The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore(mstdn.ca)
mstdn.ca
The Long History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore
https://mstdn.ca/@paulisci/110798058470040619
481 comments
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 made that clear by now.
People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.
If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.
If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.
I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.
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 made that clear by now.
People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably.
Today people, despite burning themselves out in their job, struggle to pay rent in a flat shared with other working people, after loading themselves up with 100k in students debt, and no chance in hell to ever own property of their own.
If the powers that be want people to be willing to work, that work has to pay off.
If it doesn't, well...we're at the beginning of a retirement wave unprecedented in human history. 2 low-birthrate generations to follow. And our entire economic system is designed around constant growth.
I leave doing the math on that as an exercise for the reader.
The gig economy has worn many out... The promise of services like social media, Uber, Political Parties, and airBnB that promised to create wealthy entrepreneurs fell flat on it's face after making the people at the top of the pyramids very wealthy.
I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.
It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.
Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.
I think that social media really tipped the balance of fairness in the working world... With social media, suddenly Trust fund Babies could fake success, and promote schemes that helped them to profit. The Social Media model was set up to raise Trust Funders and Popular individuals far above everyone else, and it killed hopes of upward mobility for people who didn't fall into any fame or wealth category unless they became famous for negative reasons or for ridicule.
It's not that no one wants to work anymore, it's that people are tired of weak work schemes, and being used and then thrown away in order to elevate others. It's not until real opportunity for growth, entrepreneurship, and excellence returns that things will begin to get back to normal.
Talking about is as "Nobody wants to work anymore" is an injustice... Millions of people are working very hard every day on content creation that rivals TV programming and others are regularly posting their best and fully composed and edited work on Internet sites daily, most without any pay in HOPES of being discovered for their work, as proof of that.
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 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
My theory is that this is all true, and it’s fantastic. Generally, over the last century, in year X, nobody wants to work anymore compared to year Y (Y < X).
This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak. That a few old-fashioned managers are surprised they can’t get people at the same bad terms as before is just a symptom of a very positive development.
This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak. That a few old-fashioned managers are surprised they can’t get people at the same bad terms as before is just a symptom of a very positive development.
Working in most jobs sucks. Some people are lucky to have jobs they love, but that's the minority. I know that to be the prevalent sentiment even in top notch, AAA, "I can't believe they pay me to do this" companies such as Google, Apple etc.
If people had, for the sake of a thought experiment, a guaranteed 20K/month income and free healthcare no matter what they do with their life, it's very unlikely they will choose to work on regular jobs. They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
If people had, for the sake of a thought experiment, a guaranteed 20K/month income and free healthcare no matter what they do with their life, it's very unlikely they will choose to work on regular jobs. They will instead generally pursue arts/crafts (including the craft of building computer programs in areas they are interested in), learning, exercise etc.
As a long-time software engineer and related positions. When covid started it felt as if the world said "We worked enough we need a collective time off"
To be honest, people generally don't want to work. In what way is this surprising?
Beyond the usual rationale of I don't want to work for pennies, I think hard work as a cultural vibe has fallen out of the times. It's also what we have designed our reward systems around.
Today's reward systems are tuned not around hard work, but around being smart. The disintermediation of media makes it feel like we are all in a celebrity lottery and we just need a lucky break. We don't need to compound our skills or put in the grind.
Today's reward systems are tuned not around hard work, but around being smart. The disintermediation of media makes it feel like we are all in a celebrity lottery and we just need a lucky break. We don't need to compound our skills or put in the grind.
Why would anybody want to work as a default? Work is a trade of your time for some financial security. It's a sacrifice that doesn't need to be glorified.
I do understand that a functioning society needs to good work ethic where this transactional aspect is not in the mind of the worker while he's actually doing the work, since it's a hinderance. When we're discussing work as a topic though it needs to be considered as a core truth.
Conflating salary work and personal activities (cooking, cleaning, fixing something around the house) is part of the definition of work as well.
I do understand that a functioning society needs to good work ethic where this transactional aspect is not in the mind of the worker while he's actually doing the work, since it's a hinderance. When we're discussing work as a topic though it needs to be considered as a core truth.
Conflating salary work and personal activities (cooking, cleaning, fixing something around the house) is part of the definition of work as well.
One thing that's funny to think about is in the distant past, one of the big selling points of automation and industrialization was that we could have the same things but work much less. That didn't quite work out. Now we work more, for more things. The tragedy though is there isn't a great option for trading luxuries for time. You're either 40+ hours a week invested in a career, or you're barely scraping by on a bunch of part time gigs with no health insurance or retirement plan.
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.
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.
