Somehow the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s running out of steam, and a correction taking place. A growing influence of American culture as well as Muslim immigrants, both more conservative. And perhaps feminism changing course.
The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!
All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
The French are sometimes ridiculed for their "unrealistic" worker demands but as a Dutch person, I greatly admire their unity.
Here in the Netherlands, we pride ourselves on our "polder model", a trinity of government, employers and unions that come to a consensus, hence no need to strike. That system worked well for some decades hence society runs on auto pilot.
Trouble is, due to globalization and ever more temp contracts (fire at will), the power of unions have been decimated and the combination government/employers are calling the shots, slowly eating away at worker rights.
Our "holy" retirement age used to be 65, unchanged for a huge amount of time. It was declared as unsustainable to keep it that way, instead it should become a rolling number, coupled with life expectancy. My pension fund predicts my retirement age at about 70.5.
This change was pushed through because keeping it at 65 would cost 5B per year for the foreseeable future. Absolutely unaffordable for our tiny country.
40B in support to keep businesses open during COVID though...just pulled from a hat. 25B in energy compensation so that households don't freeze to death...arranged in mere weeks.
Just saying...unaffordable means no political will.
Anyway, regardless of the money mechanics, retiring at 70+ is absurd. It effectively means no retirement at all. I know a huge amount of boomers, many were able to retire at 58-62, especially blue collar. Most by then already were in poor health but managed to pull off a decent decade of rest and joy with still some activity like going on holidays.
By 70 it's over. Some dead, the others depleted. Their partner may have died. They have severe health issues. No energy or will power left to truly have one more adventurous run. Hobbies abandoned. Health and quality of life declines exponentially. 60-70 and 70-80 are not the same thing.
Further, nobody actually wants these old people at work. Blue collar people are broken by then and white collar is either obsolete and outdated or strongly discriminated. I'm in my 40s and struggling to stay relevant.
The point of my rant is that there's always an economic reason to make workers' lives shittier. Always. Every time there's a rational reason to do so that seems to make sense. And that's how you end up working as a couple for 50 years straight. It's never going to be enough.
Only with unity as seen in France can you call out their bluff.
The age should actually be 60 and we should be having ever shorter worker weeks. A concept I call "time for wealth". In the future we probably have to do with less stuff. But it's not a vision for the future to say to people that their wealth is under pressure whilst still needing to work themselves to death.
Hence, we trade that wealth for time. You learn to live with less material goods which increases your appreciation of them. More durable/reparable products. Higher prices because externalities are included. Doesn't have to be bad at all, restoring some sanity here. In return for this material "poverty", you get more economic security, more free time, retire earlier. Also fits in well with our AI future that will disrupt work.
I think that's a vision people can get behind, and we'll still leave the door open for the super achievers that want more stuff.
My take on this is that bizarre as it is, most companies do not seem to care much about productivity in the first place.
If you look at the typical knowledge worker (non-manager) today, they're drowning in meetings, chat and email. Leaving tiny snippets of time to do actual work, perhaps as little as 2 hours per day.
I find it absolutely baffling how there doesn't seem to be any serious effort to address most of your productive base being spent on communication. Basically, people spent most of their time figuring out what they're even supposed to do, and when, and precious little time actually doing that.
This is why the 4 day work week works. I'll repeat it again as this is a key insight: This is why the 4 day work week works.
It's not because of a better "work life balance", as much as I love to believe that. It's because a 5 day work week has overhead as high as 50-75% where no actual work gets done. So to cut back from 5 days to 4 days, you just scrap the least useful meetings/chats/email whilst you continue to do the 25% we used to call actual work.
In other words, when your employees work a day less and still are just as productive, you should be embarrassed and have a serious issue in your organization. And sadly, this issue seems to be the norm, and somehow gets no attention at all.
Collaboration is not the solution, it's the fucking problem. In a utopian work state, you'd give me a work package that is clearly specified and I'll get to work. I wouldn't need 17 meetings to understand what you even mean, report status 3 times per day to 50 people, call 3 vendors to resolve dependencies, get a sign-off from 5 internal institutes or be pulled into 20 directions at once regarding 7 other projects.
We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone.
Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored.
My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble.
Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression.
Ah yes, the myth of rejecting nihilism. Just like my last restaurant visit where I ordered stale bread and water. Enough for survival, the rest is pure vanity.
I'm really quite sure that people can grasp that when you put a fish on dry land, it's not made for that. And that similarly, we're not made for social isolation, living indoors, extreme overstimulation of the senses, non-stop negativity, lack of cognitive breaks, etc.
The chronically online character overconsumes news, which is almost always bad news, as that grabs the attention. Complemented by hysterical, pessimistic social media grifters.
When you almost exclusively consume the above, your world view will be deeply corrupted.
Before smartphones, one would "surf the web" for an hour or so at night, and physically sit down at a PC. That's a radically different experience compared to the 24/7 always-on information overload and forever temptation of the smartphone.
The very article points this out: there was a time where the internet complemented physical life, in good ways even.
Second, smartphone engagement is shallow. On a PC one tends to read more, write more extensively, because it's easy to do so.
You're contradicting the entire point of the article. You mention increases as of 2017 and 2019 whilst the phone narrative aligns with 2012 and beyond. Mental health fell of a cliff since 2012 and seems to keep degrading ever since. One other study showed that even COVID had a limited effect, it was just a continuation of a trajectory happening since 2012.
Similar. Teen(ish) in the 80s. Only during my early 30s did I learn that during that era, the nuke to end us all could very well drop, and it had one of the worst economic crises ever.
Had no idea during it all, didn't notice. Nor do I think I'd worry much about it had I known.
What that tells me is that modern teens over over-informed, it is non-stop, and the messaging is extremely negative.
Somehow the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s running out of steam, and a correction taking place. A growing influence of American culture as well as Muslim immigrants, both more conservative. And perhaps feminism changing course.