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"Nobody wants to work anymore."

Things have changed dramatically from the "old days". Back then many people had a job for life, if you wanted to you could progress through the ranks. You were taken care of usually to some degree. There was an old age pension waiting for you at the end. Housing was affordable, lots of men could support a wife and kids on one income and pay off a quality home.

A lot of that has slipped away. Housing is crazy expensive now, especially in the country I live in. A lot of people are on contract work now so you know you only have work for "X" amount of years as opposed to as long as you want. People get laid off. Lots of people have spent years and lots of money studying for certain fields that then become automated and made redundant. Younger people see all of this, they experience it through their parents eyes and I would imagine it becomes overwhelming.

Then in my country they up the retirement age so now you have to work till your 67. Will you even make it to that age? They take some of your pay here too for your superannuation which is meant to replace or supplement your old age pension. But what if you were out of work for a while? What if you reach 67 and don't have enough? What if after a lifetime of work you are too old to enjoy the fruits of your labor?

I get it. I have always worked but I really don't want to!
 
Yup. More rights but also harder in a way, and many people do NOT want to remain for decades in a job daddy chose for them (cruel imvho).
 
People should be paid for their commute time as well. I know that I'm lucky it only takes 15 minutes to get to work, could not imagine having to spend an hour plus.

That is personal time being devoted to work, and typically no compensation.
That's why I have no objection to working from home. My daily commute is about 90 minutes...each way...if nothing gets screwed up.

3 to 3.5 hours dead time spent travelling each day... no thanks.
Got to WFH a fair bit last year and saving time on the commute is amazing. No traffic jams or late/cancelled trains. Getting to sleep in later, getting home earlier. Amazing and we were all happier but of course that is the problem. It's like work senses we are happy about something and feel a need to stomp it out.
 
I see there being two main motivators behind businesses not wanting work from home being adopted on a large scale. One, if the building the offices are in and everyone works from home that's a big expense to keep around. Two, bosses can't keep as thorough an eye on you to make sure you're not doing not work stuff while working.

Personally I think work from home has potential negative consequences because if businesses do adopt it wide scale they push the cost of building and it's maintenances off onto the worker. If you need hardware are they providing it? Do they pay for your internet so you can connect with co-workers? Do you even have a dedicated area that can act as an office? Though what I find most troubling would be an erosion between being on the clock and off.
 
I see there being two main motivators behind businesses not wanting work from home being adopted on a large scale. One, if the building the offices are in and everyone works from home that's a big expense to keep around. Two, bosses can't keep as thorough an eye on you to make sure you're not doing not work stuff while working.

Personally I think work from home has potential negative consequences because if businesses do adopt it wide scale they push the cost of building and it's maintenances off onto the worker. If you need hardware are they providing it? Do they pay for your internet so you can connect with co-workers? Do you even have a dedicated area that can act as an office? Though what I find most troubling would be an erosion between being on the clock and off.
That's a good point. At least when I go home from a work environment, there's a distinct shift between my time and company time.

I also saw something this morning in a discussion on this topic, the potential for companies to no longer consider employees as working for a company or corporation but instead to shift to the relationship being based on commission, defined specifically by what work you do and how much. If you work from home, I mean. If they don't need to maintain a work and company environment, if everyone works from home, it could change how we define what the employment relationship is legally.

Also, if everyone works from home anyway, who says they even need to draw employees from the U.S./in country at all?

It seems complicated and I'm still looking into it but those were the points I saw brought up so far.
 
This is one of the fears caused by that bill in California for uber/lyft drivers. The idea of classifying more and more people as independent contractors for jobs that really do not fit that definition.
 
This is one of the fears caused by that bill in California for uber/lyft drivers. The idea of classifying more and more people as independent contractors for jobs that really do not fit that definition.
Exactly. And commission work sucks ass most of the time, so commission work becoming the standard sounds like a nightmare.
 
Nobody "wants" to pay others, either.

The staunchest defenders of unfettered free markets are hypocrites if they insist that workers ought to "want" to work. Their entire philosophy is based on incentives. Supply and demand. If labour is scarce, pay more for it and don't complain about your system working as intended.
 
