The problem isn’t Panda Express on your resume, the problem is snobby bullshitters like Joanna who judge someone for working there. Anyone who has worked for big corporations who have intern programs knows what horseshit those programs are. I’d rather hire the manager from Panda Express because they’ve proven they can get promoted.
I hate job snobbery more than anything.
In 2009-11, many companies were on hiring freezes so in the years afterwards we got a lot of resumes with people who graduated college in those years and worked at pizza places and jewelry stores. The idiots farming the resumes would judge this negatively and I said a million times, but they graduated during a recession with industry wide hiring freezes. Work is work.
People work in BS "charities" now to look better on a resume, and their "work" is largely sitting on a board doing nothing or asking people for money. Zero real life experience and just shaking down your relatives for money is far easier than real responsibilities.
The era where you could start at the bottom and work your way up is largely over, causing employees to be total mercenaries against HR drones who only look at checkboxes. The gold watch at your thirty-year anniversary is over, and now if you want to stay ahead you switch around every three.
That’s true. I worked for Discovery Channel in advertising sales. Those entry level jobs are now shipped out to Mexico City. So are the entry level finance, traffic and billing. Working your way up is now impossible in a place like that. Talked with another friend still in that business and she said AI will do all those jobs in the next two years. Hundreds of entry level wiped out.
Yes, agreed about AI, so the next on your list should be: ...and what do I do about it?
If you think something tolerable will evolve, it's fine to wait and see. But if not, and you cannot come up with a viable alternative, your genes are about to be flushed from the gene pool.
Yes, it's true.
[NOTE: I don't mean the personal "you"; I mean the unidentified collective "you". I could have used "one", but I use that a lot and it's kinda stilted.]
No. I mean that as an individual, any of the "yous" out there, you'll have the problem of competing against an AI solution to a demand for, say, C++ coding. Implementation coding can very largely be done with an AI approach. So what will *you* do?
In this case, having coded for years in the old days, it looks to me like the design, as would be described by an implementation spec, is not within the scope of AI, and it could be a while before it is. You'd have to find a way to nuance this for the duration of your career.
The part about the gene pool is just a way of illustrating that without a means of making an independent living, it's less likely that your genetic line would reproduce successfully into the future.
This reminds me of how I got my first internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Up until that point, I had been going to community college on and off, oscillating between part time and full time status with the waxing and waning of my personal finances - juggling jobs on retail sales-floors and stockrooms.
There came a point where I had about a half dozen completed electronics/robotics projects, won team MVP at a Nasa robotics competition, completed the entirety of my math (Calc 1-3, Linear Algebra, Diff Eq) and physics coursework (Mech, E&M, Waves/Optics, QM) and finally was eligible to apply for University transfer and to internships at the holy grail, JPL.
I was fortunate to have a contact at JPL willing to review my application and resume for the JPL internship, an engineer who I met at a robotics competition. They too had a previous non-STEM career before JPL and I found that inspiring, “they did it so could I”. When it came to reviewing my resume, their annotated resume crossed out all of my previous work experience in retail, volunteer work in my hometown, my previous internship experience in D.C. “Irrelevant to the job” they told me. It hurt to have a part of my life redacted on paper but they were right. Like me they too had once been in my shoes.
I followed their advice, filtered out all the non essential non-STEM line items from my resume and I got the internship. I built the start of a career in Robotics without any mention of my previous accomplishments, that was altogether a different life. In many ways I still keep my previous career in retail, public service, to myself because it’s just too much baggage to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it, who I simply don’t trust.
The risk is greater still that I will be misjudged or mischaracterized for it because of the potential ignorance or bias of whoever reads my resume. It’s a shame the professional world treats this kind of work experience so dismissively, I’m not certain what I can or should do differently.
A Boomer here who’s college educated husband worked whatever job he could to keep food on the table during economic hard times, did it gratefully and cared not what anyone thought of him; and his family loves him for that. Today we laugh at the stories he tells of working in the muck at cow sale barns. A man who could do that on Saturday and then direct a choir and orchestra on Sunday. He is a man who values his family more than himself. He is the person that is the bedrock of our family and our community. He would say,
“And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;
Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.”
I love sale barns. They're the linchpin of many rural communities, and come together to help people in need. Luckily, most people don't understand how much money moves through them with the buying and selling of cattle, and they've been pretty much left alone so far. I hope it stays that way.
I often wonder how many city dwellers know you can most likely buy a steer in the circular ring and then a chicken fried steak and a cup of coffee in the diner of the sale barn. That is American life at its best with true salt of the earth folks! You gotta love this country!
Again I’m intrigued by our differences in experience. I mean certainly I agree that you can buy a steer and then a steak. But some of the biggest crooks and worst bosses I’ve ever known operated sale barns and in our town the sale barn has imported Mexican help (as in immigrant labor from Mexico) because they ran off all the local cowboys. While the ranchers are salt of the earth cattle buyers and worse than used cars salesmen.
That's what I like about sale barns versus country buyers. A sale barn gives an auction price. The price might not be good, but it's the price on the day arrived at through competitive bidding. If there's more than one buyer, it doesn't matter if the guy who buys is a jerk, because he had to compete with everyone else. Only a small number of cattle are bought at competitive auctions in America, but those auction prices are used to set the prices of all of the other cattle sold. When we lose those auction barns, it's like losing the school. Game over for the local community. Country buyers show up in a nice pickup and act like they're your friend, but just ask the Iowa hog farmers what happens when the packers get control of the value chain. Game over. No more independent hog producers. About the guy who is hiring Mexicans, I can't say, that looks pretty harsh and short sighted.
Where I’m at the sale barn buyer and the country buyer work for the same people and the sale barn buyer has the nicer truck. I’m also not sure your competitive bidding comment really holds since it’s pretty much the big five packers that are buying most everything which is why they are facing multiple monopoly related lawsuits right now. There’s real competition for bred cattle but not for feeder or slaughter cattle.
Oh, I think the lack of competition is for slaughter cattle, which is the root of the problem. The big five can divide markets and retaliate against cattle feeders (Mike Callicrate's story), but the cattle feeders have to buy their animals in the open market at auction, bidding against each other. The few fat cattle market auction (like in Yankton, SD) prices are partially used as a basis to set formula prices (the prices at which most fat cattle are settled) but those formulas are not open to public scrutiny, though according to the Packers and Stockyards Act, they should be. So cattle feeders are subject to competition, but the packers aren't. And that's for the main foodstuff consumed by Americans. If that local sale barn just has one buyer, that sale barn owner won't stay in business much longer. Cattle people will just put wheels under their stock and take them to another salebarn where there's some competition.
I evidently don’t have the depth of knowledge that you have of current sales barns. Perhaps Grazier can provide that. I was speaking from experiences that happened 45 years ago when we were young with small children.
It’s really the heart of America, shhhh, we don’t want the tourists to find out:) The best part is their clothes and hair will stink, so we’ve kind of got “natural immunity!”
That’s too bad… do you listen to Corbitt Wall’s daily youtube update? He mostly talks about cattle price movements, but at least once a month he discusses a fundraiser for someone who is ill, or to help people in the community who have suffered from a natural disaster. I love sale barn stories, good and bad, can you share one?
To be honest most of my sale barn stories are either just bad (as in not entertaining and sometimes downright horrifying) or only funny if you were there or require extensive set up.