To be fair, I've never wanted to "work".
The easiest way for leaders to mitigate the problem of 'not wanting to work' is to make work a more desirable place to be. It's not even hard to do. Some simple rules for managers and leaders:
1. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Remember all the shitty bosses you had, and be the first to break the cycle.
2. Pay people slightly above market rate. Make that your #1 hiring message: "We pay above market rate" and watch the referrals flow. Turn your employees into evangelists and you won't need a platoon's-worth of recruiters.
3. Be very loud and very public about commonsense balance of work and just 'life'. No emails after 5, prioritize social-family events like PTA meetings, or dates, or "Hey I'm gonna take my team bowling Friday afternoon, can I expense the chicken tendies?"
4. You can't build culture; it's created from within. Embrace what your employees bring culture-wise and make THAT your work culture.
1. Treat others as you wish to be treated. Remember all the shitty bosses you had, and be the first to break the cycle.
2. Pay people slightly above market rate. Make that your #1 hiring message: "We pay above market rate" and watch the referrals flow. Turn your employees into evangelists and you won't need a platoon's-worth of recruiters.
3. Be very loud and very public about commonsense balance of work and just 'life'. No emails after 5, prioritize social-family events like PTA meetings, or dates, or "Hey I'm gonna take my team bowling Friday afternoon, can I expense the chicken tendies?"
4. You can't build culture; it's created from within. Embrace what your employees bring culture-wise and make THAT your work culture.
To be called ”Long History” i think it should to extend beyond the current generation.
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
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
"I wanna be rich, rich, rich. WHY won't anyone give me half of their waking life to help?"
Found this quotation on Wiki earlier today, attributed to Jonathan Sudholt:
"In the Jacksonian era of antebellum America, class inequality was a major concern as fiscal downturns and the economy's transition from guild-based artisanship to private business sharpened socioeconomic disparity."
Found this quotation on Wiki earlier today, attributed to Jonathan Sudholt:
"In the Jacksonian era of antebellum America, class inequality was a major concern as fiscal downturns and the economy's transition from guild-based artisanship to private business sharpened socioeconomic disparity."
This pairs nicely with “they don’t make them like they used to” and “kids these days don’t know how good they have it”
I do enjoy things like this, but from a statistical standpoint, I don't think this really tells us all that much? I'm sure if you search hard enough through news archives, you can find at least one person saying something every year that validates your position.
But it does matter if only one person is saying that thing in a particular year, or thousands of people.
As an aside, I also find the idea that work is somehow virtuous to be pretty gross. That's something humanity has invented, not some natural truth. Sure, basic survival does require some amount of work, but beyond that, it's all unnecessary. Some people may want to continue to work more and more, in order to make it possible (in today's capitalist system) to do more than just survive, but we shouldn't look down on people because they've found a particular lifestyle or quality of living that works for them (as long as doing so isn't negatively impacting others).
Beyond that, I think choices like working toward financial independence early are fantastic, and I wish more people could have the opportunity to achieve that. The idea of working for even the old-school expectation of around 45 years (starting work after high school or college, and then retiring in the mid-60s) sounds awful to me... and these days people Not only are there plenty of ambitious people who want to work and build new things (to compensate for those who don't want to), but there are so many bullshit jobs that just don't need to be done, but exist mainly just to feed the self-imposed fiction that work is a virtue.
But it does matter if only one person is saying that thing in a particular year, or thousands of people.
As an aside, I also find the idea that work is somehow virtuous to be pretty gross. That's something humanity has invented, not some natural truth. Sure, basic survival does require some amount of work, but beyond that, it's all unnecessary. Some people may want to continue to work more and more, in order to make it possible (in today's capitalist system) to do more than just survive, but we shouldn't look down on people because they've found a particular lifestyle or quality of living that works for them (as long as doing so isn't negatively impacting others).
Beyond that, I think choices like working toward financial independence early are fantastic, and I wish more people could have the opportunity to achieve that. The idea of working for even the old-school expectation of around 45 years (starting work after high school or college, and then retiring in the mid-60s) sounds awful to me... and these days people Not only are there plenty of ambitious people who want to work and build new things (to compensate for those who don't want to), but there are so many bullshit jobs that just don't need to be done, but exist mainly just to feed the self-imposed fiction that work is a virtue.
For me, the issue is there's work, but nobody wants to hire me because I:
* Have been off the job market for a while because nobody would interview me let alone consider me
* The last job I had was a month long, and it ended with my termination for performance in a setting where I arguably could not succeed.
