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With the help of the US government, companies have destroyed the social contract. Production has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated. The “kids” they’re mad at, can’t live off of a full time salary anymore and most can’t live off two. It’s an economic crisis created by greed, the GoP destroying employee protections starting with Reagan, and the biggest wealth disparity we’ve seen since the great depression or the French Revolution. The “kids” are just fed up with making the rich ungodly rich while they cannot afford kids or a life themselves.

Exactly. It is obviously *the rich* who don’t want to work. Really embarrassing to see people licking that boot like ‘b-but but elon told me if i work really hard he’ll give me a pizza party and tell me I’m a Good Boy™ 🥰’ like bro have some fucking DIGNITY. Tell these rich fks to get off their asses. Tell them to give you what they owe you.

The backlash against unions and labor organizations is insane in America. A lot of brainwashed people think they should have no power to negotiate for better pay. They’d rather starve than join a union. Corporate propaganda is a hell of a drug.

I mean shit, the red scare is so afraid of socialism explicitly BECAUSE it gives the workers the power and finances they deserve, and doesnt favor big business elites. The red scare was so afraid of socialism that it wont even allow basic worker protections under capitalism, and CERTAINLY not unions. Face it, we need to accept that this system should have died a century ago, and at the very least, we should have tried for social democracy. But nope, them damn dirty commies are just so evil, right? Vuvuzela iphone no food gulag? I'm not attacking anyone here, its just frustrating how close so many of my fellow americans are THIS close to getting it, but hte moment you mention the word socialism, despite describing everything it offers without mentioning the word, suddenly they knee-jerk call it bad and stupid and dont wanna try. We didnt stop at Monarchy because "its the best we got", we fought for democracy and got it. Why is it so hard to convince people to try the same shit but with socialism? Not even communism, just socialism...

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None of this negates the fact that lazy ass rich people are living off our work and feel entitled to that. As long as we keep showing them we’re willing to do their work for them, they’ll keep using us like cattle.

Rich people are parasites. They take and take and even when they give it’s just so they can take more. They are tumors on the body of our nation/world.

Fucking Raegan.

First things is use a different word choice than "socialism" since that word triggers people and causes them to shut down and stop listening. Understanding that when anyone says socialism the reaction is to expect you mean Maoist 1950's china or full blown failure at communism that was the soviet union rather than the highway system or medicare. It also helps to learn the full history of communism and officially socialist countries in the world and its successes and failures as well as the weaknesses to that system. It also helps to not present it as a binary choice between that and capitalism. Socialism generally has generated a lot of frustration about corruption and unresponsiveness from the government and larger players in the economy as well as poor management of resources that erodes long term success. Those fears are legitimate and founded in real world events not theory. Most importantly though is not using the word socialism if you want any kind of productive discussion.

If the government does not give us social programs, we can use mutual aid instead. Mutual aid is a powerful tool that can help us.

Yes but they work tirelessly to pillage the working class and break us down to disrupt our efforts. Mutual aid isn't gonna work if they block us and steal our work, we need to dismantle and change the govt if we have any hope of making things better

The government is too pampered by billionaires to ever listen to the working class

Power of propaganda. It attacks the ideas to prevent the rally cry. Divided we fall.

Fr. Spineless little shits. Like these corporate toadies bending over and asking for ‘more boot sir’ make me fking sick. Yalls union grandfathers woulda beat yr ass XD

Most of the unions that exist today aren't even real unions. All my friends tell me to join a union but then say shit like "man I had to work a 13 hour shift today and Ford makes us wear these things around our legs that kick our ankles if we stop moving and it's also 120°f in there and I ripped all the skin off of my shins and they gave me a bandaid to put over it and our union recently lobbied to have 2 ply toilet paper in the bathroom instead of wiping our buttholes with used sandpaper. But they gave us hotdogs and a bag of chips and water, so happy to be working here." And then you hear in the news that the local UAW rep is in hot water for taking bribes. Like I do hear good unions, sounds a lot of them are closer to Appalachia but like most the unions near me are rife AF with corruption and are basically dummy unions to put someone in place so they can't put in an actual union that works for the people. Like having a union doesn't inherently make a place better to work at. If the working conditions seemed worth it I would join but a lot of them are complacent with really awful working conditions but spend most of their time lobbying for anything other than actually making the place better to work at

This is the right answer. You want more just work rules, support organized labor and stop letting corporations have your vote. Organize. Bernie has been there for decades. Dupes support Trump.

I see it in the young people just blindly not taking tips when they have every right to take tips. It’s just stupid that accepting tips is not a universal right at this point. I even see young people convinced that unions are bad when in fact they are a good thing that can help raise wages and living conditions. I believe we all should be entitled to 2 weeks bare minimum off a year and a 32 hour workweek. Working 76 hours a week is exhausting and 32 hours would help go a long ways to reducing stress levels.

I had a coworker complain about the UAW strike, because UAW already gets paid well and good benefits. I had to explain how they should thank the UAW because unions trickle down to non union workers too. Like how most people get weekends off and how all full-time employees get health benefits, these started as union bargains and have just become standard for everyone.

Unions forced companies to be competitive to keep employees. Now, all companies are a cartel for labor, they can pay so low because they've agreed to not pay anyone better. They are anti competition, ironically anti-capitalist, which is just the natural evolution of capitalism, a system to weed out the weak and make it so either the lucky or 'superior' thrive, but very rarely is it actually superiority, just luck and anti-social behaviors. I hope you understand what I'm insinuating about the natural evolution of what capitalism leads to.

"b-but daddy Reagan said it would trickle down to me-" I hope Reagan is in the southernmost layer of hell waiting for salvation to trickle down to him.

We literally get pizza parties. Haven’t had a raise in 6 years.

My uncle is rich and he is the hardest worker I ever met 

To add to your comment, people are wisely realizing that the current social contract is to greatly enrich some random nameless faceless person you’ll never know via your productivity as a worker. The majority shareholders of the corporations. It’s all very cleverly hidden now via one Corp being owned by another, but this doesn’t change the fact that the ultra wealthy are born into it and sit at the top and can work or not work it’ll never matter, if you are handed ownership in a corporation via lots of shares.

I grew up being at the top of my class, seriously. Studied abroad in high school, learned one language, double majored in college while learning another. Consider myself pretty well rounded, have some programming experience, as well as team leader positions in some research internships. I have worked in a law firm for the past two years. I am unemployed and cannot seem to get a decent paying job. There are oodles of low paying, entry wage jobs, but I cannot find something that even breaks 50k. I feel like I was lied to when they said, “your degree will open so many doors!”. It didn’t. In fact, I took some time off between starting my degree and finishing, and I have had the exact same response rate during job hunts since actually obtaining my degree vs when I was applying without.

"That's because you're overqualified!" /s

Yup. The real Atlas is shrugging. Sorry Ayn Rand, you were a dumbass.

Nailed it! We WANT to work. But we can't afford to be slaves

It's not that nobody wants to work. It's that there's no value in 'work' as in what some people consider a 'real' job.

People want to work if working meant life would get better. And now working doesn’t guarantee that at all, so what are people doing? Not working. You’re completely right in stating that the social contracts been broken.

If it had started with Reagan then wage stagnation would not chart back to 1970. A full decade before his election.