Probably my “best” story is that in college I worked with a vet that was a notorious prankster who did the sale barn. He liked to do things like have the college kids help him preg check and then purposely run a steer through the chute and try and convince them they could feel a pregnancy. His best prank was casually telling one of the cowboys that there was a new terrible STD going around that caused a certain body part to fall off and the first symptom was green urine. A week later on the cowboy’s 21st birthday he slipped methylene blue into one of his beers causing him to pee green. The kid wasn’t the sharpest anyway and he waited until he was several beers in to do it. The kid drunkenly ran out of the bathroom hollering that he had that new thing and his dick was going to fall off and was in a complete panic.
That same summer I was run over by a large goat (about 200 pounds) at said sale barn and injured my back. The first doctor I went to gave me terrible advice that worsened the injury. I wound up spending the next seven years getting laughed at by doctors every time I explained that I had a chronic back injury from being run over by a goat (apparently most of them thought goats are all small like in petting zoos). During one such visit I was diagnosed with a kidney stone that was small enough not to be a problem. About ten years later I was in excruciating pain and figured it was the kidney stone moving so went to the ER to make sure that was it and I didn’t have appendicitis or something. I was right, the kidney stone was finally moving. That’s also how I found out I was pregnant with our second baby earlier than I otherwise would have. Such information is valuable when you spend all day around radiation and anesthetic gases.
Your comment on the fundraiser was interesting. Our local sale barn hires seasonal college help but their core help is migrant Mexican laborers here on agriculture work visas. They imported said workers because they ran off all the local cowboys (many of whom had worked there for years or even decades). The working conditions are garbage partially because of the nature of the job (working thirty hours straight in negative thirty weather outside is common at the busy sales that ran in the winter) but also because of how the place is run. The pay is low and benefits minimal but there are always guys who want to cowboy and this is accepted as part of the deal. The issue is this particular owner developed a reputation for lying to his employees and screwing them out of pay and benefits wherever possible. (Well it’s mostly his wife doing it.) After running off the help that had been there for years and after running off several crops of new help they went to hiring foreign laborers who don’t complain or quit. However when a large prairie fire threatened a local community and burned up hundreds of thousands of acres of pasture said owner was extremely generous with his resources and time and jumped to help. So to anyone who hasn’t worked for him he very much looked like the sort of pillar of the community he wanted to be seen as but to anyone who actually did business with him not so much.
So there you go, one good sale barn story and two lame ones.
All good stories, you're three for three in my book. And those goats and rams are all the more dangerous because people can treat them like pets when they're little and cute, and then they can grow up and really hurt somebody. Now I realize you're a vet. Good for you, that's about as honorable a job as there is. I read your post about jobs for young men on the other thread. That's just tragic what has happened. My brother is trying to steer his sons into the School of Mines as engineers. I hope he can do it. My feeling is there is always something for people who want to really push for it, but there seems to be a lot of people just as sure that no matter what you can't get ahead.
I don’t understand the mindset that there is something wrong with working a blue collar or service industry job, that working your way up to manager at any sort of franchise is below someone. That said I think one problem with Rufo’s thesis is that just because companies are theoretically desperate to hire people doesn’t mean they are willing to hire you. I have known several men who had advanced degrees who were quite willing to take any job available to them who couldn’t get hired, anywhere. Over qualification is a real impediment to finding work. The discrimination white men face even in those fields is also real. My husband has extensive firearms experience and when the local farm and ranch store started selling guns he applied to work at the gun counter. Instead of hiring the thirty somethings year old veteran with extensive firearms knowledge they hired a girl in her twenties who was an idiot and didn’t even have a hunter’s education certification or any firearms safety training. So just because they are hiring doesn’t mean they are hiring you.
As the mother of a boy the biggest hurdle seems to be the lack of a clear path to any sort of financial stability and the ability to support a wife and children. If my son was 16 I would definitely be encouraging him to look into the trades as that seems the best path forward right now but he’s closer to six and who knows what the next ten years will bring? The trades are also changing, independent mechanic shops are being swallowed up by chains and dealerships and technological advances make it impossible for the little guy to keep up. I don’t want my son to sell his integrity or soul to Ford or Jiffy Lube anymore than I want him selling it to big pharma or Wallstreet. Unless something massive changes to the structure of the university system it’s unlikely we will be able to afford that option for him. A four year degree at our local state university is now running $100k (including living expenses), most of the jobs you can get with such a degree in our area pay $60-70k if you’re lucky. I won’t let my kids make the same mistakes I did. Given our country’s history of fighting bullshit wars and then screwing our veterans we aren’t big on the idea of him following his dad’s footsteps into the military. This seems to be the biggest difference between what young men are facing and what the last several generations of young men have faced. My great grandpas and grandpas and father had a very clear path toward a life of meaning, that path is now murky and unclear. I think the last time a generation faced a similar murkiness in the U.S. at least, was the Industrial Revolution.
Not only will the young 20-year old woman get to sell firearms over the 30-year old veteran with firearms knowledge, but there’s tens of thousands of Mexicans more adept at rolling burritos than him, and willing to work faster and for cheaper. And there’s networks of Punjabis, Gujaratis, and Hyderbadis managing the Dunkins and the gas stations all around (at least on the coasts). But there’s somewhere to manage, maybe. Yet Overqualification is still an impediment. A skill and talent for firearms, or even translating Arabic or emergency response, provides little talking points for how to troubleshoot printers or making soup.
I think with much of the overqualification the problem is employers see it as a red flag. I have a theory that many of these large companies are doing things that are inefficient and/or immoral and likely illegal and they don’t want to hire critical thinkers who might notice and cause trouble. If you can translate Arabic you can figure out how to trouble shoot a printer but you’re also probably going to notice the multiple labor law violations.
"I don’t understand the mindset that there is something wrong with working a blue collar or service industry job, that working your way up to manager at any sort of franchise is below someone. "
I think it's OK to think this privately, if this is what you want to believe, but the instant you enunciate this publicly, you take the option of working your way up in a service industry off the table, limiting your choices in exactly the same job environment that you condemn as having too few choices.
And why would it work that way? Simply because to take such a job you'd lose face by accepting what you vehemently said was unacceptable. You'd have to eat a big heaping ol' portion of self-prepared crow.
I believe in an interview Douglas Murray said something like if a man had a good job, took care of his family, and was a strong member of the community it was success. Now that guy [especially if he is a Panda Express manager] is a loser.
I work in the think tank world, and am still thinking through what I think about the Panda Express Debate®️ (PED). But, I like what I think is this post's ultimate message: we are more than our jobs, and instead of rage-clacking on the keyboards, however justified the rage may be, we need to *build* something.
It's fundamentally humiliating to have to live in a society that teaches you about the "American dream" (now normally told by some nonwhite mouth piece) and to be more educated while being more qualified than your parents yet being forced to accept downward mobility as if nothing is amiss.
The only thing you have to accept is that you can't live your parents' life. Every generation must. If you're trying to live on their terms you've surrendered your agency to the system you hate but whose approval you seek. Make your own dream.
Saying this in the context in which we are dealing is treacherous. Do not ask men to accept dispossession and plebification. They naturally strive to exceed their parents until it’s beaten out of them, and then you arrive, meaning well but not understanding this context, and they read what you said as “settle for being a peasant”
Some of us come from working class families and understand that our people have always been screwed by the system. That’s why I think Librarian’s post is probably the best statement yet of the dilemma we faced and the next generation faces. People like us have to live within the constraints of the society we live in and find a way to hack the system to achieve the best life possible.
