public school in town X vs. town Y don't have the same lift.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#234

Post by blocked_again » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

If working hard is the key most of the blue collar workers would be billionaires.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#235

Post by PragmaticPulp » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

I mentor college students as part of a structured mentoring program. Some of the young people who come through the group have wildly pessimistic views on the world, especially as it pertains to jobs and capitalism.

Part of our job is to defuse some of the more self-defeating views, but it’s increasingly difficult to compete against the non-stop onslaught of pessimism that comes from their subreddits and Twitter follows. When someone has been conditioned for hours each day to believe that capitalism is evil, that no one should have to work, that UBI is as simple as taxing Jeff Bezos a little more, and that jobs are “wage slavery”, it’s hard to compete with healthy mentorship advice.

Some of these online communities are downright toxic. Some of my most difficult mentees subscribed to “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) communities on Reddit that felt like the notorious incel communities we’ve all heard about, but with the vitriol directed at jobs and bosses.

There are even explicit anti-work movements, like /r/antiwork on Reddit, that have a stated goal of ending work. No alternative is proposed and no one explains how society would function if no one works, but instead they complain about having to work at all. Someone consuming this material on their phone before, during, and after work every single day is obviously going to become bitter and miserable.

This doesn’t explain everything, of course, but it is a growing factor among the most disgruntled young people I see coming through our program.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#236

Post by watwut » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

yathern wrote: post #46

hawk_ wrote: post #4

There was a short window of time (anthropological scale) in the western world where this was seemingly true. The American conservative propaganda latched onto it and tricked people into thinking it was true. The fact is whenever quick upward mobility has been possible anywhere for a large number of people, it has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour. It was someone else's hard work that w…

> has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour As far as I understand, this is actually a myth - at least the first two. It's a common cynical refrain that the current level of abundance would be impossible without slavery. There are many many places where there has been slavery throughout the years, and they have not ended up richer for it. The American South, where slavery was more prevalen…

Slave trade brought in massive wealth into Europe back then. That is why people did it, really. Otherwise they would not bothered with it.

The south had slavery, because it was massively profitable. They did not done it for fun and giggles. Owners fought to keep slavery multiple times, because they wealth was in slaves and in what slaves produced. The slave owning families were the richest and most powerful.

Same with colonialism. It was not done out of boredom, it was done because resources you get from all of it.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#237

Post by randlet » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #220

fullstop wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

I would think "starting conditions" includes the parents one has. Also what you say is not quite logic - you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then? I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starti…

> you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Possibly because the parents parents didn't value education and by the time the parents came to value education they were already stuck in the cycle of poverty.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#238

Post by zests » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #220

fullstop wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

I would think "starting conditions" includes the parents one has. Also what you say is not quite logic - you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then? I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starti…

The parents were immigrants. They were successful -- just not in the way its normally measured.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#239

Post by umvi » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #91

wishigotitfree wrote: post #25

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

> It has to be extremely difficult to focus on school and education when you don't know when your next meal is going to be

This is true, but which is the bigger factor in America: parent(s) who are uneducated themselves and do not take an active role in their childrens' education OR food insecurity? I would argue the former. I remember a recent story about Baltimore single mom Tiffany France being shocked that her kid (a senior in high school) wasn't going to graduate because he had a 0.1 GPA (the story was that that was one of the top GPAs in the school). Like... how checked out do you have to be from your kid's education in order to not know that your kid is rampantly truant and has Food insecurity exists, but also there is an obesity epidemic and single parenthood epidemic in America among various lower classes and based on personal experience I tend to think parent mentorship (or lack thereof) plays a far bigger role in kids' education than food insecurity.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#240

Post by mc32 » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #220

fullstop wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

I would think "starting conditions" includes the parents one has. Also what you say is not quite logic - you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then? I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starti…

I think implicit in the post is that parents’ parents could have lived where education was too far away physically, took away from a pool of labor, etc.

Conversely, we have kids today, who for whatever reason have the opportunity to get an education but are sidetracked by entertainment and other things that can derail their long term prospects despite more being available to them. (Contrast with kids in third world counties who walk miles to the nearest school, pay for books from their meager earnings, take jobs to pay for their siblings’ education, etc) yet these privileged kids can’t be arsed.