Some interesting interpretations, although I would like to provide a perspective that might be a little alternative, one that does not necessarily target the potentially ambiguous notion of "economic productivity" as measured in USD terms. Rather, I would like to touch on the possibility that Gen Z may be becoming increasingly less capable and studious, with respect to the exponentially expanding state of mathematics and the sciences, from someone who's Gen Z himself.

For those who have at least a little experience with mathematics and the sciences, the suggestion that mathematics and the sciences expand "exponentially" is indeed quite understandable, in fact, many famous figures in mathematics and the sciences had utilized such metaphors, more famously, Einstein had once compared the domain of knowledge with that of a circle (where the surface area increases by the square of the radius, nonlinear, though not necessarily exponential). One can imagine that, like a pyramid, an increasingly robust foundation is required for further developments in mathematics and the sciences, but the foundational prerequisites become exponentially cumbersome.

But what does this have to do with Gen Z? From what I am able to notice, having been immersed in multiple different educational systems and curriculums across different cultures and countries, it seems as if even though the mean performance of Gen Z in conventional mathematical and scientific curriculums have risen, it would seem as if such reflects more so a trend in intellectual obedience, and in the popularization of effective techniques in training for exams, such as by going through up to a decade of past papers. Increasingly, as mathematics and the sciences seem to outpace the body of knowledge that has existed in previous periods, the level of mathematical and scientific education seems to be ineptly incapable of following, sadly.

Like a "pyramid scheme", it does appear that an increasing proportion of so-called graduate students in mathematics and the sciences are just simply unable to strengthen a necessary exponentially expanding foundation, and it eventually collapses for such graduate students as accompanied by an increasingly exasperated imposter syndrome. Essentially, it may appear that Gen Z has one of the lowest (learning rate)/(knowledge mass) ratios in recent history, and I expect, as no doubt many others do as well, such a ratio to rise again sometime in the future due to a significantly greater amount of insights into learning and human capital optimization. Sometimes, I am shocked by the lack of mathematical aptitudes of the many so-called graduate or Ph.D. mathematics students, and they convince themselves that they are doing okay by comparing themselves to mathematicians of previous centuries, except, we are living in the 21st century.

I myself am deeply disappointed in Gen Z, but no doubt a lot of blame lies in the previous generations in their approach to structuring modern societies.

[Warning: Mathematics Jargon - Explicit Example]
[Warning: Mathematics Jargon - Explicit Example]
For those who know, some examples could be provided. Historically, the form of infinitesimal calculus conceived by Leibniz and Johann Bernoulli was only feasible because such persons were polymaths, and had managed to obtain a sufficient level of mathematical maturity in all the necessary motivational subfields that preceded their style of infinitesimal calculus, in Euclidean geometry, arithmetic, algebra, mathematical physics, and on and on. Several of these subfields would in fact combine in unison to provide much more insightful subfields, as in the combination of geometry and algebra in what is known as analytic geometry. Indeed, many problems of the infinitesimal calculus of the period saw motivational material from optimization problems from geometry, optics, celestial mechanics, and so on.

Moving into the centuries after, such a trend is followed repeatedly, whether it would be in the successful union of analysis with the so-called abstract linear algebra in the functional analysis and its applications by Hilbert in the calculus of variations, or the decades of iteratively motivational material from geometry, analysis, integration theory, classical differential geometry that had resulted in the final conclusion of the measure being given explicitly, or the insight by Kolmogorov in masterfully providing a rigorous foundation to probability theory and stochastics in introducing a measure-theoretic foundation, coupled with the new methods of analysis in real analysis and function analysis, as furthered by more rigorous set-theoretic insights isolates a general topological nature, and on and on and on - what is clear is that mathematical foundations expand exponentially, if only metaphorically speaking.