For example affirmative action mugged me in the ‘80’s and completely prevented me from working in my chosen career field. Back then the HR people were forthright enough to say out loud that I had no chance at employment being a white male. One guy told me, as the first generation in my family to attend college and in my late 20’s and married, that I should go back and get another degree in computers. It may have been the earliest known instance of “learn to code”. Lol. So I did other kinds of work which were not necessarily great but kept food on the table. Now my son is facing the same brutal headwinds and there are just no easy answers. So this stuff has been going on a long time and it’s a multi generational thing now.
"Some of us come from working class families and understand that our people have always been screwed by the system."
The way this is phrased--and almost everyone phrases it like this--makes the system a conscious malignant actor targeting you and your (my) kind. In at least 99.5% of the instances this is wrong.
The system is indifferent to you and your class. They just don't know, or if they do, care. If they could succeed to the same level with you also succeeding, this would be fine. The single point of focus is their own success.
...and why would it be otherwise?
This now changes the problem from fighting an enemy in an existential battle to controlling a force of nature, bending it or working with its energy. The strategies for each are radically different and are not interchangeable.
> The system is indifferent to you and your class. They just don't know, or if they do, care.
No, the system hates you. There are individuals in this system who like you, and there are many more who are simply indifferent to you, but the system as a whole hates you.
Frequently the system chooses lose, lose over win, win.
We live in a fallen world ruled by the father of lies. We are in a spiritual battle.
OK, I'll amend what I said. I'm not a double-down kinda guy if I can see validity in someone's counter-argument.
I'll still stand by the idea that "the system" is indifferent to you *so long as they don't think of you*. And they don't really want to think of you much.
But if they *do* think of you, it's likely because they fear that you want some of their stuff. They'll *really* notice you if you vote for, say, a surtax on personal income over maybe 200K to fund preschool for all. They'll then tend to also disrespect you as lazy and under-achieving. And in many cases, they'll be right.
Maybe you have individuals in the system who like you, but the only people I can say actually *like* me are friends/family. Tribesmen.
Oh, sure, there certainly are a lot of individuals in the system who *say* they like you, but the more fool you to believe them.
We tend to underestimate the evil in people's hearts.
Covid provided many great examples of this evil because social moores were more fluid.
For example at my kids school they implemented social distancing rules. You couldn't go within 6 foot of another kid. However, classrooms didn't have enough space to make this possible. So in the classroom kids had to sit about 14 inches apart but at recess and lunch they had to stay 6 foot apart.
The majority of the ~20 teachers at the school realized how stupid the rule was and only made half-hearted attempts to enforce it. However, 3 of the teachers made a point of ruthlessly enforcing the 6 foot rule at recess/lunch and seemed to delight in the rule not making any sense.
So around 15% of the teachers were actively enjoying punishing the students for no good reason.
You have a point that this evil is not necessarily targeted at a specific individual and these kids were just unlucky to be under the eye of Sauron
The education department obviously knew the distancing rules couldn't possibly work and yet they still rolled them out. Again, evil but at a larger more systematic scale.
What really rustled people is Rufo talked like this while hiring a literal pornstar to the Manhattan Institute, and then said a lot of right-wing anons didn't have the right "temperament". If the messenger was a guy in a place like Rufo that employed good men on our side the message would have went down easier.
To be clear, he didn’t hire the pornstar; his bosses did. And to his credit, he did link to job postings at MI and James O‘Keefe’s outfit. That said, the pornstar thing was a very bad look.
Doesn’t matter, it’s still the wrong message and proof that men like Rufo are ratchets to prevent the society from moving further right
The plebification of the right is why we’ve gotten our asses kicked for decades, we don’t train and prepare men of vision and reading. Leaning into it further is a death warrant.
There are only two legitimate reasons to pursue work; to feed yourself and provide for those under your care, and to give to those in need. Anything else is extra and should be cause for great thanksgiving. If you are pursuing meaning or status or fulfillment in work, you will be sorely disappointed.
"What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?"
Spot on with the irony and contradictions. Which reminds me of the Left's contradictions: everybody wants food and indoor plumbing, but nobody wants to be a farmer or plumber.
I think we've been hurt by the loss of the Protestant work ethic, that all men had dignity who did an honest labor.
TPTB have effectively rendered small farming impossible, and they’re moving fast in the direction of rendering homesteading illegal (raising one’s own food). As for plumbing, I was a plumber’s apprentice once. Illegals depressed my wages, and because my wife was a legal alien (green card) she was not entitled to Medicaid, but we had no access to health insurance that covered maternity. We almost immigrated to Canada simply to be able to have children.
The rest of the story is long. Suffice it to say that by some miracle I landed a federally funded job with gold plated health insurance, but when the gravy train stopped running years later, I ultimately led our family of seven back to my wife’s native Japan for the American Dream, which was already fast disappearing before my GenX was even born, and certainly does not exist at all for today’s GenZ, the “Lost Generation.”
We operate a successful home business here in Japan, which would be impossible to do in the USA because of its dysfunctional & crumbling infrastructure: health care, K-12 education, shipping/ mail service, transportation, housing costs, business regulation, zoning/ land use, taxation, and - how could I forget?! - desperate 3rd-world style crime & poverty, plus the BIGGIE - I can’t believe I almost forgot this one - a cost of living & a whole entire socioeconomic system predicated on both parents working f/t outside the home, aka 1960’s style 2nd-wave “feminism.”
What should a young man do in the USA today? Well, I say 1) don’t despair, but 2) he’ll have to work twice as many hours just to get half the material wealth that my parents’ Boomer generation acquired, plus 3) there simply aren’t enough virtuous home grown women to marry, so do keep in mind the mail order bride option.
People are talking past each other and grabbing the low hanging fruit.
Wages are suppressed, and also everyone can’t be a manager (unless there is federal funding lol) — so now only managers are worthy of living the good life. Of course there is no problem with being a manager, but how many manager positions are there??? And, we return to the original problem — not enough good paying jobs to go around to fulfill a decent life for Americans…
"Work is a curse; toil is the inheritance from our fallen forebears. But through the redemptive power of Christ, work done in His name, any lawful work, is given dignity and meaning."
is it? What is the first command in the Bible?
“Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.”
Where is that? Genesis 1:28 - BEFORE the fall.
What's in Genesis 2:15, also before the fall? "The Lord God took the man and placed him in the orchard in Eden to care for it and to maintain it."
Seems pretty clear to me that work was there from the beginning and Man was made to do it. What the curse that happens in Genesis 3 shows is that the world would be in active rebellion against Man after Adam messed up.
Something fundamentally changed after the fall in terms of man’s relationship with nature; what had previously been one of wholistic purpose was now hostile and antagonistic. Man would now have to suffer to survive, and then die. That’s the curse I mean.
Around the 18 min mark. To quote from the transcript:
the works of God are creative The Works of God build things The Works of God develop things the work works of God beautify things The Works of God put things in order all of these things are part of what it means to be faithful to God this is what our loyalty to him is is about
I think where a lot goes wrong is this idea that it's only "creative" if you're doing poetry or art. Those things are good - those things are fine - but it's also creation to install wiring, put in pipes, lay down tile. There are a billion trillion jobs that it takes to make a civilization and when we do those jobs, we are building and creating that civilization.
Agree 1000%. Work, as God intended it *pre-Fall*, is an integral part of being human, especially being a man. Work only became drudgery/wage slavery post-Fall.
The Left has promulgated the idea that work is a curse, to our shame and detriment. The outcome of work, and much else, turned to frustration and futility, but work remained honorable.
Not to pile on, but I think that distinction is important.
