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The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

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Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#61

Post by somenits »

On this, the communists and paleo-conservatives can agree:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. Preamble, The Communist Manifesto

(Of course, Marx had no love for ancien regime, while the conservatives did.)

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#62

Post by darkclouds »

constantly wrote: post #11
swayvil wrote: post #4

Modern work is weird. All your energy goes into it. But at the end of the day there's no satisfaction. Just emptiness and exhaustion. So you invest your remaining time in entertainments, drugs and shopping. Frantically groping for a scrap of joy. My friends in carpentry call it "feeding the monkey". The monkey must be fed, one way or another.

Speak for yourself, I know many people who derive a lot of joy from their work and find it energizing, myself included.

Are you an AVN winner then?

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#63

Post by wredue »

quelsolaar wrote: post #3

To be called ”Long History” i think it should to extend beyond the current generation.

2 Thessalonians 3:10

The odd suggestion that “nobody wants to work anymore” somehow just appeared this generation.

It’s in the bible dude, and undoubtedly has sentiments dating back millennia.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#64

Post by nine_zeros »

usrbinbash wrote: post #53

It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…

This. I don't understand why this is up for debate. Working hard does not buy a house, a convenient apartment, a promotion to higher income, equity at low prices, a lifestyle where one can find partners and settle down, kids, kids education.

We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations.

The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#65

Post by mikestew »

z7 wrote: post #36

Noam Chomsky: "For two millennia the idea of getting a job was regarded as a fundamental attack against basic human rights and human dignity. Why? Because getting a job means accepting servitude to a master. It means saying, 'Okay, I'll rent myself to you for most of my waking life and I will follow your orders during this period.' That was considered an utter abomination. By now it's sort of taken for granted. But s…

We may admire what he did, but we despise what he is: a tool in the hands of others.

Chomsky can be so full of shit at times. I’d like one piece of writing from before the 19th century, perhaps just a morsel of evidence that this was a “common belief” among anyone but the elite that have time to sit and write things all day.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#66

Post by coldcode »

One of my favorite old songs: Big Rock Candy Mountain (https://genius.com/Harry-mcclintock-big-rock-candy-mountain-...) covers it well. The last verse ends in:

There ain't no short-handle shovels No axes, saws or picks I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day Where they hung the jerk that invented work In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#67

Post by nine_zeros »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #58

As a tech lead, the big problem I see now is that people are not hungry anymore. The best engineers I've ever worked with were consistently asking for more and leveling up the team at the same time. Now, the post-covid hires, especially the junior engineers, just do the bare minimum to scrape by, and they seem totally unbothered by it. One new hire on my team spends upwards of 2 hours per day "walking her dog." I eve…

> As a tech lead, the big problem I see now is that people are not hungry anymore. The best engineers I've ever worked with were consistently asking for more and leveling up the team at the same time. Now, the post-covid hires, especially the junior engineers, just do the bare minimum to scrape by, and they seem totally unbothered by it.

Because they see management not pulling their weight for the pay they get. Why should lowly paid junior engineers work harder than management who are just sitting back, dumping poor decisions on them?

> One new hire on my team spends upwards of 2 hours per day "walking her dog." I even called this out during a formal performance review and her behavior hasn't changed at all. (Work-from-home abuse is another component of this observation.)

Wow, blame someone for having a healthy life.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#68

Post by BirAdam »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

Similarly … The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. 400BC

The perennial nature of “kids these days” being insolent and otherwise generally poorly disciplined is that discipline is something to be cultivated within and not imposed from without. As a result, children who lack years of practice in discipline are not particularly well behaved. Adults tend to forget their childhoods, remembering only bits and pieces. In truth, every child was scolded for his/her bad behavior, and each generation tends to have the same bad behavior as the one before it. If each generation of kids were perfectly well behaved there’d be no need for raising, and there’d be no statements from old people such as “children are to be seen and not heard” or as “do not speak unless spoken to” or even as “get your elbows off the table”. That such statements are uttered and remembered by multiple generations proves that kids have made roughly the same “mistakes” over the course of those selfsame generations.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#69

Post by jader201 »

cmilton wrote: post #29
rightbyte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, people realized how nice their life's were if they spent less time at work. I did not understand how much my 45min x 2 commute was draining my stamina before I stopped commuting, e.g.

Agreed. I will never work a job with a >10 minute commute another day in my life. On top of the time lost, you don’t even get paid for it. It costs you time and money to go to work.

I wonder if workers, at some point, will be able to start demanding compensation for commute to work, when there it is perfectly possible to work from home? E.g. these tech companies that are starting to require employees to return to office.

On the other hand, we don’t get compensated (fully [1]) for the utilities cost from working from home.

[1] Some reimburse things like internet, but that’s about it. We can’t even claim taxes on expenses from WFH unless we’re independent.

Re: The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

#70

Post by projektfu »

From a small business perspective, turnover is a lot higher, and a lot more of it is because the employees are simply not doing their jobs and have to be let go. I think this is the tight labor market at work, actually. Good workers are being retained because there is enough demand for them. If they move, they are not on the market, they're recruited and cherry picked. The available ones responding to ads have usually been let go before for cause.

A single example of people complaining each year does no more to debunk the observation than the complaints do to affirm it.

This forum frequently talks about the 10x performer, the 1x performer, the 0.1x performer and the negative performer. In other industries, maybe you won't have a 10x, but you can definitely get ranges from impressive performance to destructive interference in your employees.

What we really need is to study engagement and effectiveness in various industries to determine whether there's trends of more hard work or more slack, but in lieu of that we will find journalists interviewing the guy at the diner for the story, and that will become the zeitgeist.

I personally feel like things are more hectic and busy than ever before, and I don't know how much of that is due to the increased distraction power of all of our "tools". Or whether it's a symptom of aging or long COVID or whatever.

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