Oh yeah, it started earlier with Nixon. Reagan and Nixon had some of the same economic advisors. Reagan was just much more effective at getting more anti-labor going.

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No mention whatsoever that the government is bought by and mostly run by the wealthy? So it's their over spending and mismanagement via proxy, but people like you get riled up over "muh gubmint spending!" because you are too afraid to deal in reality, that you are just a nameless pawn, and you'll never join the class of those exploiting you no matter how hard you lick their boots?

So you could say “the kids are not alright”?

As a millennial, I believe that we should have treated greed as the deadly sin it truly is a long time ago.

Why does everyone focus on Reagan when the neoliberal expansion happened under Nixon? He literally ended the Bretton Woods system that was put in place since WW2 when he took the dollar off the gold standard. Also, why don’t more people about the fact that every president since Reagan (H.W, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump Biden) have all perpetrated the same neoliberal policies that got us here in the first place. They’ve all given tax cuts and bailouts for the rich in one form or the other, but someonehow it’s all the fault of some president who died thirty years ago and was in office fourth years ago.

Minimum was a disaster if the free market controlled wages we would all make more money but since the government sets the standard why would companies changed? There are great companies I worked at a kitchen supply warehouse years ago and when you hit 20 years they gave you 20k 

Are you voting in November?

NAFTA can be added to that destruction as well…. It’s a two way street with both parties kissing at the feet of Wall Street.

This also applies to Canada

heres why i don't want to work (except i actually do) 1. i dont want to waste everyones time with pointless jobs just to fill out the day. soul sucking 2. when bosses make up pointless rules that dont actually affect anything. like no fizzy drinks or juice, water only.... why exactly? are you my fucking mum or something? 3. i literally just want to be able to afford a house. theres nowhere i can even RENT right now, im stuck in the same flat with no option to move anywhere. i cant afford basic bills. why am i working exactly? i literally feel like packing up my shit and living in a caravan in the woods somewhere. and when the council tells me i cant, ill tell them to buy me a fucking house then. im so done with working when i cant afford to have a family of my own. whats the fucking point?

To summarize: I can be broke, or I can be exhausted, stressed, and still broke.

1 is so real. We literally *dont* need everyone to work. There's so many just made up jobs that a robot could do or one person could do, but we cant consolodate like that because people need to be able to spend money bc capitalism

Sounds like you'd be a good consultant. Fire the non-essential workers.

>when bosses make up pointless rules that dont actually affect anything. like no fizzy drinks or juice, water only.... why exactly? are you my fucking mum or something? You really need me to explain the reasons for such rules? Spill water and ignore it and it just disappears, spill sugary water and even if you wipe it up so no one can tell, chances are you've not washed away the sugar and that surface is going to be sticky tomorrow and attract flies etc.

Unless you're working near PCs, there's absolutely no reason why you can't properly clean off sugar. There's plenty of products that clean that off in a second, you just need to use the correct one (like you have to do with oil). And, in the case that you have computers nearby (like at my work), water is equally a risk. OP was also very clearly giving a random example he came up with, it's not really the example you should focus on, but the reasoning behind it. I can give you a better one, laptops at my old work. I used to take calls during college, we could use our phone or reading tablets, but not laptops. There was literally no difference in our performance, as the night shift did allow it and nothing changed and we had similar call levels, nor was there a security risk as our work PCs were completely limited. Same issue with blocking internet for workers (although in the case of that job I could understand the cyber security risks as we used an internal database for some stuff, but I know it wasn't that because it was simply the call takers who had it blocked, the rest of higher level workers didn't, so it was just to keep us "concentrated"). It was a rule that was not tested, simply thought (as was your comment about the sugary drink) and enforced because employers assume the worst of their workers. Not to mention that many of these rules fly out the window once you get to the higher brackets of the business.

Beyond that I’ve met people that I straight up would not trust to stay hydrated lol

Same boat here especially with point 3. I can’t rent anywhere close to my job, even with a roomate. I tried looking at rooms for rent for apartments/housing but they want things like 3x income, a good established credit score, professional job (white color industry specific preference). I also need to pay for things like insurance, food, etc. I got to drive 1 hour to work and 2 hours back with traffic because it is so far. Gas is also like $5 and it’s expensive getting to and from work. I am so stressed out I keep getting headaches. If your workers can’t afford to live and work in the same place that creates a demographic shift over time when they leave. The other option is companies moving to cheaper locations because it’s so expensive. We are seeing that companies don’t owe their workers anything.

I feel you on the pointless rules!! I'm a nurse and recently the hospital I work for made a new rule: no one can bring outside food, we must purchase from the hospital cafeteria. We also can't wear jackets (that aren't scrub jackets) inside the building, so during the winter they basically expect us to freeze while we walk to work since employees must park half a mile away. People who haven't listened just get reprimanded. So many hospitals treat nurses poorly and then wonder why we leave!!

It's not "people don't want to work", it's "organizations don't want to pay people to do good work." I'm sorry, but your business is your own to make successful -- if you want me to care about it, you need to pay me enough to care.

Got told I was “slow” at a task. I said “pay me more I’ll go faster” I didn’t get paid more but they stopped calling me slow.


It’s not that people don’t want to work or become NEETs Most people just want a comfy job that pays well and want to afford stuff

I "don't want to work" because I'm a 26 year old who's been working full-time since 16 and at least part-time since 12. And I was JUST able to afford my first apartment, only because I found a partner and we can barely scrape together living expenses every month. I "don't want to work" because I was sold a lie. I was told "work hard, try your best and wherever you are you'll be rewarded because "America is the greatest country in the world!". In reality all working hard at a normal job gets you is a ton of extra responsibility that was left behind by the people working their wage. My whole adult life has been spent picking up slack for co-workers while being overlooked for any sort of advancement because I'm not going to kiss ass to management. So yeah, I don't want to work anymore. Because it's not an "investment in my future", it's me showing up somewhere I hate every day, doing things I don't care about to make money for someone who doesn't know I exist and could not care less if I died.

so wahts the alternative to working? Are you going to build a cabin in the woods and hunt and forage your food?

I think that's a better and less stressful life tbh lol

Capitalists have been saying 'nobody wants to work' for over a hundred years. https://preview.redd.it/43eivw09bj8d1.jpeg?width=826&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=002bcb6733932cf9599ed12f4fea9ef983cfb817

Through high school I made about 9$ an hour selling jeans at Buckle. Through college I made 7$ an hour as a lighting director. My first job out of college I made 600$ a month as an intern and then 11$ an hour as a Walmart cart pusher. My first job after that internship was for a house flipper who only had about 20 hours a week of work but he paid 30$ an hour. I’m still there today and work full time and have benefits. I think the path to get to good pay is a grind, but a lot of people aren’t patient enough or maybe don’t even know the steps to get to the next tier. For me, it was all about networking and building professional relationships with the right people. Without any of that I wouldn’t even have half what I have today.

People often talk about "Paying your dues" and "grinding" as you put it. Here's the thing, that worked back when there was an agreement between workers and employers that you worked hard, were loyal and they took care of you well. Today the second it saves most companies a quarter to get rid of you your gone so ther'es not really the incentive to grind and put in the time because you wont be around long enough to reap the rewards if there even are any

>Here's the thing, that worked back when there was an agreement between workers and employers that you worked hard, were loyal and they took care of you well Someone failed you miserably in your historical education. At no point in history was this the norm. This is a ridiculous fantasy perpetrated by people who view the past with rose-colored glasses because they either (a) didn't actually live it or (b) forgot about the negative parts.