Great essay and a thoughtful response to Becoming Noble.
The Left has promulgated the idea that work is a curse, to our shame and detriment. The outcome of work, and much else, turned to frustration and futility, but work remained honorable.
Not to pile on, but I think that distinction is important.
Great essay and a thoughtful response to Becoming Noble.
I am literally Saturday's Child, and became completely comfortable with it after purging youthful ideals of the Brotherhood of Man from my value system.
I'm from the "I'm OK, you're OK" era and nothing made sense so long as I bought into it. I saw injustice and unfairness everywhere. Things were not as they *should* be.
But when I modified it to "I'm OK, but I'm not so sure about you", *everything* made sense thereafter.
Another wonderful essay. I started with the simple idea that I “wanted to help people”. Here I am 50 years later a Surgeon in the twilight of his career. I adore caring for patients but have watched in horror as Medicine has been “corporatized”. Maximizing wealth over human suffering is uniquely debased. I counsel my students/residents that they may have to quit their positions in the future if encouraged to do immoral things for money
I love work and have enjoyed every job I’ve had starting with peeling potatoes at age 12. I am a believer that ALL work is ignobling. All for the Glory of God. I am also a hustler/grinder/striver. I am not particularly talented at anything but I WILL out work you, or die trying
Continued blessings on you, your family, and your ministry.
I taught in the CA public school system for 7 years from the mid 70s to the early 80s.
It cleared away a lot of silly assumptions/delusions about the nobility of *unqualified* mankind. As a result I sent my daughter to carefully selected private schools. Not ideal, still, but a big improvement over public indoctrination and babysitting.
I view the seven years as a sort of a stay in a "re-education camp".
My first real job was teaching at a private Christian high school. I left after four years when they decided to tell me where I had to go to church.
After that I worked part-time for 17 years as a delivery driver for an overnight express company so I could read, write and spend time with my son (helped homeschool him). Never tried to move up as I knew it would mean long hours. There have been times when I've regretted that decision, but overall it's one of the best decisions I made in my life.
In later life (I'm 67) I worked at home as a web developer, a business I started from scratch....a harrowing, but ultimately great experience. No one would hire a guy pushing 50 just starting out, but I loved that work and I loved working at home...
We still don't have the financial security I hoped to have at this age, but it's okay. As my wife always reminds me, "Life is an adventure." Yes it is.
"The first thing any of us must do here on the right side of things is make a mental break with the world."
Crucial advice. If we define success by the world's standards we'll be unhappy at best, defeated at worst. Don't use your enemy's definition of victory.
Very difficult advice to follow, however. The siren call of wealth and power is hard to resist. But is wealth bad? No. Is power? No. The secret is to enjoy those things should they come, and use them wisely, and should they not, be still content.
There is a huge problem. People want to, expect to be, "Happy". To them this is something akin to what Madison Avenue tells them is happiness, which is a sort of manageable ecstasy.
But what you really want is quite satisfaction for the long haul. Contentment.
"I embody the Faustian spirit of the West- moving, expanding, conquering- but I’m certainly not going to live in the middle of nowhere. I’m a based koryos-Chad warrior Uber-bro who seeks out the most comfortable and risk-free life I can wrangle. I revolt against the modern world, save that I accept its moral authority and values. "
This is the very essence of common feminine disconnects, and it's why in traditional marriages one of the man's roles is to mediate the impulse to expect to get multiple mutually exclusive results from a course of action where only one result is possible.
...and yet, most/many such malcontents who voice these desires are young males.
This then means that many, including you, have noticed that the general social norms of western democracies has feminized. We are living in a society in which feminine values and expectancies are considered the normal baseline.
The West has become feminist, not feminized, but indeed 1960’s style 2nd-wave “feminism” does emasculate Western men.
Genuinely feminine priorities would be: childrearing, marriage & homemaking, extended family relationships, & female neighborhood f2f social networks.
In contrast, in the US we’re currently raising our 3rd & 4th generations of children indoctrinated in 2nd-wave feminist values: sex, money, career, power, leadership, assertiveness; these are masculine values - for working men - not feminine values.
Another boomer. Never personally motivated by money or status, but never had much respect for beatniks or hippies. Always felt my work was what I did for my precious wife and numerous children, and if I was proud of it, as I often was, that was gravy. Respect and sympathy for Gen Z - embarrassed to take your money for my Social Security and military retirement. Trying to help out the next generation as best I can. Hang in there, work hard, don't make too many rules for yourself.
Got an Uber ride home yesterday from a man who holds two degrees, a masters in criminal justice, and bachelors in some comp-sci communications blah blah blah. Father in his late 40s with great relationship with both his adult sons & his wife, makes most of his income long haul trucking. Doesn't use his degrees in the slightest. Nothing but respect for working class salt of the earth chads. More meat & potatoes on the bones seems like a natural salve to hollowing out societies & communities. Seen it best put as "they may not run America, but they make America run." Great post.
Rufo is basically right. Its not their fault but the young generation is whiny and entitled. At 47, I work white collar and would rather not, but I make a good living and have flexibility so there are tradeoffs. A fella can make $70k as a manager at Chipotle or as a welder or mechanic. Very different jobs, but generally not too awfully boring having interaction with people or being creative. Try sitting and staring at a computer and grinding at that all day for the same pay. It ain’t all that great either. And often very unsatisfying. And maybe will go away due to AI. Ya gotta pick your poison. We can’t all be comics or actors or politicians or artists or Toktokers or Hunter Biden. Life’s not fair. Quit whining and get after it.
I’m sympathetic to their concerns, which are valid at a basic level, but the notion that some change in economic or political conditions will lead to their finding fulfilment in paid work of any kind is more than a bit misguided. If you’re not happy now a higher status job isn’t going to fix things.
Most of the validity of their complaints has to do with an economic mismatch. A period of active inflation without the requisite wage growth to compensate and bring the standard of living back to some kind of equilibrium. The rest of the complaints are basically whining about the same crap we all had to deal with. Revisit this in 5 years, it'll seem like ancient history.
It’s good to dream. It’s not good to wallow in sorrow for unfulfilled dreams. Unfortunately our education system has gone way too far indulging delusions.
I think flexibility and tradeoffs is an important pair of issues. Kids seldom have to deal with these as so much of their lives are prescribed these days. How many kids have a talk with their dad about their work, other than the fake and stupid, "take your child to work" days which morphed into "take your daughter to work" days and were little more than play dates for the parents.
The problem isn’t Panda Express on your resume, the problem is snobby bullshitters like Joanna who judge someone for working there. Anyone who has worked for big corporations who have intern programs knows what horseshit those programs are. I’d rather hire the manager from Panda Express because they’ve proven they can get promoted.
I hate job snobbery more than anything.
In 2009-11, many companies were on hiring freezes so in the years afterwards we got a lot of resumes with people who graduated college in those years and worked at pizza places and jewelry stores. The idiots farming the resumes would judge this negatively and I said a million times, but they graduated during a recession with industry wide hiring freezes. Work is work.
People work in BS "charities" now to look better on a resume, and their "work" is largely sitting on a board doing nothing or asking people for money. Zero real life experience and just shaking down your relatives for money is far easier than real responsibilities.
The era where you could start at the bottom and work your way up is largely over, causing employees to be total mercenaries against HR drones who only look at checkboxes. The gold watch at your thirty-year anniversary is over, and now if you want to stay ahead you switch around every three.