And my run of bad luck has led to difficulty keeping work for the past two years. Its not fair, and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to do it anymore. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
* Have been off the job market for a while because nobody would interview me let alone consider me
* The last job I had was a month long, and it ended with my termination for performance in a setting where I arguably could not succeed.
And my run of bad luck has led to difficulty keeping work for the past two years. Its not fair, and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to do it anymore. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
It's always nobody wants to work anymore at the wages you are presently offering.
It's like concluding we've run out of oil because the price of gasoline went up.
It's like concluding we've run out of oil because the price of gasoline went up.
This post on Twitter (pardon, X) [1] by the same author goes back for longer (at least 1912). I guess he crossposted on both and somehow the Mastodon version got truncated.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1681790405615173632
[1] https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1681790405615173632
Finding historical quotes seems like a gotcha, but stating the actual conclusion that's implied makes it appear much less plausible:
> The level or kind of work ethic in the population has been about the same over time.
Or
> Children have been about as well behaved over time.
Can anyone justify why these things should remain identical? That would suggest that environment is not an input into that equation.
> The level or kind of work ethic in the population has been about the same over time.
Or
> Children have been about as well behaved over time.
Can anyone justify why these things should remain identical? That would suggest that environment is not an input into that equation.
Nobody wants to work anymore [at terms that are only beneficial to me]. The worst jobs pay the lowest salary. Employment rate is low enough many don't have to put up with it. So we now have immigration, legal and otherwise. Jobs have to be done, so either raise pay, hire desperate immigrants or go out of business.
Brilliant.
It should be memorialized forever somewhere easily accessible by everyone.
That way, when silly people complain that "nobody wants to work anymore," they can quickly be shown how uninformed and unoriginal they are.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Or, as The Who succinctly put it: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
It should be memorialized forever somewhere easily accessible by everyone.
That way, when silly people complain that "nobody wants to work anymore," they can quickly be shown how uninformed and unoriginal they are.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Or, as The Who succinctly put it: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
This reminds me of the romanticism of the Medieval Peasant I’ve sometimes seen online. The thinking is yes they worked hard, but at least they got guaranteed housing and a wife, etc.
America really is the land of opportunity, but if you don’t end up in a higher bracket, life is really really difficult.
America really is the land of opportunity, but if you don’t end up in a higher bracket, life is really really difficult.
I will never work to make money for someone else ever again
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 should we take it for granted? Or should we go back to the ideals of working people, classical liberals, Cicero, all the way to Abraham Lincoln, saying that this is not a decent way for human beings to live, that people should be in control of their own work and their own destiny. One of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von Humboldt, captured the point very lucidly. He said, suppose an artisan creates a beautiful object on command, in a job. We may admire what he did, but we despise what he is: a tool in the hands of others. That was common belief right through the nineteenth century. We now accept that renting yourself into servitude is one of the highest goals in life – an idea that would have been an abomination for 2000 years."
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6MU5zQwtT4&t=3540s
"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 should we take it for granted? Or should we go back to the ideals of working people, classical liberals, Cicero, all the way to Abraham Lincoln, saying that this is not a decent way for human beings to live, that people should be in control of their own work and their own destiny. One of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von Humboldt, captured the point very lucidly. He said, suppose an artisan creates a beautiful object on command, in a job. We may admire what he did, but we despise what he is: a tool in the hands of others. That was common belief right through the nineteenth century. We now accept that renting yourself into servitude is one of the highest goals in life – an idea that would have been an abomination for 2000 years."
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6MU5zQwtT4&t=3540s
Difficult to prove, but I suspect this complaint is one business owners make when they realize their business is going to fail. They know they could get more workers if they paid more, but they also know they can't afford that.
It's always easier to blame the people below you.
It's always easier to blame the people below you.
We will see what statistics say and what the trend will be in a few years, but if labor goes up for the same output then mathematically productivity has to go down, which has a variety of consequences, but I can think of 1) less capital market yields; 2) less tax income from governments. Both 1 and 2 have nasty impacts on pensions. I am not saying one way of thinking is better, I am just pointing out the obvious fact that there is no free lunch. Workers might get a better deal now, to be handed a bad one when they retire. Unless technology comes to the rescue and helps us keep increasing productivity, but it’s not realistic to rely only on tech.
> Man, what a weird week. Unless it's on their own terms, it seems nobody wants to work anymore.
It's the only one with any acknowledgement that agreeable terms may actually be needed in order to attract people to work. It doesn't take a PhD to figure this out!
Utah Phillips, one of my favorite storytellers and all-around anarchist and hobo has a line I was reminded of:
That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 -he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance!
From the track Bum on the Rod off the album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere with Ani DiFranco https://youtu.be/-rw4sd4AuJE