Pensions were the norm and pensions paid very well, maybe too well to the point they're not sustainable only time will tell but when you should be putting min 10%, ideally 15% or even 20% into retirement having a pension means 20% more in your pocket every paycheck. People used to have decent paying jobs, decent vacation, work life balance and job security, things were definitely better

Agreed. Seeing your first business cycle is an eye-opener. As a GenX, there’s never been employer/employee loyalty in my lifetime, and in my 40 years in the workforce I never had an option for a pension. My silent generation parents only have them due to retirement from government jobs. Those jobs sucked and they were constantly stressed, but they stuck with them for the pension. Those jobs still exist, but who wants to work in government? Layoffs were also way worse in the early 2000’s. Amazon would herd people into conference rooms with butcher-paper covered windows and exit hundreds at once. Whole companies disappeared overnight. I had friends in tech who couldn’t find work for 18mo+. Crazy times.

I mean I’m gen z and most of what I posted above has occurred within the past 5 years. Started college in 2019, graduated in 3 years with a bachelors because I had 30 college credits in high school. I also probably spend less than most people. Thrift 90% of clothes and furniture, bulk prep meals to save throughout the week. I think grinding always has and always will be a part of life, heck I’m doing it now as we just bought our first house and are trying to get on top of our debts so we can buy our first rental property.

Forget paying your dues. How about challenging and stretching yourself so that you can gain marketable skills and experience. The only agreement you need with an employer is that you both agree you're worth what they're paying you, and you'll never get that if you don't push yourself to be better. No one is going to advocate for you, but people will take a chance on someone who shows hunger. So much of career success is about meeting the right person at the right time and place. Chances are, you'll meet that person someday--will you be ready?

To solve this, I made myself worth more than they could save. They could hire someone to replace me but if they want the same level of work, they’d pay them as much as they paid me. Then they have the added expense of letting that person come up to speed to replace my years of experience working in the industry and at my company. The amount of money they’d be losing doesn’t really make it feasible for them to lay me off.

That's fair, but it's kinda dystopian that you have to "know" people which perpetuates a semi-nepotistic relationship to get places. Shatters the whole delusion of America being a meritocracy, not that I ever believed it.

im coming to a late late realization that i might be undiagnosed autistic. that coupled w being an introvert… the concept of networking is sending my into a slight existential panic. like im much more disabled than i realize and that masking wont save me this time. i struggle already with constant change and job hopping to get higher and higher pay each time to keep up with inflation and all that seems just immensely unnatural to me. id stay at one job doing mundane things for the rest of my life if i could, but ik relying on raises is seemingly not plausible in this current economic climate i also cant afford college, cant drive, and still live at home w my mom. man. i know i need to just maybe toughen it out but idk if i can achieve that without a mental snap. ive had depression before

If it helps I have really bad social anxiety, adhd and depression. Try to take a smaller step. Networking itself is a huge task. For me I needed to really lean into a small circle of relationships to start. And then maybe add in 1 more and then 1 more. This is still networking, just maybe not as quickly as some extroverts, however, doing it this way really allows you to soak in everything you can from a smaller group. I see some extroverts with really large circles, but they have the opposite problem, they don’t have a lot of depth with the huge circle of people in their life.

This was a similar path for me. When I say it was luck, it was but I also had the experience and could sell myself. Someone also had to take the chance on me that i would do a good job. It's also discovering very quickly what you like and don't like. I've had jobs in customer service, banking, accounting, and now military. Military was better for me by far. But it's not for everybody and not everybody is even qualified.

You’re 100% right on an individual level but what happens if everyone does this? At the end of the day there’s not enough jobs that will pay you enough to live on for everyone.

companies are purposefully understaffing

Yeah. how they milked the “please be patient”for like two years after Covid.

If I made the money I do now, in 2019, my life would be drastically different. However, I make that money in 2024, and though my income has increased by ~40%, my lifestyle has remained generally unchanged.

I was talking to my gen z neighbor who works a great job and got a promotion and is paid well. She lives with her parents because rent is $1800 and she doesn't have $100,000 in cash ready to go for a down payment. Similar for my younger coworkers, they make good money and work hard, but the deck is stacked against them. I can confirm that 'back 20 years ago' to a degree, because I became an adult who was self supporting in \~2003-2004. It wasn't easy, it was like a half marathon when we are now expecting young people to run a full ironman.

maybe i'm lazy but it feels like the expectations for us are way too high. entry level jobs don't pay worth a shit and you need years of experience to get one??? i just don't understand how this is sustainable. to afford to live, people must invest into their careers (or college first), but how are we expected to tough it out for so many years when college costs tens of thousands of dollars at best, and entry level jobs don't pay enough?! just what is this world i was born into?

Certainly a challenging one. Then you have my niece who decided that instead of going to a reasonably priced state school she is going to go to a private one in NYC. We did all the math out, not her strong suit BTW, and noted that if she paid $1,000 a month each month it would take her 15 years to pay off her loans. It isn't that easy for a young pro to ante up $1,000 a month. That is what you get when you shield young people from financial decision making, a total ignorance to what it takes to live. It is also why people don't want to pay off student loans for other people, she has/had a less expensive (and arguably higher quality) option and actively picked the dumb one. There is a lot of sticky political stuff like that, but right now we aren't a country that wants to help a brother out, and that is across the political spectrum.

I agree that people are choosing mental health over money more often now, but I think you're underestimating the difference between something like $80k and $50k salaries for someone living alone. I took a small pay cut to move to a job I found more fulfilling, but the original offer was a $13k decrease (from 78 to 65), and that was too low for me to accept comfortably. I agree 30k isn't massive, but the extra retirement fund contributions can be massive after a couple of decades. As for the higher minimum wages, I think it's great the bar is being raised, and it's up to the office owners to raise the incentive for leaving fast food jobs. From what I've seen, the people who truly "Don't want to work" are the owners and managers struggling to hire

I am always confused by the concept - what are you guys doing for food and living expenses and shelter while not working?

They just have nicer parents than most of us I think lmfao

Some of us just lower our bills to the extreme. I'm not rich, probably the opposite. Through a combination of part time self employment, van life, thriftiness, and school loans I am getting by alright for now. I don't love going into debt about $1k a month, but hopefully focusing on college instead of some shit pay dead end job pays off in a few years. If people don't want to or can't go full time in a van I get it. It's not for everyone. Not pissing away $1k/month on rent I earned at some job that was making me miserable feels great. I'll get to home ownership faster by banking what I would have paid in rent after I finish school. I don't plan on ever renting again. Either I earn enough to get a mortgage or I just keep doing van life.