That’s true. I worked for Discovery Channel in advertising sales. Those entry level jobs are now shipped out to Mexico City. So are the entry level finance, traffic and billing. Working your way up is now impossible in a place like that. Talked with another friend still in that business and she said AI will do all those jobs in the next two years. Hundreds of entry level wiped out.
Yes, agreed about AI, so the next on your list should be: ...and what do I do about it?
If you think something tolerable will evolve, it's fine to wait and see. But if not, and you cannot come up with a viable alternative, your genes are about to be flushed from the gene pool.
Yes, it's true.
[NOTE: I don't mean the personal "you"; I mean the unidentified collective "you". I could have used "one", but I use that a lot and it's kinda stilted.]
Uh...what do you mean? You envision some genetic engineering as inevitably following from how AI must evolve?
No. I mean that as an individual, any of the "yous" out there, you'll have the problem of competing against an AI solution to a demand for, say, C++ coding. Implementation coding can very largely be done with an AI approach. So what will *you* do?
In this case, having coded for years in the old days, it looks to me like the design, as would be described by an implementation spec, is not within the scope of AI, and it could be a while before it is. You'd have to find a way to nuance this for the duration of your career.
The part about the gene pool is just a way of illustrating that without a means of making an independent living, it's less likely that your genetic line would reproduce successfully into the future.
And my husband went to UPenn and worked in a pizza place with a woman who was in Wharton. She got fired because she couldn’t wait tables.
This reminds me of how I got my first internship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Up until that point, I had been going to community college on and off, oscillating between part time and full time status with the waxing and waning of my personal finances - juggling jobs on retail sales-floors and stockrooms.
There came a point where I had about a half dozen completed electronics/robotics projects, won team MVP at a Nasa robotics competition, completed the entirety of my math (Calc 1-3, Linear Algebra, Diff Eq) and physics coursework (Mech, E&M, Waves/Optics, QM) and finally was eligible to apply for University transfer and to internships at the holy grail, JPL.
I was fortunate to have a contact at JPL willing to review my application and resume for the JPL internship, an engineer who I met at a robotics competition. They too had a previous non-STEM career before JPL and I found that inspiring, “they did it so could I”. When it came to reviewing my resume, their annotated resume crossed out all of my previous work experience in retail, volunteer work in my hometown, my previous internship experience in D.C. “Irrelevant to the job” they told me. It hurt to have a part of my life redacted on paper but they were right. Like me they too had once been in my shoes.
I followed their advice, filtered out all the non essential non-STEM line items from my resume and I got the internship. I built the start of a career in Robotics without any mention of my previous accomplishments, that was altogether a different life. In many ways I still keep my previous career in retail, public service, to myself because it’s just too much baggage to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it, who I simply don’t trust.
The risk is greater still that I will be misjudged or mischaracterized for it because of the potential ignorance or bias of whoever reads my resume. It’s a shame the professional world treats this kind of work experience so dismissively, I’m not certain what I can or should do differently.
One of the reasons I lie like a motherfucker when dealing with big corps.
Not anymore.
Great essay Librarian, as usual.
A Boomer here who’s college educated husband worked whatever job he could to keep food on the table during economic hard times, did it gratefully and cared not what anyone thought of him; and his family loves him for that. Today we laugh at the stories he tells of working in the muck at cow sale barns. A man who could do that on Saturday and then direct a choir and orchestra on Sunday. He is a man who values his family more than himself. He is the person that is the bedrock of our family and our community. He would say,
“And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;
Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.”
I love sale barns. They're the linchpin of many rural communities, and come together to help people in need. Luckily, most people don't understand how much money moves through them with the buying and selling of cattle, and they've been pretty much left alone so far. I hope it stays that way.
I often wonder how many city dwellers know you can most likely buy a steer in the circular ring and then a chicken fried steak and a cup of coffee in the diner of the sale barn. That is American life at its best with true salt of the earth folks! You gotta love this country!
Again I’m intrigued by our differences in experience. I mean certainly I agree that you can buy a steer and then a steak. But some of the biggest crooks and worst bosses I’ve ever known operated sale barns and in our town the sale barn has imported Mexican help (as in immigrant labor from Mexico) because they ran off all the local cowboys. While the ranchers are salt of the earth cattle buyers and worse than used cars salesmen.
That's what I like about sale barns versus country buyers. A sale barn gives an auction price. The price might not be good, but it's the price on the day arrived at through competitive bidding. If there's more than one buyer, it doesn't matter if the guy who buys is a jerk, because he had to compete with everyone else. Only a small number of cattle are bought at competitive auctions in America, but those auction prices are used to set the prices of all of the other cattle sold. When we lose those auction barns, it's like losing the school. Game over for the local community. Country buyers show up in a nice pickup and act like they're your friend, but just ask the Iowa hog farmers what happens when the packers get control of the value chain. Game over. No more independent hog producers. About the guy who is hiring Mexicans, I can't say, that looks pretty harsh and short sighted.
Where I’m at the sale barn buyer and the country buyer work for the same people and the sale barn buyer has the nicer truck. I’m also not sure your competitive bidding comment really holds since it’s pretty much the big five packers that are buying most everything which is why they are facing multiple monopoly related lawsuits right now. There’s real competition for bred cattle but not for feeder or slaughter cattle.
Oh, I think the lack of competition is for slaughter cattle, which is the root of the problem. The big five can divide markets and retaliate against cattle feeders (Mike Callicrate's story), but the cattle feeders have to buy their animals in the open market at auction, bidding against each other. The few fat cattle market auction (like in Yankton, SD) prices are partially used as a basis to set formula prices (the prices at which most fat cattle are settled) but those formulas are not open to public scrutiny, though according to the Packers and Stockyards Act, they should be. So cattle feeders are subject to competition, but the packers aren't. And that's for the main foodstuff consumed by Americans. If that local sale barn just has one buyer, that sale barn owner won't stay in business much longer. Cattle people will just put wheels under their stock and take them to another salebarn where there's some competition.
I evidently don’t have the depth of knowledge that you have of current sales barns. Perhaps Grazier can provide that. I was speaking from experiences that happened 45 years ago when we were young with small children.
Today’s experience is very different, heck it’s different than it was 20 years ago when I was a high school kid.
It’s really the heart of America, shhhh, we don’t want the tourists to find out:) The best part is their clothes and hair will stink, so we’ve kind of got “natural immunity!”
Your experience of sale barns and mine couldn’t be more different ha ha.
That’s too bad… do you listen to Corbitt Wall’s daily youtube update? He mostly talks about cattle price movements, but at least once a month he discusses a fundraiser for someone who is ill, or to help people in the community who have suffered from a natural disaster. I love sale barn stories, good and bad, can you share one?
To be honest most of my sale barn stories are either just bad (as in not entertaining and sometimes downright horrifying) or only funny if you were there or require extensive set up.
Probably my “best” story is that in college I worked with a vet that was a notorious prankster who did the sale barn. He liked to do things like have the college kids help him preg check and then purposely run a steer through the chute and try and convince them they could feel a pregnancy. His best prank was casually telling one of the cowboys that there was a new terrible STD going around that caused a certain body part to fall off and the first symptom was green urine. A week later on the cowboy’s 21st birthday he slipped methylene blue into one of his beers causing him to pee green. The kid wasn’t the sharpest anyway and he waited until he was several beers in to do it. The kid drunkenly ran out of the bathroom hollering that he had that new thing and his dick was going to fall off and was in a complete panic.