In the modern world, you can find graduate mathematics students who are intimidated by the analysis of the 20th century and purposefully avoid such subfields, and even graduate students who refuse to study introductory contemporary abstract algebra with the excuse of "specialization" (imagine, a mathematician of the 17th century who refuses to study arithmetic or algebra due to "specialization in Euclidean geometry"). Bizarrely, there remain graduate students who claim functional analysis is "too abstract to be useful", even though functional analysis, along with multiple different subfields of analysis, demonstrates to be responsible for the explosion in technological progress in recent decades.

[Warning: Mathematics Jargon - Explicit Example]
[Warning: Mathematics Jargon - Explicit Example]
 
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What about in absolute terms? There are suggestions that various cognitive abilities of Gen Z may be dropping, on average, and this should not surprise many, although, as usual, the level of rigor in the modern social sciences is so bad that it is always prudent to take social science studies with a grain of salt.

Suggestively, there is an increasing body of evidence that points to the possibility that the Flynn effect may be reaching a plateau, and even reversing, for Gen Z. The Flynn effect is a phenomenon of the social sciences that recognizes the generationally rising mean I.Q.s of multiple demographics across the world, but should such a phenomenon be expected take place perpetually? A paper authored by Flynn himself had suggested otherwise: IQ decline and Piaget: Does the rot start at the top?

What about attention span? The very trait that is required for mathematical learning, and deep mathematical thinking? Indeed, there are multiple social-cultural phenomena, that may actually induce the necessary pressures so as to reduce the mean attention span of Gen Z, and sometimes, such is accomplished through manipulative means of hijacking the archaic reward system that is deeply ingrained in the neurological architectures of most people as is genetically predisposed. They appear in the form of certain styles of video games, pornography, social media, and on and on. Now, there is no end to the amount of studies that may touch on such a topic, even if there might be a slight amount of disagreements here and there. In fact, such a mass societal transformation has affected a proportion of the Gen Z demographic in their circadian rhythms in a fashion that's more significant than the introduction of the light bulb - that is, mass sleep deprivation has resulted as a consequence, and cognitive abilities correspondingly impacted. I myself am heavily affected, and need to accommodate by experimenting with alternatives, such as with a 30-hour sleep-wake cycle, as opposed to 24.

Essentially, I do believe Gen Z of many demographics around the world has become much lazier, cognitively at the very least, and especially so in mathematics.
 
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My job recently asked why our satisfaction was so low, or why we felt like management didn't support us after an anonymous survey was done.

Or rather they asked everyone in every other department. See I'm a cashier and we don't get grass roots meetings because that would require having 5 minutes where the tills were closed or heaven forbid some of management actually lend us a hand so we can air our grievances.

Maybe no one wants to work in this job, because it has sent me to the hospital four times, maybe I don't feel like management has my back because I got written up for letting a customer steel from us after they threatened me with a knife. I've seen coworkers objectified, assaulted, and I've had my hours cut because I left a shift early after getting stabbed in the eye with a fishing pole by a toddler.

Every day I work I get told that the "new self checkout is going to take my job." By old people, I had one guy curse me out because I offered to scan their items.

Yet all my supervisor cares about is that I haven't signed anyone up for the cash rewards Mastercard today.

So maybe people don't want to work in jobs where they get treated like shit for minimum wage, get beaten, have their cock grabbed by a customer only to have the customer be comforted and written up because I involved the police.

Maybe we are just kind of sick of living pay check to pay check while having the shit beaten out of us regularly. So we are getting called lazy because we want a job that would actually treat us like a human?
 
It's not that nobody wants to work or that Millennials and Gen Z are lazy (which itself is a lazy and ageist statement to make), it's that nobody wants to work for poverty wages and for shitty management anymore. I think Covid helped many people realize their worth and just how poor wages are, especially in the retail and service industries.

Companies need to pay their employees a livable wage and adapt with the times or risk getting left behind.

Frankly, if a business has one of those "nobody wants to work anymore" signs, I take it as big red flag that they underpay and mistreat their staff.
 
I would be very hesitant about tracking anything by IQ when the number one factor in predicting someone's IQ is their economic background.

Also a tangent I know; but fuck the bell curve and it's racism.
 