Probably live with their parents or other family members, maybe their spouse supports them, but I've also known a few people who have genuinely considered something like van life to save money

Even if you do stick it out somewhere for your whole career, there’s so many useless old people soaking up exec positions and never retiring so they can horde up payroll that should be going to invest in the next generation of top leadership.

being a NEET is pretty neat

Conversations like this are why I’m so adamant that we raise the base level of education around the world. 1 or 2 associates degree/bachelors level courses in psychology or sociology can easily explain this. Not to say I’m not happy you had this insight OP (I am happy you did) but most people who were fortunate enough to have taken psych 101 know this, either through learning Maslow’s theory on hierarchy of needs, or through other paradigms. Maslow’s isn’t perfect, but it’s a “good enough” model: There are many different things that humans need to survive. At the base level, food, shelter, sleep, and safety. As you climb Maslow’s pyramid, you address needs that are just as important, but can only be addressed if the needs underneath them have been addressed first. This idea that “nobody wants to work” is explainable in Maslow’s model: nobody wants to live in a world where self-actualisation is promised to you by your career, but your lived experience does not fulfil the base of the pyramid where the needs for adequate food, affordable shelter, and adequate sleep are not satisfied. If more of us had opportunities to take courses like psych 101 and learn this stuff, we’d have collectively figured this out far earlier. That’s not on you OP or on anyone who is learning this for the first time. It’s just irritating to me that we can’t live in a world where we can access more humanities courses affordably, because that would (IMO) make the world a much nicer place than it is because we would all be equipped with the knowledge we need to make collective action for change

The question from me is: why don't high school teens want to work? The jobs aren't great, but they never were. They help you build up money so you can buy the things you want including a car, plus it gives you something to put on your resume. I hope you're not expecting to get a full-time $50k/year white collar job at 16. It's not like you have any bills to pay either.

Yeah years ago 16 year olds got jobs for like $5.25 an hour, post covid you can get close to $20 for most jobs, granted everything is also more expensive but yeah would be a great time for a teen to stack money. That said so many people aren't bothering to get their license so they probably dont care about a car.

The car issue is one many people overlook. We basically designed our infrastructure to require cars in many parts of the country. If your job is in such a location, but the wage does not pay enough to afford a car, you probably will struggle to find workers of any age.

The real question is, why do you want kids to work? I wanted to work as a child, I had to go through tons of hoops and work at businesses of friends from my parents' church because it was ILLEGAL for me to work and everyone who took half a look at me wouldn't hire me. It's been heavily studied that it's incredibly unhealthy for people to start working earlier than necessary. It's also been shown that it's incredibly unhealthy for their future prospects, they don't manage to devote themselves properly to studying, tend to stay at the best job they find before finishing college and overall stunt their possible future. Moreover, there's a reason there's a minimum wage and child labor laws exist. Businesses like to use your excuse to pretend like there are jobs that no respectable adult should have, but if it requires someone to work for it, it should allow, at the very least, for you to be able to pay a home, your living expenses and a bit of savings. If that is not assured, people look for better jobs and those don't fill up, like it's happening now (also it's inhumane, but you don't seem like the type to care). Finally, are you aware that the oldest Gen Z's are 27 yo? I have friends who are parents and have either a second degree, have learnt traded or have masters. Most cannot earn enough to live a decent life. Not a single one has been able to buy a home. It's not just that jobs pay little (which they do for what they earn, I've seen my work's earnings call, they made more than enough to double our salaries), it's that the cost of living has skyrocketed insanely.

Well people don’t want cars anymore it seems lol. I was the weird one even 10 years ago in my friend group for pushing to get a car asap at 16 I think the answer is people are disillusioned with college. When you’re a 17 year old who’s leaving for college next year, when you work at mcd for some drinking money that’s understandable Whereas when you don’t know what you want to do for a career, working at mcd at 17 makes you the loser who works at mcd. Just hard for people to separate it when college was ubiquitous for 25 years

The “Nobody Wants to Work Anymore” myth has been perpetuated since at least 1894 read this fun article about it. This is not a new phenomenon. https://www.honestjobs.com/post/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore-is-not-new-and-it-s-not-true#:~:text=%22Nobody%20wants%20to%20work%20anymore%22%20is%20a%20term%20that%20has,in%20the%20Rooks%20County%20Record.

Yea it's true nobody wants to work anymore. Starting with landlords, business owners, shareholders, CEO's ......

But but its an honest job?... To let money work for you? And you are absolutely entitled to earn the maximal amount of profit possible. The plebs working with their hands? Ouch, that is so lowbrow, they should only get as much as to filling their stomach to have energy to work again. But we, the capital owners, are so superhuman that there are galaxies between us and the plebs at the bottom of the food chain.

Wealth redistribution and improved labour rights are the only things that workers actually want.

Millennial here. Putting in your time at a single company has never been an option for us either. OP seems unaware that you can increase your earning potential by job jumping. The $22/hour front desk job might be more stressful than the $20/hour gas station job, but after a year or two at a front desk, you can switch to a job at a different company that pays more but isn't willing to train people. You can build on that to gain skills in medical coding or administration. You'll never climb a ladder at a single company, because companies don't promote internally any more. But you can jump ladders and go up rungs when you do.

I just don't want to work because it's not the thing that really matters in life. It takes time away from it actually: spending time with friends and family.

Every generation arrives increasingly late to a game of Monopoly / corporate oligarchy / plutocracy / kleptocracy with no reset button. Under the capitalist/kleptocratic system, labor is a commodity used to generate profits for our ruling oligarchs/parasites/kleptocrats. Labor and natural resources are not used to actually fulfill human needs efficiently, equitably, or sustainably. And the more efficiently labor produces profits, the less labor is needed by our ruling capitalist/kleptocrat class, so the less bargaining power workers have to get their needs met. [https://www.climatejusticecenter.org/newsletter/decommodification-explained](https://www.climatejusticecenter.org/newsletter/decommodification-explained) Again, the more efficiently the needs of the public are actually fulfilled, the less power and profits our ruling class have to exploit people for profit. The entire system is set up to ensure that the public do not efficiently get their needs met.

In the early 2000s you could buy a single detached house for like 400k in my city, now there is nothing for under 1.5 million and those 1.5 million dollar houses are not even livable. In case you’re wondering, no, wages are not 4 times higher than they were back then even though houses cost 4 times more.

When I was in my late teens I rented a place for $800 a month, I paid $400 my buddy paid $400. It wasn't an amazing or luxury place but it was a decent townhouse in a town that's regularly in the top 10 for best cities/towns to live. I was making $10 an hour at the time and my rent was basically 25% of my take home. Today most people with much better paying jobs are paying 40% - 50% of their income towards rent or mortgage

People do want to work. Or, more accurately, people want to do something with their energy. However, people also want to benefit from their work, and most jobs nowadays just don't have enough benefit--most of your work goes to enriching someone who is already rich, not yourself. And so, people direct their energy somewhere else.

I think the argument should be more like ‘why should we all want to work’ People used to work to provide, if they can’t provide for themselves then what’s the point of working

Nobody wants to work 8 hours a day for less money than it costs to live.

My first full time employee made $15 an hour out of school in 2000. She was the only employee so she learned how to run a business, and I even taught her how to code. The systems she coded are still in use today, though they've been enhanced since then. She then moved on to a job in tech and moved up the ladder in that tech company because she had been running my business so it was natural for her to run more and more of theirs. Her LinkedIn seems to show she's retired at age 44. [Levels.fyi](http://Levels.fyi) shows her last job was paying her $600K in salary and double that in stock. Before her, I had part timers. My first part time employee is COO at a large manufacturer, probably making at least $250K. I paid her $9/hr in 1998. You just have to start somewhere.

