Laziness or something deeper
I often hear young folks have no work ethic and aren’t willing to pay their dues.
I think we may be missing the forest for the trees. There are many reasons young people are not willing to do some of the jobs that we middle-aged and older folks were willing to do.
Biological disposition
On an evolutionary scale, it’s only a minuscule amount of time that we humans were doing anything other than running around enjoying the lakes and rivers, eating wild berries, and enjoying the freedom of living.
Until the early part of the last century, people would have thought it cruel and unusual to force someone into an office cubicle with a big clock on the wall, watching the minute hand slowly ticking forward as your life ebbs away.
Is it possible forcing very young children into confined spaces and rickety wooden desks and then as adults enslaving them in a confined space for 8 or 10 hours a day might not be the way we are biologically wired?
What’s changed
Trust: We don’t trust so much anymore. Deals made on handshakes are laughable in today’s age.
Education: Banks are loaning students obscene amounts of money on inflated tuition, room, and board because the government backs those loans. It is a win-lose situation. Banks win — students lose….everytime.
Technological disruptions: Technological advances like the internet, YouTube, automation, robots, and artificial intelligence, have allowed people to become do-it-yourself lawyers, doctors, mechanics, bankers, investors, and teachers. Not long ago, something as simple as changing your address, phone number, or credit card required speaking to a human who would manually type in your information. Millions of jobs have or will disappear based on how much we do for ourselves using modern technology.
Loss of urgency: In the 1980s when I came of age, we were desperate to grow up….fast. At 16, we’d be at the DMV before they opened to take our driving test. Being an adult was such an exhilarating, mind-blowing, appealing desire, we would have shoveled horse manure for a living to make it happen.
When I started raising a family in the early aughts, my children and most of their friends showed no urgency to engage in the “grown-up” stuff my friends and I would have amputated our own arm to acquire.
Why?
Cultural and religious considerations
One explanation might be the monumental change in what constitutes the American dream from a cultural and religious perspective.
In the early 1970s when I was in elementary school, teachers proudly told us little boys we were going to grow up to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, fathers, and heads of our households. Little girls were encouraged to grow up to be good wives and mothers and to care for their families.
Male and female roles were still cemented within a puritanical and religious framework. While grossly unfair to women, minorities, gays, and anyone who didn’t follow societal norms, there were several aspects of life you could rely on that are no longer guaranteed.
Divorce rates were very low. Rents, mortgages, and car costs were relatively stable. Large unions protected workers' rights. And people routinely stayed with the same company for 25 or 30-years with generous pensions provided.
In short, modernization moved slowly enough so that you could plan your life. With reasonable certainty, your marriage, religious beliefs, societal roles, and careers wouldn’t be automated or culturally shifted out of existence.
Lives were lived similarly: long-term jobs, marriages, families, homes, cars, attending church services, taking pride in being trustworthy, dependable, and honest, helping your neighbor.
Young people are entering a world with high divorce rates, scattered families, decimated unions, technologically advanced companies with outrageously skewed salaries favoring upper management, and the most rancorous, divisive, and volatile political environment in recent memory.
Piecemeal doesn’t pay the bills
If the Gen Z’ers witness their parent’s divorce, lose their jobs: or be unable to afford health care, a home, or the lifestyle they were accustomed to when they grew up, wouldn’t it make sense they’d be dubious about following in their parent’s footsteps?
Even solid careers in medicine and law are being automated and streamlined with students graduating with such high levels of student debt, their salaries don’t cover their expenses.
The resultant “gig economy” offers no stability, benefits, or ability to be promoted. If demand for your product or service is inconsistent or dries up, you’re out of luck. Banks don’t care if a hurricane or flood destroyed your ability to make any money, the bills are still due.
Those making money as influencers, YouTubers, and social media darlings, can make money as long as their popular but are paid a relative pittance compared to what the platforms are making. Moreover, if you make your living on any of the big technological platforms, one wrong move and you can be canceled, banned from the platform for life, reducing your income to near zero, overnight.
Piecemeal work encourages people to spend as if they’re going to make that kind of money consistently. It encourages people to buy homes, cars, and live a lifestyle they ultimately cannot afford.