That same summer I was run over by a large goat (about 200 pounds) at said sale barn and injured my back. The first doctor I went to gave me terrible advice that worsened the injury. I wound up spending the next seven years getting laughed at by doctors every time I explained that I had a chronic back injury from being run over by a goat (apparently most of them thought goats are all small like in petting zoos). During one such visit I was diagnosed with a kidney stone that was small enough not to be a problem. About ten years later I was in excruciating pain and figured it was the kidney stone moving so went to the ER to make sure that was it and I didn’t have appendicitis or something. I was right, the kidney stone was finally moving. That’s also how I found out I was pregnant with our second baby earlier than I otherwise would have. Such information is valuable when you spend all day around radiation and anesthetic gases.
Your comment on the fundraiser was interesting. Our local sale barn hires seasonal college help but their core help is migrant Mexican laborers here on agriculture work visas. They imported said workers because they ran off all the local cowboys (many of whom had worked there for years or even decades). The working conditions are garbage partially because of the nature of the job (working thirty hours straight in negative thirty weather outside is common at the busy sales that ran in the winter) but also because of how the place is run. The pay is low and benefits minimal but there are always guys who want to cowboy and this is accepted as part of the deal. The issue is this particular owner developed a reputation for lying to his employees and screwing them out of pay and benefits wherever possible. (Well it’s mostly his wife doing it.) After running off the help that had been there for years and after running off several crops of new help they went to hiring foreign laborers who don’t complain or quit. However when a large prairie fire threatened a local community and burned up hundreds of thousands of acres of pasture said owner was extremely generous with his resources and time and jumped to help. So to anyone who hasn’t worked for him he very much looked like the sort of pillar of the community he wanted to be seen as but to anyone who actually did business with him not so much.
So there you go, one good sale barn story and two lame ones.
All good stories, you're three for three in my book. And those goats and rams are all the more dangerous because people can treat them like pets when they're little and cute, and then they can grow up and really hurt somebody. Now I realize you're a vet. Good for you, that's about as honorable a job as there is. I read your post about jobs for young men on the other thread. That's just tragic what has happened. My brother is trying to steer his sons into the School of Mines as engineers. I hope he can do it. My feeling is there is always something for people who want to really push for it, but there seems to be a lot of people just as sure that no matter what you can't get ahead.
I don’t understand the mindset that there is something wrong with working a blue collar or service industry job, that working your way up to manager at any sort of franchise is below someone. That said I think one problem with Rufo’s thesis is that just because companies are theoretically desperate to hire people doesn’t mean they are willing to hire you. I have known several men who had advanced degrees who were quite willing to take any job available to them who couldn’t get hired, anywhere. Over qualification is a real impediment to finding work. The discrimination white men face even in those fields is also real. My husband has extensive firearms experience and when the local farm and ranch store started selling guns he applied to work at the gun counter. Instead of hiring the thirty somethings year old veteran with extensive firearms knowledge they hired a girl in her twenties who was an idiot and didn’t even have a hunter’s education certification or any firearms safety training. So just because they are hiring doesn’t mean they are hiring you.
As the mother of a boy the biggest hurdle seems to be the lack of a clear path to any sort of financial stability and the ability to support a wife and children. If my son was 16 I would definitely be encouraging him to look into the trades as that seems the best path forward right now but he’s closer to six and who knows what the next ten years will bring? The trades are also changing, independent mechanic shops are being swallowed up by chains and dealerships and technological advances make it impossible for the little guy to keep up. I don’t want my son to sell his integrity or soul to Ford or Jiffy Lube anymore than I want him selling it to big pharma or Wallstreet. Unless something massive changes to the structure of the university system it’s unlikely we will be able to afford that option for him. A four year degree at our local state university is now running $100k (including living expenses), most of the jobs you can get with such a degree in our area pay $60-70k if you’re lucky. I won’t let my kids make the same mistakes I did. Given our country’s history of fighting bullshit wars and then screwing our veterans we aren’t big on the idea of him following his dad’s footsteps into the military. This seems to be the biggest difference between what young men are facing and what the last several generations of young men have faced. My great grandpas and grandpas and father had a very clear path toward a life of meaning, that path is now murky and unclear. I think the last time a generation faced a similar murkiness in the U.S. at least, was the Industrial Revolution.
Not only will the young 20-year old woman get to sell firearms over the 30-year old veteran with firearms knowledge, but there’s tens of thousands of Mexicans more adept at rolling burritos than him, and willing to work faster and for cheaper. And there’s networks of Punjabis, Gujaratis, and Hyderbadis managing the Dunkins and the gas stations all around (at least on the coasts). But there’s somewhere to manage, maybe. Yet Overqualification is still an impediment. A skill and talent for firearms, or even translating Arabic or emergency response, provides little talking points for how to troubleshoot printers or making soup.
I think with much of the overqualification the problem is employers see it as a red flag. I have a theory that many of these large companies are doing things that are inefficient and/or immoral and likely illegal and they don’t want to hire critical thinkers who might notice and cause trouble. If you can translate Arabic you can figure out how to trouble shoot a printer but you’re also probably going to notice the multiple labor law violations.
"I don’t understand the mindset that there is something wrong with working a blue collar or service industry job, that working your way up to manager at any sort of franchise is below someone. "
I think it's OK to think this privately, if this is what you want to believe, but the instant you enunciate this publicly, you take the option of working your way up in a service industry off the table, limiting your choices in exactly the same job environment that you condemn as having too few choices.
And why would it work that way? Simply because to take such a job you'd lose face by accepting what you vehemently said was unacceptable. You'd have to eat a big heaping ol' portion of self-prepared crow.
I enjoyed this and read it during my lunch.
I believe in an interview Douglas Murray said something like if a man had a good job, took care of his family, and was a strong member of the community it was success. Now that guy [especially if he is a Panda Express manager] is a loser.
I work in the think tank world, and am still thinking through what I think about the Panda Express Debate®️ (PED). But, I like what I think is this post's ultimate message: we are more than our jobs, and instead of rage-clacking on the keyboards, however justified the rage may be, we need to *build* something.
It's fundamentally humiliating to have to live in a society that teaches you about the "American dream" (now normally told by some nonwhite mouth piece) and to be more educated while being more qualified than your parents yet being forced to accept downward mobility as if nothing is amiss.
The only thing you have to accept is that you can't live your parents' life. Every generation must. If you're trying to live on their terms you've surrendered your agency to the system you hate but whose approval you seek. Make your own dream.
Saying this in the context in which we are dealing is treacherous. Do not ask men to accept dispossession and plebification. They naturally strive to exceed their parents until it’s beaten out of them, and then you arrive, meaning well but not understanding this context, and they read what you said as “settle for being a peasant”
Never settle, never surrender.
ABSOLUTELY ON THE MONEY.
Some of us come from working class families and understand that our people have always been screwed by the system. That’s why I think Librarian’s post is probably the best statement yet of the dilemma we faced and the next generation faces. People like us have to live within the constraints of the society we live in and find a way to hack the system to achieve the best life possible.
For example affirmative action mugged me in the ‘80’s and completely prevented me from working in my chosen career field. Back then the HR people were forthright enough to say out loud that I had no chance at employment being a white male. One guy told me, as the first generation in my family to attend college and in my late 20’s and married, that I should go back and get another degree in computers. It may have been the earliest known instance of “learn to code”. Lol. So I did other kinds of work which were not necessarily great but kept food on the table. Now my son is facing the same brutal headwinds and there are just no easy answers. So this stuff has been going on a long time and it’s a multi generational thing now.
"Some of us come from working class families and understand that our people have always been screwed by the system."
