Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Santa Fe, NM |
A bit more eloquent than my original post, cribbed from a guy more eloquent than myself (three separate posts on the same theme—long, but worth reading): Quote: Sadly I think I am being optimistic. I mean insofar as nobody seems to be willing to look at this from the perspective of a healthier society v an ever-more "productive" one. Deep in an extremely severe world recession - of confidence, of actual productivity, of massive interrelated, unsustainable debts sold as "investments" of one kind or another, assume positive futures - I think the dialog these days is agonizingly dishonest, desperate to cling to a continuity of vantage, that they're writing From A Distance and Things Are This Way when the reality is the distance is as uncertain as the destination. I am more concerned at the LACK of concern for radical changes to ensure we don't lose this generation. We are frighteningly far along in TOTALLY IGNORING EVERYONE UNDER THE AGE OF 30 because of economic and political crises/concerns. Any suggestion that the agenda should be modified to help spread the wealth on an AGE basis, not just a mean income basis, is ridiculed because hey kids just need iPhones and headphones and hoodies and a corner to crash in. If you tell kids those are their requirements, how are you ever going to tell them they need to work for a living. How are you going to help them find value in the process of working if you tell ****ing Standford grads "EHHH STIPEND FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS THEN MAYBE YOU CAN FILE SOME SHIT FOR ME". Fully three years of top-tier law students are being put on the shelf, given incomes comparable to retail store managers. And explicitly, through that treatment, that GUESS WHAT, YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THIS WORKS ON MY TERMS.
Who's lobbying for the kids on the other end of this? They can't speak for themselves because they get told "Buck up you little pussy you gotta pay your dues this is how it works I made my bones when you were playin' Nintendo". Thanks, *******s: I WANT TO MAKE MY BONES TOO, BUT YOU WON'T ****ING LET ME. There's such an easy slide there of self-exclusion from the situation, terming ambitious kids "entitled" - 1) because entitlement is a serious affliction in the <30 set but 2) because if you write EVERYONE off in those terms, you don't have to feel guilty for ****ing them out of the opportunity YOU HAD to kick ass when things were flush. Quote: I've just never felt such a disconnect between surface society (media, adults, the gainfully employed), and youth in my life, because of the accident of being born in 1975 and basically seeing nothing but Good Times. I was too young to have any experience or even really much memory of the terrible recession we had running from 75-82, and Black Monday was an issue in the financial markets, it was quickly over. The early 90s recession, with the LA riots and all, that was a really bad time and it felt like we just needed to get a Democrat in and everything would be fine. And bizarrely it kind of was and I was a teenager so it felt like a solution and that was a blip and now, you know, life is grand. And I spend my late teens and get-my-first-job 20s in probably the best employment and compensation market for young people in the history of the entire world, the late 90s.
What I've realized since the 2008 crisis is that all of this was just a generational stroke of luck, and that for kids born ten years later than me, who are now 25, life is a huge bucket of shit. I mean even rich kids, even pedigreed kids, that I see coming into trading desks and analyst roles, jobs that pay well, these are jobs that you didn't go to ****ing Harvard Business School or Yale or Oxbridge, even the LSE for. Those were the jobs you *skipped* in going to the Ivies and the big networking unis in the UK. But now all that huge theoretical work and the better part of a decade accumulating loads of debt to get this degree is rewarded by a job that was once a way to give a kid from the mail room a shot.
Maybe you're so rich that it doesn't matter, and this is just a way of continuing to swim in that same pond, keep the club together, and you're ok with how horrifically, nakedly vile that is, how aristocratic. I'm in a position of sort of servicing this class - I see it, I'm not from that high-born class, but neither am I distant from it. And in this position, I feel so much more outrage, not because, in the words of Noel Gallagher "IT'S IMPORTANT THAT I'M WORKING CLASS" or that I could even hope to identify with the economic struggles people a couple rungs down from me on the earnings ladder face. Or that I would want to, I've worked my whole life to bring my salary up, to afford the things I have, but I afford them, just. I can't buy them on a lark, I don't own anything particularly luxuriant, and went into debt to build the best house I could. Everywhere else, I am in a position to spend intelligently. But like 90+% of the ****ing planet isn't even in that comfort zone. I can't pledge allegiance to the systems we have because I don't think they afforded me the opportunity to earn a solid salary - I think I did, and the systems we have afforded the 1%-ers the opportunity to keep being 1% of the population. I don't see how you need to make much more than I do. Everything that occurs in the income brackets above me is total ****ing largess and waste. Quote: I'm no expert, I just have some friends abroad I've known since I was younger and so much rage at the differing expectations they deal with culturally and wrt their families as we get older. It's just completely ok to be in your mid-thirties and "getting started" with work-life in most of Europe. And if anything there is less pressure to do so since the economic blowout. It's just envy you know I wish it was ok for me to live at home and scrap for beer money and make music, write, bullshit blag my days away, but the US has this hangover from the Greatest Generation that you get into the workforce ASAP to increase national productivity and pull our standard of living up, DOT DOT DOT, but the reality is without real production, living in a service delivery/consumer society with a glaring tier of elite bourgeois media dickbags beating each other off on a daily basis and only advertising and delivery devices as their revenue, that mindset no longer applies. Entrepreneurial success today is not starting or growing a company, it's flipping one, and rather than a company it's an advertising conduit in 90+% of cases. One of the only real US companies to come out in the last ten years, Tesla - paid for by PayPal. Service and advertising. If we're - well no, we have an entire generation that is being offered depressed incomes (through salary, opportunity and external inflation) and expected to go through these motions, get in the mix ASAP. But the older generations are survivalist and flattening their career tracks out to map their requirements, to maintain their exaggerated standard of living. We're coming out of the most illusory period of prosperity (95-07) in American history. Nothing in the last ten years has occurred without increased money supply, incentivized by the government as corp/VC tax breaks (Megabank conglomerations, .com boom) or raw capacity (current QE phase). I'm hanging on, I'm in a good earning bracket (not too little that I can't enjoy a plush lifestyle, not so much that I cost more than I provide), but I'm constantly struggling with what's happening to kids in their 20s. It's a ****ing mess.
That said, it's only worse if the expectations are out of whack. If parents who can afford it would embrace the reality - that none of this is their child's fault, that internship after internship is simply whoring them out as slave labor - and let these kids live at home, cost and hassle free, as long as they're productive, creative and thinking in some way, that generation has a chance to ride this out without feeling like the working world is a ****ing scam and having zero faith in the entire construct. Don't force them to pretend things are ok, that they can and should be able to make it out there because you did - there has never been a bigger disconnect between expectation and reality than these kids are being subjected to. |