Young people are acutely aware of this economic trap we’ve put them in and are not having it.
Unfortunately, instead of fighting back politically or culturally, they often end up climbing into a virtual, social media, video game enhanced world, decimating their attention span and turning many into unmotivated zombies.
Video games and social media’s effect on the mind
Just today (9/15/21), politicians are demanding answers from Facebook because of a Wall Street Journal article exposing internal studies showing Instagram can be toxic to teen’s mental health — particularly girls.
Our brains are the least understood of all of our body parts. There will come a time when surgeons can slice into our cerebral hemispheres and fix things, but for now, there’s psychotherapy and anti-depressants.
We instinctively know the internet, smartphones, social media, and video games affect our mental health — by shortening our attention spans, separating us from biologically based forms of communication, and making us feel inadequate about our physical appearances, finances, and lifestyles.
Our computers anesthetize us into a state where we easily lose track of space and time. There are examples of video game players wearing diapers so they don’t have to leave the game to go to the bathroom.
Search engines and learning
Currently, students and adults use search engines to find the answers to almost anything.
Up through the turn of the last century, you had to look things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia which had its limitations.
With the answer to nearly every question and equation in the world is at your fingertips, it’s asinine to require children to memorize clumps of information to regurgitate back on a test.
Traditional school curriculums are outrageously outdated and unnecessary. It makes no sense for young folks to spend the first 18 to 21 years of their lives sitting at a desk with 30 other kids in a prison-like environment as if it were 1945.
By the time most children are in the 3rd or 4th grade, their reading, writing, and math skills are advanced enough to be provided with an individualized curriculum based on their aptitude for learning, motivation, and potential career pathway.
Walk into any high school in the country and you’ll notice the students have found ways to discretely “earbud” themselves into their smartphones as an escape.
It makes utterly no sense for students to take 5 to 10 years of repetitious math, science, history, and English courses. They are using search engines to complete their assignments and pass their tests anyway.
It’s Google that earned the A.
How long before we recognize our education system is stuck in the industrial age.
The technological age calls for highly specialized educational pathways tailored to each individual's abilities. That isn’t politically correct since it means children will be tested and placed on scholastic pathways as early as elementary school based on aptitude.
Now, we’re just torturing students and dumping them into a society where their knowledge base doesn’t have any real-life, career-oriented, applications.
Traditional education is dead — we just haven’t accepted it yet.
Summary
There isn’t a single explanation why young folks are missing a sense of urgency to become an adult with all the accompanying freedoms, power, and materialism.
It’s not pure laziness.
Nobody expected the technological revolution to so quickly displace workers.
Nobody predicted, perhaps as a result of traditional morals being replaced with raw greed, that companies, the government, and human selfishness would create a top-down economy with wealth so unfairly distributed.
Many have benefitted from social-cultural advances like equal rights, but our society was structured around an American dream that looked like the television show, Father Knows Best — a mom tending to the home, a dad bringing home the money, and the ability to afford a comfortable lifestyle on one income.
With young people postponing marriage or forgoing it altogether, there is no longer a stigma associated with being single into your 30’s or later. Women no longer feel an urgency to find a husband and have children.
Therefore, this new sense of timelessness combined with the unaffordability of homes, cars, and modern lifestyles, makes this technological zombification of our youth an oddly appropriate salve — a mind-numbing necessity.
Perhaps technology will advance to the point where the cost of goods and services becomes affordable for the masses.
Maybe universal income will make sense, particularly if wealth continues to flow into fewer people’s hands.
Technology will eliminate the need for even professions with advanced degrees like doctors, lawyers, and professors.
It’s scary to imagine a world with unimaginable materialistic marvels in the hands of a minuscule percentage of the country….and world.
The best-case scenario is a world where people can find spiritual and material success without effectively being indentured slaves to corporations.
Perhaps a new currency or form of technological bartering will emerge with a more equal field.
In the meanwhile, I can sympathize with this supposedly lost generation, who want to experience their American dream — which looks nothing like ours.
Exactly-- very well said and I couldn't agree more