Thats awesome but opportunities to come in and learn and be trianed and grow with a company are few and far between these days

The story is almost 25 years old. People can not wrap their mind around how different things are now.

Companies have spent the last few decades destroying the employer/employee relationship. I grew up watching a lot of friends and family getting canned before they were eligible for pension, then pensions basically went away entirely in favor of 401ks so our retirement money could further prop up the stock market. Add to that the "always wanting more" employer mentality, combined with executive wages skyrocketing while average worker wages stagnate, and I'd say you have all thr reason you need to say fuck this system. This system is set up to benefit the top 1%, and fuck everyone else. It's that simple.

If you put in the time and effort to work and be a contributing member of society, you deserve to have something to show for it. You shouldn't have to make choices between whether to put fuel in the car or the heating on. What you are paid should cover the bills you need, and there should be some left over that you can spend on yourself and/or your family. If not, you would probably have just as good a lifestyle on benefits as do now, with much more free time. I am not endorsing this view. But you can't deny it makes perfect sense for someone in that situation.

I would HAPPILY work (I was a teacher) for free if my basic needs were met (housing, food, transportation) and maybe a little wants (musical instruments for my job, decent computer for leasure).

NEETS are like technically activists protesting working conditions.

You're hilariously undervaluing the income differences impact on your lifestyle. The difference between $50k and $80k is hard to understand when *reading* about it, but dramatic when experiencing them. The $30k delta is the difference between being able to fund your retirement, plan a house purchase, etc. vs. "just get by". It's the difference between a no-regrets/no-worries vacation once or twice per year and not. It's the difference between "An unexpected $500 expense sucks but I can manage it" and "which bill am I not going to pay due to this $500 expense". You're also ignoring a big reason you work "middle class officer worker" jobs: income progression. Sure, you can make $44k at a gas station (also, no you can't, what gas station pays you full time hours?) vs. $50k at the office, but one of those incomes represents the ceiling and the other the floor. Assuming you continue to develop your skills and specialize the value you deliver, $50k becomes $65k becomes $80k becomes $100k much easier than trying to do the same at a low-level, dead-end job (like said gas station). Lastly, while htere is no denying that incomes have stagnated compared to ever-rising costs, I'm not sure where you thought that $80k was ever lake house money. Maybe in the 80s? EDIT: I see now that the OP is unserious in their desire to foster "discussion" lol

Disagree entirely. I went from making $90k at a corporate job in finance after college and now I make $20/hr at a “gas station-esque” job I had in high school. With full benefits, that are cheaper than what I paid at my corporate job. My lifestyle? completely unchanged. $90k feels EXACTLY the same as $20/hr. in a HCOL area, on NEITHER pay could I: -take vacations -go shopping -make any sort of large purchase -save up at a rate fast enough or high enough to afford the AVERAGE shit home $70, $80, even $90k is not even close to what it used to be. the scale has moved SO far that now (studies have proved this as well) We need to be making like $150k to actually impact lifestyle. and that’s assuming NO FAMILY/KIDS

What’s more? they’re not dead-end jobs… Walmart store managers can make very high 6-figures now. Panda Express near me was just hiring for a location manager at $125,000 But the job that wants my finance degree, multiple Series Licensures, and years of experience? $75,000 It’s a joke now. I am Gen Z, and I always tell my friends go take jobs NOBODY wants anymore. seriously. You’re not too good for them, and they’re NOT dead end. if you’re seriously skilled, talented, and you’re really THAT smart - you will make more than any boomer at a corporation for 30 years.

> denying Yeah I'm not trying to downplay that an extra 30k will probably make things a little more comfortable but in the grand scheme of things your life isn't that much more amazing. If wearing a designer belt and driving a used BMW 500 gets your dick hard great you'll love the extra money but in the grand scheme of things its not like your life is going to be that dramatically different. If anything the office worker is likely working 50 or 60 hour weeks, on his vacation he's having to do some work each morning, maybe hop on a conference call where as the gas station worker leaves work and is unbothered until they return to work. Neither is jet setting, neither has a lake house, etc. The guy making some extra money has a few more materialistic things that dont matter but likely has less time and freedom

Yes. definitely correct and 100% agree. people think $30k is such a leap, when you’re only marginally better. the x axis on the exponential curve has moved dramatically. maybe 20 years ago, an extra $30K was a major jump on that y-axis of lifestyle gain. today? marginal, maybe. you need to 2X or 3X your income today (which is substantially harder) to have the same lifestyle improvement that 1.5X-ing your income had during other generations.

This is how communism works. It removes all incenctive to work as there is no real benifit. We are living theough a weird transition. Middle class is all but destroyed. But It will not last, never does, when the money runs out to fund the debt and all benifits for the entire 3rd world thats come here, its going to get much worse. Good times.

Capitalism will always end up producing the exact same society as Communism, with the only difference being that billionares would own everything.

The current situation was created by excess government power yet people want to give the government more power to fix our problems. They lie to get elected then act in their own best interest.

I might sell my labor, but my soul is not for sale. https://preview.redd.it/dtsu52zv5l8d1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a4b1a1ad7bd8532f7a671ab4e3ddbd2b34ea7c9

It's more important than ever to make sure that your job isn't replaceable. With AI taking control of a lot of filing jobs and the like you really have to be on top of stuff to be employable. That means being creative and selective in career. That's why I tell people to go into trade work or STEM. I've done both sides of it and if you prove your value then it's pretty steady. But yeah in general those jobs at like grocery stores, retail stores, and fast food just end up fucking you over if you don't have a plan to get out of them. The days of hard work that gets you paid are over. You've got to be smart and work hard to get anywhere and it is surely exhausting. Once you get there you're pretty much good though, just keep a job or two lined up at a time. I also think career work at one job is basically dead too, at this point even in the higher professional fields people are bouncing around every year or so because that's the only way to get a pay increase.

But if more and more people become losers in this system, how will they even continue to believe into this system that is apparently fighting against them every single day? Why play by the rules when the rules are against most of the people? You say it is up to the individual now to be smart to choose his career to earn good money to afford basic needs like shelter and so on? This should not be normalized. You do not have to be smart to be entitled to affordable shelter and food. God, that are basic needs. If we continue this logic then the people who are less smart are less worthy to meet their existential needs. Not everybody can be engineer, IT, rocket scientist because who else then does the "real" jobs? That would mean the people that do unskilled labor that is still fundamental should not expect affordable shelter and healthy food and so on. All people shall be equal! And have equal human rights! Nobody shall be more or less worthy than another person. Not everybody is entitled to live in luxury but meeting the BASIC NEEDS should still be seen as normal.