How in the hell is consistent exponential growth in any given field sustainable for any prolonged period? Sorry but that rant just sounds like a rehash of every "The younger generation is the worse than my generation," argument. If old generations are so great, shouldn't they have exponentially better arguments about the laziness of younger generations? 🙄

Proof that technology is ruining each subsequent generation:
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Something my father would often say with regards the development of computing technology in particular (and he WORKED with computers for a profession):

"A computer is fast, accurate and stupid; the brain is slow, inaccurate, and brilliant."

A reliance on computers to do the thinking for you diminishes your own capacity for thought.

Just an observation.
 
Something my father would often say with regards the development of computing technology in particular (and he WORKED with computers for a profession):

"A computer is fast, accurate and stupid; the brain is slow, inaccurate, and brilliant."

A reliance on computers to do the thinking for you diminishes your own capacity for thought.

Just an observation.

Where are people using computers to think for them?

People use media to think for them. The world is enormously complex and people naturally look to others to make sense of it.

That hasn't changed since the Spanish-American war.
 
Where are people using computers to think for them?
I encounter this particularly in Retails stores, when at the checkout and younger staff are manning the registers.

The incident that sticks in my mind as a highlight, here (and I know it's not an isolated incident), is when I was paying for my purchase and the amount came to a portion of a dollar. I'd pulled a note out and the girl rang it up, but I also presented some coins so I could get rid of them and get an even-dollar amount back as change. I knew in my head exactly what I needed to get back; the girl, having already rung up the transaction based on my note and seeing what change the register told her I was due based on that note, struggled to work out just how much change I was actually due when I added my coins to the equation.

Like I said, though: just an observation. :)
 
I encounter this particularly in Retails stores, when at the checkout and younger staff are manning the registers.

The incident that sticks in my mind as a highlight, here (and I know it's not an isolated incident), is when I was paying for my purchase and the amount came to a portion of a dollar. I'd pulled a note out and the girl rang it up, but I also presented some coins so I could get rid of them and get an even-dollar amount back as change. I knew in my head exactly what I needed to get back; the girl, having already rung up the transaction based on my note and seeing what change the register told her I was due based on that note, struggled to work out just how much change I was actually due when I added my coins to the equation.

Like I said, though: just an observation. :)

So, one person, working who knows how long or early, with whatever else may be on her mind at the time, is trying to be sure her drawer balances at the end of her shift, takes a bit of time to figure 84 and 16 (or whatever) make a hundred.

And you're blaming computers for this?
 
And you're blaming computers for this?
I don't recall that I apportioned "blame" to anyone or anything.

I merely made observations based on my experiences. That you may not have experienced what I have does not automatically make my experiences wrong.
 
A reliance on computers to do the thinking for you diminishes your own capacity for thought.

Where are people using computers to think for them?

<Insert story about a girl struggling to make correct change.>

I don't recall that I apportioned "blame" to anyone or anything.

I merely made observations based on my experiences. That you may not have experienced what I have does not automatically make my experiences wrong.

I didn't challenge your experience, I challenged what you 'observed' from it. Drawing a major assumption about people because of their reaction when you pulled them out of their zone.

Of course people will have difficulties, some more than others, especially for people who may have developed some other skill besides arithmetic.
 
*shrugs* The internet is a prime example of how people have gotten dumber in some aspects. Sure, they may have become smarter in some ways, but critical and objective thinking has taken a slide in the rise of the Internet, and Social Media in particular.

It doesn't help that people don't like to have their preconceptions challenged (a critical component of objective thinking) - you only have to look at the demand for "safe spaces" to see this.

While this can be fun to discuss, it's also going off-point for the topic at hand. :)
 
It's not that nobody wants to work or that Millennials and Gen Z are lazy (which itself is a lazy and ageist statement to make), it's that nobody wants to work for poverty wages and for shitty management anymore. I think Covid helped many people realize their worth and just how poor wages are, especially in the retail and service industries.

Companies need to pay their employees a livable wage and adapt with the times or risk getting left behind.

Frankly, if a business has one of those "nobody wants to work anymore" signs, I take it as big red flag that they underpay and mistreat their staff.
Sound logic.
 