The way this is phrased--and almost everyone phrases it like this--makes the system a conscious malignant actor targeting you and your (my) kind. In at least 99.5% of the instances this is wrong.
The system is indifferent to you and your class. They just don't know, or if they do, care. If they could succeed to the same level with you also succeeding, this would be fine. The single point of focus is their own success.
...and why would it be otherwise?
This now changes the problem from fighting an enemy in an existential battle to controlling a force of nature, bending it or working with its energy. The strategies for each are radically different and are not interchangeable.
> The system is indifferent to you and your class. They just don't know, or if they do, care.
No, the system hates you. There are individuals in this system who like you, and there are many more who are simply indifferent to you, but the system as a whole hates you.
Frequently the system chooses lose, lose over win, win.
We live in a fallen world ruled by the father of lies. We are in a spiritual battle.
OK, I'll amend what I said. I'm not a double-down kinda guy if I can see validity in someone's counter-argument.
I'll still stand by the idea that "the system" is indifferent to you *so long as they don't think of you*. And they don't really want to think of you much.
But if they *do* think of you, it's likely because they fear that you want some of their stuff. They'll *really* notice you if you vote for, say, a surtax on personal income over maybe 200K to fund preschool for all. They'll then tend to also disrespect you as lazy and under-achieving. And in many cases, they'll be right.
Maybe you have individuals in the system who like you, but the only people I can say actually *like* me are friends/family. Tribesmen.
Oh, sure, there certainly are a lot of individuals in the system who *say* they like you, but the more fool you to believe them.
We tend to underestimate the evil in people's hearts.
Covid provided many great examples of this evil because social moores were more fluid.
For example at my kids school they implemented social distancing rules. You couldn't go within 6 foot of another kid. However, classrooms didn't have enough space to make this possible. So in the classroom kids had to sit about 14 inches apart but at recess and lunch they had to stay 6 foot apart.
The majority of the ~20 teachers at the school realized how stupid the rule was and only made half-hearted attempts to enforce it. However, 3 of the teachers made a point of ruthlessly enforcing the 6 foot rule at recess/lunch and seemed to delight in the rule not making any sense.
So around 15% of the teachers were actively enjoying punishing the students for no good reason.
You have a point that this evil is not necessarily targeted at a specific individual and these kids were just unlucky to be under the eye of Sauron
The education department obviously knew the distancing rules couldn't possibly work and yet they still rolled them out. Again, evil but at a larger more systematic scale.
Big difference between benign indifference and utter contempt. As Tucker Carlson frequently points out, you have no idea how much they hate you.
Don't kid yourself. You are not on their radar screen at. Unless they happen to hear you whining, you're beneath contempt.
You should be old enough to not need a figurehead to follow.
BTW, I *did* learn to code, back in the early 80s.
We have much the same backstory, sounds like. I'm the first to attend college, also.
What really rustled people is Rufo talked like this while hiring a literal pornstar to the Manhattan Institute, and then said a lot of right-wing anons didn't have the right "temperament". If the messenger was a guy in a place like Rufo that employed good men on our side the message would have went down easier.
To be clear, he didn’t hire the pornstar; his bosses did. And to his credit, he did link to job postings at MI and James O‘Keefe’s outfit. That said, the pornstar thing was a very bad look.
Doesn’t matter, it’s still the wrong message and proof that men like Rufo are ratchets to prevent the society from moving further right
The plebification of the right is why we’ve gotten our asses kicked for decades, we don’t train and prepare men of vision and reading. Leaning into it further is a death warrant.
There are only two legitimate reasons to pursue work; to feed yourself and provide for those under your care, and to give to those in need. Anything else is extra and should be cause for great thanksgiving. If you are pursuing meaning or status or fulfillment in work, you will be sorely disappointed.
"What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul?"
I have been very fulfilled and thankful for my job.
I was as well, for 40 years, and am grateful for that.
Lotus eaters commented too.
https://youtu.be/IW1Qdn28tLI?si=pSNckpUBfkypsqWf
Spot on with the irony and contradictions. Which reminds me of the Left's contradictions: everybody wants food and indoor plumbing, but nobody wants to be a farmer or plumber.
I think we've been hurt by the loss of the Protestant work ethic, that all men had dignity who did an honest labor.
TPTB have effectively rendered small farming impossible, and they’re moving fast in the direction of rendering homesteading illegal (raising one’s own food). As for plumbing, I was a plumber’s apprentice once. Illegals depressed my wages, and because my wife was a legal alien (green card) she was not entitled to Medicaid, but we had no access to health insurance that covered maternity. We almost immigrated to Canada simply to be able to have children.
The rest of the story is long. Suffice it to say that by some miracle I landed a federally funded job with gold plated health insurance, but when the gravy train stopped running years later, I ultimately led our family of seven back to my wife’s native Japan for the American Dream, which was already fast disappearing before my GenX was even born, and certainly does not exist at all for today’s GenZ, the “Lost Generation.”
We operate a successful home business here in Japan, which would be impossible to do in the USA because of its dysfunctional & crumbling infrastructure: health care, K-12 education, shipping/ mail service, transportation, housing costs, business regulation, zoning/ land use, taxation, and - how could I forget?! - desperate 3rd-world style crime & poverty, plus the BIGGIE - I can’t believe I almost forgot this one - a cost of living & a whole entire socioeconomic system predicated on both parents working f/t outside the home, aka 1960’s style 2nd-wave “feminism.”
What should a young man do in the USA today? Well, I say 1) don’t despair, but 2) he’ll have to work twice as many hours just to get half the material wealth that my parents’ Boomer generation acquired, plus 3) there simply aren’t enough virtuous home grown women to marry, so do keep in mind the mail order bride option.
People are talking past each other and grabbing the low hanging fruit.
Wages are suppressed, and also everyone can’t be a manager (unless there is federal funding lol) — so now only managers are worthy of living the good life. Of course there is no problem with being a manager, but how many manager positions are there??? And, we return to the original problem — not enough good paying jobs to go around to fulfill a decent life for Americans…
Also have to disagree here:
"Work is a curse; toil is the inheritance from our fallen forebears. But through the redemptive power of Christ, work done in His name, any lawful work, is given dignity and meaning."
is it? What is the first command in the Bible?
“Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.”
Where is that? Genesis 1:28 - BEFORE the fall.
What's in Genesis 2:15, also before the fall? "The Lord God took the man and placed him in the orchard in Eden to care for it and to maintain it."
Seems pretty clear to me that work was there from the beginning and Man was made to do it. What the curse that happens in Genesis 3 shows is that the world would be in active rebellion against Man after Adam messed up.
From Genesis 3:17
cursed is the ground because of you;
through toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your bread,
until you return to the ground—
because out of it were you taken.
For dust you are,
and to dust you shall return.”
Something fundamentally changed after the fall in terms of man’s relationship with nature; what had previously been one of wholistic purpose was now hostile and antagonistic. Man would now have to suffer to survive, and then die. That’s the curse I mean.
I liked the close of this priest's talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SxFyIvHwt8
Around the 18 min mark. To quote from the transcript:
the works of God are creative The Works of God build things The Works of God develop things the work works of God beautify things The Works of God put things in order all of these things are part of what it means to be faithful to God this is what our loyalty to him is is about
I think where a lot goes wrong is this idea that it's only "creative" if you're doing poetry or art. Those things are good - those things are fine - but it's also creation to install wiring, put in pipes, lay down tile. There are a billion trillion jobs that it takes to make a civilization and when we do those jobs, we are building and creating that civilization.