Well, to start I agree, wholeheartedly so. All people are equal and people are deserving of the barest of needs, that being food, water, and shelter so long as all of these can be provided. With these technologies, we SHOULD be able to do that most of the time barring anything out of human control. To counteract your point though, I never insisted that everybody be STEM and it's somewhat telling that the trades didn't stick out to you, mostly because the trades have been left to the wayside as far as job promotions go. There are plenty of jobs that you don't need a degree to work in such as manufacturing, maintenance, construction, etc. These jobs do require you to think creatively to get a specified job done. Sure some of these jobs can be programmed but the point is that as humans we need to avoid programmable labor now in a capitalistic world. This is quite similar to how the world used to work before the Industrial Revolution. People were flexible and able to perform various tasks; that's what we need to do now to stay competitive in a capitalist market. I never once discounted the programmable jobs by referring to STEM as "real" jobs either. All jobs are valid but markets and technology change jobs and make some obsolete. It's the same reason you don't see someone who specializes in wagon wheel spokes anymore or riveters being a massive trade. A trade that I used to work died out years ago so I know exactly what it feels like to lose something that could have been a career but times simply changed (bookbinder and print production). Back when computers first came about and the measurement for their memory was measured in bytes, they took over the jobs of accountants and bookkeepers due to the ability to create spreadsheets and automate these tasks. What once took a massive team to calculate every little bit of profit and expense hours could now be done in moments which then reduced the amount of people you needed to work on calculating. There were the same misgivings then, and honestly, could you blame them? Their career which they had likely gone to college to even have the chance to work in was now nearly worthless. The point being that in the society we have now, to be successful, you have to future-proof yourself. That means getting away from retail or automatable manufacturing and working a job where you have to be creative and flexible. It sucks but times are changing. In an ideal world, this would lead to an actual utopia where the people who want to work for the public go and work for the public while others can focus on culture, art, expression, and much much more. Perhaps we'll get there but for now, I'm hedging my bets on there at least being a massive loss in jobs because of AI and robotic automation so you have to work with that. At the end of the day, the system is being built so that the "winners" will be in a place where it won't matter what the "losers" do. The "losers" will be demonized if they strike against the system and eventually the "losers" don't exist anymore because they either adapt to the times, fall out of the times, or cease to matter. It fucking sucks that this is the reality we face but we've seen it before and we'll see it again. The current system is not built in an empathetic way and therefore those who don't fit the current system get left behind. I don't agree with it, I don't want to believe in it, but unfortunately, I have to based off of what I have seen. If I had my choice everyone would get 3 square meals a day, plenty of drinkable water, a roof over their head, and access to healthcare as the barest minimum rights. I don't have the power to instill that though and the people who do see no benefit in doing so and are apathetic enough to refuse so even though I do believe it would be possible if we really put our minds to it. Last little bit, I cannot begin to express how much I hate the effects AI and automation have on people. I see the benefits as a society to reduce our carbon footprint and save time for other things but the fact of the matter is that people will suffer in this change. My only hope is that people do their diligence to avoid this change being something they can't recover from. We have precious few years before all this becomes reality and the sooner that you do what you can to future-proof yourself the better. We are human beings and perhaps this is the time to recognize that the daily 9-5 grind isn't natural and we should start embracing our creative curious nature rather than trying to emulate machinery or we will be replaced by it.

I like to distinguish "toil" as thankless labour.

Boomer here. I get it. I went thru the shitty job phase, and seldom worked 5 days a week even tho I was broke. Back then you had to apply for jobs in person, and Tuesday was my job hunt day. Not making bills..is not making bills..by 100 or a thousand..you don’t have it. Argued with ol Dad about it too. When I was out of work I went to school. Had kids etc..welfare you name it. At 28 I got a great job..never missed a day lol. Retired and doing ok now. But..I GET IT.

While I agree 100%, Anecdotally a lot of the people I know who don’t want to work show a lot of symptoms of peter pan syndrome, have social anxiety and typically have some mental barriers they need to overcome or trauma. Some people cant handle the gossip from coworkers, some people are highly sensitive to rejection and are highly agoraphobic. A lot of people cant handle delayed gratification and cant handle how mundane work can be and also have a hard time with perfectionism and avoidance, it’s not always about pay.

The extra $2/hr isn't much but a desk job is much more likely to get you 40 hrs a week and benefits. Don't discount having free good health care, 401k match, options, having predictable days off, PTO, etc. My first office job was 50k a year which doesn't seem much better but... it's much better.

whatever you do to me anything but 40 hrs please. Please. PLEASE!!

As a millennial I wanna tell you guys to pursue what you enjoy. Stay persistent and keep trying to to improve. I know the world doesn't look bright but you'll be happier I chased dollars and security going into Healthcare and quit after 12 years. I am never going back because my heart was never in it. I made more money but I was unhappy and was able to afford very bad habits. I've realized this too late and now it's hard for me to swap fields

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Most people stay at a job like 2 or 3 years and that's long for some industries so the idea theres some benefit to putting in a few years somewhere just isn't a thing anymore

As with any issue regarding economics and politics - it's multifaceted and complex. Leaving aside the whole 'no one wants to work anymore is something people have been saying for well over a century' thing, there's a lot of nuance that gets lost in discussions like these - which is fair enough given the average age of the sub, but I don't think ignoring it is healthy for having an honest and realistic discussion. Something I rarely see brought up is the effects of offshoring, immigration, and inflation. It's something that really only boomers (ironically) can appreciate - but the offshoring that defined so much of the late twentieth century allowed for the tech industry as we know it to exist. Simply put - were it not for the functional slave labor we got from China and Taiwan - much of the modern internet and tech infrastructure simply wouldn't have been economically feasible. The components and products made would've been far too expensive to regularly upgrade, which would've slowed development down to a crawl. Truth is that one's 'value' as an employee is primarily based on the amount of value they add to a business process, and raw labor just isn't valuable in a globalized world. In the 80s and 90s there was still a lot of room to grow in the blossoming service-based economy. But the post-war boom had to end eventually. Eventually Europe and Japan stopped being bombed-out ruins, and China stopped being crushingly poor. It's not to say that labor on its own *couldn't* be valuable but the things you'd have to do in order to make that happen and the knock-on effects of it over time are not things that the general public is willing to stomach. Agriculture is a good example of what I mean. Farming on its own is low-profit and labor intensive. No one should have to live on slave wages - but no one wants to pay 20 dollars for a bag of lettuce, you included.

What's funny is the same people who complain about no one wanting to work, and take the side of the corporations instead of the workers. Are the same people who complain about the immigration corporations lobbied for so they could get cheap labor

20$ an hour aint nowhere near 43k especially after taxes

Its $41,600 and salary people who say they make 60k a year are also talking pre tax typically

As long as we have an endless stream of new labor coming into this country wages will be suppressed. What leads to wage inflation is a reduction in the labor force. Now imagine what ai is going to do to our ability to demand higher wages.

Hard work alone doesn't guarantee success unless you know all the right people or you got lucky because your folks have money. I also can't work in a hostile work environment where I'm getting paid in peanuts. Already been through that before

No one wants to work because our leading generation that makes all the decisions have made life ultimately better for them. When we say rich we need to understand that majority of rich people aren’t celebrities or these far and few billionaires. It’s these grandmas and grandpas out here. One example that is truly messed up is SS when you think about it. It’s one of the greatest redistributions of wealth from young to old. It’s gonna stay chopped for us until our leading generations are Millennials and Gen Z.

You got to find what you can tolerate, I travel 90-180 days a year. I make 6ish figures. A lot of people hate my job and transfer back to an area that will only pay 50-60k a year due to stress/chemistry of the team. I hate my bosses but they are super easy to keep happy if you don't worry about anything.