@interestedwriter1710 is your argument Gen Z is too stupid to get a job?
My argument alludes to the possibility that Gen Z may be interpreted as the so-called "lost generation" by historians in the future, at least for several demographics. I would want to emphasize that the "alternative interpretation" I had provided remains that, alternative, that instead of focussing on the questionable economic quality of many countries of the 21st century, I was trying to specifically identify issues in mathematics and the sciences. From what I can see, for the few demographics that exist around the world, Gen Z seems to appear less intelligent on average, coupled with greater impulsivity of thinking and lower conscientiousness, which heavily impacts mathematical studies.

Note that, historically, serious mathematicians do not study mathematics due to money, and some even study mathematics disagreeably even given the threat of starvation and death - there was even a Jewish mathematician who remained active even when interned in a Nazi concentration camp. That is, although it is no doubt reasonable to acknowledge the sorry state of many economic systems around the world today that discourages human capital optimization, it was exponentially worse historically. Indeed, there are many stories of mathematicians who almost did not become mathematicians due to the stigma associated with various subcultures. Isn't pure mathematics useless? Who would pay for mathematicians to investigate the distribution of primes? Such a problem had always existed for millenniums. One contrast with Gen Z, in general, is that I seem to have detected a greater amount of entitlement, pertaining to suggestions as "if only my teacher was better and more creative in primary school, I would be an engineer now" - although an interesting claim, historically, for many STEM human capital, they did not even have teachers to begin with, including a number of highly successfully mathematicians who were entirely self-taught (e.g. Green, Ramanujan, a line of mathematicians who had studied from Euler's books, etc.). Perhaps such a selection process may have filtered out lower-quality STEM human capital, and perhaps that might provide one suggestion as to why Gen Z/Millenial mathematicians and scientists, including graduate students, seem to be much lower quality on average (due to a lack of filtering).

Moving forward, I do in fact believe that a very sizable proportion of Gen Z will be too stupid, to be it crudely, to adapt to the transforming 21st century. Of course, I do not believe Gen Z is too stupid to be employed in labor. But what does it mean? What does the inability to adapt to the transforming 21st century mean? It is possible for most to imagine that moving forward into the 21st century, increasingly, that occupational specialization rates, in their critical values, will plummet drastically. That is to say, historically, the critical value for the proportion of agricultural occupational specialization demonstrates to be quite high in some contexts, that up to 50% of entire demographics are involved in agriculture, and if not, society may collapse. As society developed, the critical values had begun to drop and even drastically. For the 21st century, it is expected that critical values for occupational specialization rates will drop in rapid fashion across the board due to STEM human capital managing teams of automated entities, such as drones, robots, artificial intelligence algorithms, and so on.

But what about the "liberal arts" degreed persons? It is already understandable from my perspective that STEM human capital will contribute disproportionately to society, while there will be persons who merely leach, not just with a percentage of former liberal arts students, but NEETS (not in education, employment, or training). Increasingly, I would not want to work, or provide slave labor to entire masses of entitled persons who are unable to contribute, or give back to people like me, and I may be increasingly attracted to political positions that fight exceedingly hard so as to not be put, implicitly, in positions to provide cognitive slave labor to millions of non-contributing persons. To put it bluntly, I cannot see a productive future with a large proportion of Gen Z, of the many demographics today (of western countries more specifically), that it seems my interactions with such subcultures will become increasingly hostile and violent, and if a sufficient amount of Gen Z STEM human capital feels the same way, then the situation may become worse, for them. One can, of course, note that liberal arts students tend, disproportionately, to be of a certain ethnic-cultural background, and of a certain socio-economical background, but not all, of course, are of such backgrounds.

Now, in the context of the United States, to go further, I would think that certain subcultures should be very careful in the way that they carry out their caste systems, that although society will be heavily led by STEM human capital, how such subcultures treat said STEM human capital may have consequences, and so might the policies of, shall we say, de-affirmative action as imposed on a particular demographic (East-Asian American).
 
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