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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#361

Post by underlipton »

elmer2 wrote: post #282
notsmarthuh wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in the Western world is that switching to a different career is made almost impossible. This society pushes people out of the workforce all the time. I'm one of them. I've been "unemployed" since 2012 with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again, just due to a "zigged when I should have zagged" situation decades ago.

"with apparently ZERO ability to get any kind of skilled job ever again" Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.

Survivorship bias. You know what's as bad as a criminal record for your career prospects, in America? Being a black man. Having autism. Being over 50. Being a single mother. Being an immigrant without local credentials. Having a long employment gap. Having social anxiety. Having a physical disability. On and on.

The first step to solving the problem is acknowledging the problem, not throwing earnest observations of dysfunction into the, "I know a short guy who gets lots of sex, height doesn't matter," bin.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#362

Post by IshKebab »

kstenerud wrote: post #253

The author talks as if this were a new phenomenon; it is not. I actually did go buy a farm in the 2010s, grew alfalfa, managed cattle, cared for horses, etc. Except I did it while working remote as a software engineer. Very fun life, and I may return to it again. But it's not an AI thing, and it's not a disappearing job thing. It's just that office work keeps you so separated from the real world that you yearn for so…

Yeah I had to stop reading after the author thought he could draw some deep insight from the fact that someone with a boring finance job had a hobby...

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#363

Post by pj_mukh »

worik wrote: post #344
pj_mukh wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict , but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers. No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about goi…

Yes, it is a tool. "Normal"? It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare. But: AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired

"AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired"

This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.

[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#364

Post by mrguyorama »

consensus1 wrote: post #209
MarkusQ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year." Agreed. From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious." I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom…

I remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65... For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the t…

"If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals.

If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#365

Post by georgeburdell »

Tarq0n wrote: post #276
RealityVoid wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense there is this air around of "demand our jobs keep being relevant" - I personally feel this kind of thing holds the world backwards if it works. I think if our jobs were to become obsolete, embracing it and re-orienting oneself is the one thing that is personally effective and is morally right. But what do I know, I'm just some doofus on the internet. The irony is not lost on me on all those years where people…

That's a fine philosophy on a personal level, but if the labor market is shocked for entire sectors there's not enough slack in the system for all of those people to adapt at once. That's how you end up with lost generations.

You’re too kind. That’s how you end up with civil unrest. See: early Covid

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#366

Post by jgerrish »

I'd like to congratulate Aaron Horwath on publishing this article. As a creative professional, he must feel pride in bringing his ideas to light.

Unfortunately, this isn't the movie industry. We don't see a list of credits at the end of his commentary recognizing the thousands of others involved in helping him publish his thoughts.

Perhaps we can all chip in and name some of the many people involved in building the tech stack he published with. I'm sure there are THOUSANDS without even looking at the previous technologies those things like blogging platforms, current browsers or current generation phones built from.

Is that fair enough?

I'm not sad. As I look out to the next few weeks and whatever, I'm not sad. Hopefully those credits will help others also not be sad.

Here's to WordPress and Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#367

Post by chasd00 »

nikole9696 wrote: post #153
ausbah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i’m in the US, if you took a call for more than a few mins a busy metro car I’d tell you to knock it off

Unfortunately, these days, most of us won't do that because there is a high likelihood it could incite violence.

and inciting violence is against the law.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#368

Post by bee_rider »

qlte wrote: post #259
marginalia_nu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.

People always say this like it’s a panacea but n=1, I did exactly that for about 5-6 months in 2024 after I quit Twitter and didn’t want to get sucked back in to endless election drama like in 2016. For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day. But after a month my baseline pretty much reset wit…

I think this idea (and I necessarily don’t believe in it, but let’s give it a fair chance) is more like a few-weeks detox. Avoiding any news at all half a year seems a bit disorienting (as you experienced).

Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.

Politics matters a lot, but for most of us are just going to vote or donate. I don’t need to hear somebody’s opinion for that, and I especially don’t need to hear speculations about political events that’ll happen in the next couple days (the speculation possibilities will collapse before I do either).

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#369

Post by underlipton »

facepalm1 wrote: post #343

[flagged]

Someone is going to chime in about the tone of this post, with the ramifications of a decade-and-a-half of rejection on one's outlook flying right over their head. If the underemployed and NEETs got half the consideration that extroverts jonesing for just one water cooler chat (just one, man) got during the pandemic, we'd be one our way to solving not only their problems, but also the ones that they're uniquely equipped to tackle.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#370

Post by gamblor956 »

facepalm1 wrote: post #343

[flagged]

Thank you for proving my point. Enjoy being unemployable.

You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.

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