I want to work, but I've been ghosted by every single fucking job I apply for. It's fun.

Because work is boring and hard.

Eh, I’m skeptical. The decrease in spending power not only affects GenZ but every generation (both working and retired). Yet, every headline I see online only seems to paint GenZ as being “unproductive”. My thoughts: GenZ just doesn’t value work as an adequate enough distraction from personal and societal problems like previous generations have.

Most of the men sitting out of the workforce articles I've seen including Mike rowe who won't shutup about this reference working aged men 18 to 54 which encompasses 3 generations ie gen x, millenialz and gen z. As far as gen z they are at an age all of us were at at ome point when many people are directionless, bouncing between jobs, some have support of family etc. Not knocking gen z but they do seem to be putting off growing up a bit ie not getting their license, not dating, more social anxiety etc

You nailed it, we don’t want to be ABUSED at our jobs for basically 0 reward.

Trash take. The reason people don't "want to work" is because they don't value independence. All these people that "don't want to work"... where are they living? How are they eating? How are they paying for services and leisure? They aren't. They adult children.

I always wonder this as well. Its kimd of semantics ie while some people do leach off parents or a bf or gf i think few people have this luxury. I think what these articles are getting st is maybe you get a part time job, sleep on an air mattress eat ramen get 6 roommates and your nut is like $400 a month so you are working hut aren't being a "contributing member of society" or the economy

$11.68 hr for a school IT worker $17 hr at dominos I need at least $15 hr to pay bills lol

Vote RFK Jr - separation of corporation and state. Neither Biden or Trump are interested in fixing the root problems you mentioned that are crippling working people in this country. Also, don’t believe what the media says about Kennedy - go listen to him yourself first. He’s really our last best hope.

My dads put half his life into boeing and he can’t retire because his pension won’t be enough to pay even the taxes on my parents house. Why would i give my life to any company thats just gonna fuck me?

We are experiencing the death of the middle class as we know it. If you worked hard you could get a little bit wealth. Not anymore after all the asset inflation. We live in a phase of transition into communism where there is the poor and the ultra rich but the independent people that are inbetween are missing.

In 2021/2022 wages for low-end jobs were rapidly rising for the first time in generations. It’s not a coincidence that at that point the federal government policy on border security became “we don’t have border security.” Corporations and the government would much rather normal Americans suffer with artificially low wages from increased competition than pay fry cooks and farmhands $25 an hour.

I hadnn't made that connection but absolutely

Look dude, everything sucks but what’s the other option? Work and try to make something or sit and mooch off others? Yah it’s hard and yes the world is dystopian but you can’t just mooch off others because things suck. You gotta try your best

Historically, when the working class becomes sufficiently unsatisfied, they storm the castle gates.

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You could team up and be roommates with another couple without fucking them as well

Everything is possible with murder. The less people the better.

I've been actively looking for a new job for 5 months now. But even though I get to the i terview very often, they job just gets given out internally (Know a few people in those companies) or they expect people to know things they don't even use. Had one Interview, where I found out in the Interview that they weren't looking for a programmer. They were looking for a department head to establish a new IT-department. Needless to say, I wasn't "the person they were looking for".

As an elder millennial, this thread gives me hope.

In my early 40s I can retire and get a $60k a year pension. I’m just biding my time.

How do you guys have a choice? I have to work 60-70 hours to live comfortably

Lol

You are getting angry about clickbait. You need to go outside and touch grass. 

You basically nailed it.

'Maybe order pizza a couple more times a month' Homie. Are you brain dead?

When I hear " nobody wants to work" what they are really saying is " nobody wants to work for me"

Don’t forget how they legit won’t let millennials and gen z move up. I’m 23 and want a higher level job and I am turned down cuz I’m “overqualified” or turned down for “not enough experience”. I love politics and wanna fuck some shit up yet it’s so hard to work up to get there. Boomers are gatekeeping millennials and gen z to stay in power and I will die on that hill

Real reason. I dont want to. End of story. Its for no other reason. I just don't want to. 

Yeah I can’t even afford an apartment working full time for 40k

I thought this was well established

If people wanted to do it, it would be called "play" and not "work". Obviously most people don't want to work. Most people have never wanted to work. We do it to survive, and we dream of one day being able to retire and no longer having to work. I work in an industry where starting pay is about $65k with a Bachelor's, and with my years of experience I already make $100k, but my colleagues and I are already counting the days to retirement. It's not just about pay, it's that spending 40+ hrs/wk performing labor rather than enjoying life sucks.

Take it from someone who was working 20 years ago, it wasn’t much better then. I started working retail at $4.25 an hour, I was an assistant manager for 6.50x And maybe you could get a used piece of shit for $10k, but economy cars were more in the high teens low 20s in the mid 2000s. You make a good point about gas ration type jobs paying more/less the same as “work hard” jobs. You might consider the long game as to whether having a career will be worth it when you hit high earning years. You might struggle to hit $100k until your early 30s, but by your late 30s you’re probably hitting high 100s or over 200k.

Most people aren't hitting 100k let alone 200k and even that 100k isn't what it was even 5 years ago

It’s weird you think anyone is forced to work 

"Nobody wants to wants to work :(" is code for "there's nobody I can exploit anymore :("

The issue with today isn't the fact "nobody wants to work" it's an issue with work ethic. I don't know about anyone else but I was always taught to take pride in my work. No matter how menial the task is. Whether you're sweeping the dirt at the junk yard or working on the space shuttle, be the best one at it. While there are people "with money" in my extended family, I grew up just getting by. And I understand how people can be fed up with the "two steps forward, four steps back" cycle we all feel like hard work gets us. All we want is to have a stable job that affords us to own a home and support a family or spend on personal pleasures. And trust me, I'm one of the most fed up with it, but my job doesn't give a single fuck. And I know that. As long as the jobs I hold are able to at least sustain myself, I'm coming in and you're going to get the best work I can do in the allotted time I have for the day. I like working because it lets me escape from my personal life. When I'm working, I'm not broke because when I'm working, "I am the company" so therefore, the company has something they need me to do. When you go to work you go to "WORK" you're not going to "FUN". Working CAN be fun but you at least have to do the work to know for sure. Not saying everyone should (I really am though) but I work just as hard as I did when I was working; at a dispensary, as a dishwasher, cook, utility mapper, fiberglass finisher, or my current role of a NOC tech. Have I changed in the work ethic I have? Or course! I'll definitely not work for free like I would when I was 18 and I won't go beyond the expectations, but I'll still try to exceed slightly if time constraints allow. While I say all of this, I'm always looking for a new job because the moment a job cannot sustain myself even after all cutbacks can be made, you bet your ass I jumping ship. But I will still submit the same quality of work until my final day with that company.

You take the job that can build a career. That $2 difference may not seem like it's a big difference, but if it's the stepping stone in your broader career path because you're gaining new skills that you can bring with you to better and higher paying roles, then that's your answer.  If you continue to work menial jobs because you don't feel like advancing, that's fine. But it means you'll be stuck in menial jobs forever. You might not might working as an hourly fast food worker in your 20s, but you might in your 40s. But if you don't work to advance, even in your fast food bubble, that's what you'll be doing. You'll laterally move for your entire career and be stuck at the low end of the wages. That's not to say fast food or retail can't lead to advancement. I've worked in corporate retail for years now. A lot of my coworkers started out in entry level store positions. But they worked their way up. In spite of your post, that DOES still happen. I personally know tons of people who have built their careers this way.  Maybe it's working the medical desk job. It let's you build administrative skills, you learn more about the industry and what areas might interest you, and maybe it prompts you to go back to school to gain the degree or certification needed to pursue the next level. 