In this manner, work is good not a curse.
Yes that would be what my final sentence in my comment was referring to. Hence why I said "the curse that happens in Genesis 3"
Agree 1000%. Work, as God intended it *pre-Fall*, is an integral part of being human, especially being a man. Work only became drudgery/wage slavery post-Fall.
The Left has promulgated the idea that work is a curse, to our shame and detriment. The outcome of work, and much else, turned to frustration and futility, but work remained honorable.
Not to pile on, but I think that distinction is important.
Great essay and a thoughtful response to Becoming Noble.
The Left has promulgated the idea that work is a curse, to our shame and detriment. The outcome of work, and much else, turned to frustration and futility, but work remained honorable.
Not to pile on, but I think that distinction is important.
Great essay and a thoughtful response to Becoming Noble.
I am literally Saturday's Child, and became completely comfortable with it after purging youthful ideals of the Brotherhood of Man from my value system.
I'm from the "I'm OK, you're OK" era and nothing made sense so long as I bought into it. I saw injustice and unfairness everywhere. Things were not as they *should* be.
But when I modified it to "I'm OK, but I'm not so sure about you", *everything* made sense thereafter.
Another wonderful essay. I started with the simple idea that I “wanted to help people”. Here I am 50 years later a Surgeon in the twilight of his career. I adore caring for patients but have watched in horror as Medicine has been “corporatized”. Maximizing wealth over human suffering is uniquely debased. I counsel my students/residents that they may have to quit their positions in the future if encouraged to do immoral things for money
I love work and have enjoyed every job I’ve had starting with peeling potatoes at age 12. I am a believer that ALL work is ignobling. All for the Glory of God. I am also a hustler/grinder/striver. I am not particularly talented at anything but I WILL out work you, or die trying
Continued blessings on you, your family, and your ministry.
Thank you very kindly. And I do think of teaching as a kind of ministry.
I taught in the CA public school system for 7 years from the mid 70s to the early 80s.
It cleared away a lot of silly assumptions/delusions about the nobility of *unqualified* mankind. As a result I sent my daughter to carefully selected private schools. Not ideal, still, but a big improvement over public indoctrination and babysitting.
I view the seven years as a sort of a stay in a "re-education camp".
Great essay.
My first real job was teaching at a private Christian high school. I left after four years when they decided to tell me where I had to go to church.
After that I worked part-time for 17 years as a delivery driver for an overnight express company so I could read, write and spend time with my son (helped homeschool him). Never tried to move up as I knew it would mean long hours. There have been times when I've regretted that decision, but overall it's one of the best decisions I made in my life.
In later life (I'm 67) I worked at home as a web developer, a business I started from scratch....a harrowing, but ultimately great experience. No one would hire a guy pushing 50 just starting out, but I loved that work and I loved working at home...
We still don't have the financial security I hoped to have at this age, but it's okay. As my wife always reminds me, "Life is an adventure." Yes it is.
Another good word from The Librarian:
"The first thing any of us must do here on the right side of things is make a mental break with the world."
Crucial advice. If we define success by the world's standards we'll be unhappy at best, defeated at worst. Don't use your enemy's definition of victory.
Very difficult advice to follow, however. The siren call of wealth and power is hard to resist. But is wealth bad? No. Is power? No. The secret is to enjoy those things should they come, and use them wisely, and should they not, be still content.
I have learned to be content in all things…..
YES!
There is a huge problem. People want to, expect to be, "Happy". To them this is something akin to what Madison Avenue tells them is happiness, which is a sort of manageable ecstasy.
But what you really want is quite satisfaction for the long haul. Contentment.
"I embody the Faustian spirit of the West- moving, expanding, conquering- but I’m certainly not going to live in the middle of nowhere. I’m a based koryos-Chad warrior Uber-bro who seeks out the most comfortable and risk-free life I can wrangle. I revolt against the modern world, save that I accept its moral authority and values. "
This is the very essence of common feminine disconnects, and it's why in traditional marriages one of the man's roles is to mediate the impulse to expect to get multiple mutually exclusive results from a course of action where only one result is possible.
...and yet, most/many such malcontents who voice these desires are young males.
This then means that many, including you, have noticed that the general social norms of western democracies has feminized. We are living in a society in which feminine values and expectancies are considered the normal baseline.
Well observed and well put
The West has become feminist, not feminized, but indeed 1960’s style 2nd-wave “feminism” does emasculate Western men.
Genuinely feminine priorities would be: childrearing, marriage & homemaking, extended family relationships, & female neighborhood f2f social networks.
In contrast, in the US we’re currently raising our 3rd & 4th generations of children indoctrinated in 2nd-wave feminist values: sex, money, career, power, leadership, assertiveness; these are masculine values - for working men - not feminine values.
Another boomer. Never personally motivated by money or status, but never had much respect for beatniks or hippies. Always felt my work was what I did for my precious wife and numerous children, and if I was proud of it, as I often was, that was gravy. Respect and sympathy for Gen Z - embarrassed to take your money for my Social Security and military retirement. Trying to help out the next generation as best I can. Hang in there, work hard, don't make too many rules for yourself.
Good essay. Thanks.
Give up "your" social security and maybe I'll care.
Got an Uber ride home yesterday from a man who holds two degrees, a masters in criminal justice, and bachelors in some comp-sci communications blah blah blah. Father in his late 40s with great relationship with both his adult sons & his wife, makes most of his income long haul trucking. Doesn't use his degrees in the slightest. Nothing but respect for working class salt of the earth chads. More meat & potatoes on the bones seems like a natural salve to hollowing out societies & communities. Seen it best put as "they may not run America, but they make America run." Great post.
Once again, we're on opposite sides of a debate, yet despite my fundamental disagreement, I still respect the eloquence and points being made.
Rufo is basically right. Its not their fault but the young generation is whiny and entitled. At 47, I work white collar and would rather not, but I make a good living and have flexibility so there are tradeoffs. A fella can make $70k as a manager at Chipotle or as a welder or mechanic. Very different jobs, but generally not too awfully boring having interaction with people or being creative. Try sitting and staring at a computer and grinding at that all day for the same pay. It ain’t all that great either. And often very unsatisfying. And maybe will go away due to AI. Ya gotta pick your poison. We can’t all be comics or actors or politicians or artists or Toktokers or Hunter Biden. Life’s not fair. Quit whining and get after it.
I’m sympathetic to their concerns, which are valid at a basic level, but the notion that some change in economic or political conditions will lead to their finding fulfilment in paid work of any kind is more than a bit misguided. If you’re not happy now a higher status job isn’t going to fix things.
Nicolas Gomez Davila said that “man matures when he realises politics will not solve his problems”
Most of the validity of their complaints has to do with an economic mismatch. A period of active inflation without the requisite wage growth to compensate and bring the standard of living back to some kind of equilibrium. The rest of the complaints are basically whining about the same crap we all had to deal with. Revisit this in 5 years, it'll seem like ancient history.
It’s good to dream. It’s not good to wallow in sorrow for unfulfilled dreams. Unfortunately our education system has gone way too far indulging delusions.
I think flexibility and tradeoffs is an important pair of issues. Kids seldom have to deal with these as so much of their lives are prescribed these days. How many kids have a talk with their dad about their work, other than the fake and stupid, "take your child to work" days which morphed into "take your daughter to work" days and were little more than play dates for the parents.
Thus speaks the voice of middle aged experience of reality. Totally agree. Our society indulges whining too much. Where else did the Karens come from?