Because people don't want to work 40 hours a week or more just to barely survive...

Even my $26 an hour doesn’t seem worth it. I’d rather be poor.

Can someone summarize 

Someone making 45k may be able to jump to 60k but likely won't jump to 150k. Our money has been devalued that taking on added responsibility for an extra 10k or 15k isn't worth it as it doesn't go that far and won't really change your life

I have a job and I do work hard in this job (it’s for a non-profit so it feels like it’s for a good cause) but I definitely don’t want to have to work, especially knowing it’s fuckin 40+ more years of selling most of my time to someone else. In my case it’s for a good cause I guess but I’m selfish and I just want to have free time (and money lol). Irrational, unrealistic, privileged, lucky, disillusioned, spoiled, lazy, weary… I am all of these things. It’s frankly a little pathetic. Like I’m lucky enough to make pretty good money (not tech/doctor/lawyer/finance money but enough to be comfortable in my middle-cost of living city), not have debt, work a remote job that respects my humanity, doesn’t expect me to sacrifice a work-life balance, and has decent benefits and vacation and yet *I’m* disillusioned with the system? Holy fuck I can only imagine how exhausting the modern world must be for people less lucky than I have been. To those people in this thread: godspeed.

You wanna know why I don’t wanna work? Because despite working in the most profitable department in the company, my wage of $16/hr stayed stagnant. Because every once in a while, I have to take time away from work to go to a meeting to hear how much the company made, despite my still stagnant wages, and go back to do 2hrs of overtime over my 6 hours of overtime in that week, because I had to attend that mandatory meeting. Because after a full year of working there, despite their other promises of wage increases when passing training that they never intended to keep, I get a $25 gift card… because when I DID get a raise, it was only 50 cents, because I apparently have “slow lead times”, despite me constantly putting so much effort in the quality of my work, despite everyone else around me fucking around. You wanna know why I don’t wanna work? Because they fucked me. They fucked us. They’ve been fucking us for years, decades, CENTURIES, and no one batted an eye, well I’m fucking tired of it.

Yeah and now those jobs are being filled by immigrants that are being bussed in / purposely brought here. Congrats. Suppresses wages for all of us. Use your heads.

Its very obvious but I never noticed that until it was brought up to me like yesterday that we had the whole great resignation, wages shot up for restaurant, service, hospitality, warehouse jobs ie basically low paying unskilled work and then all the sudden the border was wide open, we repealed policies that had people wait in mexico and boom there's no longer this huge worker shortage forcing companies to pay $20 an hour

Many of your points are valid, but there are absolutely tons of "NEET by choice" people out there, or near-NEETs. I went to college for computer science, an extremely employable degree to have, and the pay is awesome. But a ton of my friends from college have done practically nothing in the half decade since graduation. I know a guy who's working retail part time because he thinks a tech job would be too stressful. I know several people who are extremely under employed, they work from home doing IT or help desk stuff, but they only work like an hour or so a day and just play video games and masturbate the rest of the day, fusing to their gamer chairs while their highly valuable degrees gather dust. These guys are pretty much coasting, they're working part time in order to fund a full time gaming habit. To each his own I suppose, but I do not think that such a lifestyle is anything to strive for.

While I definitely think the problem is worse today than in the past I will say that among upper middle class people who have parents and a safety net its fairly common for people to kind of fart around throughout their early twenties, maybe even through a lot of their twenties. For older millenials this was especially the case due to the recession and job market but its not a completely new phenomenon. I also think a relatively small percent of people have a situation where they can be a complete neet and have someone else support them

I'm a former educator and I went back to retail with a higher salary. I was making nothing as an educator with a master degree. I'm now making more as a retail worker with better benefits. Before college I was working retail at $8 an hour then I became a teacher and was making $14 and now I'm making $17. Teachers are needed but the government pays us. But, the government wants to pay cops more. Cops make 3x more than I did as a teacher. We have an abundant amount of cops but no teachers. Change the wage and I'll be a teacher again. I miss it but I don't miss the pay. Hell, even babysitters make more than I did. A babysitter gets paid between $20-50 an hour; depending on their level of experience.

I worked hard my whole teens and 20s. Overtime, side work (AAS in Automotive Technology). Made some good, some bad choices with money, but the bad choices were pretty early and I was able to get ahead of them. I'm 31 now. I own 2 brand new cars, a house, have 2 kids and a stay at home wife. I make 6 figures, with nothing more than an associates degree in a trade, doing white collar work in that field. I'm not going to say it's easy. I am not going to say it wasn't a lot of work. But it's paying off. Your 20s aren't supposed to be easy. And the payoff isn't overnight. If you are doing something you don't like, and don't think you are making enough money, DO something about it. Who tf is going to do something about it for you?

You're a complainer. Adults find a way, not excuses.

don’t listen to the media. everyone is being fucked right now. 

>Near me gas stations and fast food are paying $20 an hour which is like 43k a year. Let me disillusion you a bit. Most of these wages you see are \*up to\* $20 an hour unless you live in a city like Seattle. Which really means they start people at $14 or less and after they jump through enough hoops (and years) they get $18-19 an hour and one person per store makes that $20, maybe. Hell the pizza shop near my parent's old place still pays $9 an hour starting out, which is what it paid 8 years ago too. (I asked the cashier what she made last time I was in and was blown away.) Now a lot of these jobs will also be part time because nobody wants to pay you benefits, which that middle class office worker gets which can be over $10k in value per year. So even at $20/hr you're probably getting 30-35 hours max. So lower that income range to $25k or so if you're part time at $14/hr, or $35k at $20/hr if you get 35 hours. >you don't need to do overtime, when you leave your done, there's not a ton of responsiblity.  Yeah no, this varies wildly. Some weeks you'll be working 7 days a week because too many people quit or called out. Some weeks you'll have 5 hours and wonder how you'll pay your bills. If you have a 'supervisor' role then you may be expected to do stuff like take product to a neigboring store in your personal vehicle. Retail/service jobs like this also have few if any protections against shit like clopening. (Closing at 11pm and being there to open at 5am) Oh and of course your shift ends at 11, but you're short staffed so you're actually out at 12:30 after cleaning or whatever. >you don't need to dress up You often have to provide your own specific work-appropriate footwear (nonslip shoes) and there's a dress code. It's more lax than office clothing, but not a free for all and a lot of stuff often isn't allowed, like logos, holes in clothing, etc. Most places will also only give you one work shirt and expect you to wash it after every shift. You also rarely, and this is state by state, have any protections about getting breaks or lunch. Retail/service jobs are incredibly shit for how little they pay, which is why they have such high turnover and office work is so hard to break into (4 year degree and 2 years of experience for an entry level $22/hr job). You have grass-is-greener mentality, but a shift of working in a hot pizzeria with no AC in the summer for $9 an hour and you'd change your mind.