If you are getting fat on the couch without working- while driving up everyone else’s cost of stuff, you don’t want to go backwards.

If you are working and doing well,
and don’t want to pay for the people getting fat on the couch- the government will send armed men to take you in at gunpoint
Or want to defend the stuff you make your livelihood with while they try to steal it- the government will send armed men to take you in at gunpoint
Or even make them leave your property or prevent them from killing you-the government will send armed men to take you in at gunpoint
And a decent amount of us would be fine with going back to letting them starve in a ditch if they don’t work

I have been working since I was 15. Some college. Never had the time for a degree. I like cars to much...and parts ain't cheap. I have multiple certifications, can work in multiple disciplines. Have been a shop foreman/service manager for a large equipment company. This was when I was 29. Was making bank..no kids, no wife. Was a plant supervisor at 38 making less money..still no kids or wife. Went back to being a tech in a specialized industry..I make more now than I ever have..still no kids or wife at 51. I will be debt free in a couple of years. I plan on quitting not long after that.
I also own a couple of car shops with a partner. I don't spend money outside the business, only that I haven't paid for fuel in almost 7 years.
I may go back and work in my shop, for actual pay. It's 20 minutes from my house. No traffic. 8 hrs or less a day....I am just done.

My nephew is 25. He's currently at home working a online job part time. Firmly under mommas wing. Has a credit card that mom pays off every month. Doesn't leave his room very much, lives his life on the internet.

I think there's a lot of young people like him

Hard work (the ethic and belief that doing so is a good thing and improves your situation/world), family, and religion (Christianity) were the foundational values that built America.

These things are openly hated and attacked by the media and the elites now.  With nothing to work for, people stop working.  It’s really that simple.

You call the nanny state progress?

You should have persevered............

41. I do not trust our national leadership, nor do I feel I can change what is occurring, nor would they let me.

42. They would gleefully sacrifice my life in a military conflict, but won’t even bother to count me as an unemployment statistic – preferring instead to replace me with imported voters. I am willing to lay down my life for my fellow citizens, but not for an encroaching third-world culture which is teaching hate, demeaning and replacing me – and from whom I get the stark impression that they would never fight alongside me in return.

Years ago I was part of a huge motorcycle escort taking an American flag that once flew at the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC to a newly built memorial in southeast Missouri. I did it to help honor and respect all soldiers fallen or not that fought in that conflict and all others, and to show support for my country.

When they rose the flag to fly over the new memorial wall the pledge was said and national anthem were played. I had a very hard time being a patriotic and proud American looking at all the names on the walls.

I so hope so.  Do ouu have any idea how many people have given up because they were in their late 30s - early forties, and stuck a a certain level until 74yo Bob decides that he is ready to hand over the reigns?  No hope at all of advancement,  especially in local government  agencies, until Bob's and Marie's kick the bucket.  Hell they are in their 70s, that supervisor position is a joke.  They sit in an environmentally controlled building,  in the most expensive office chair they could get with that grant, and type away on the computer.  On top of that they NEED those kick ass Humana plans!  They ain't going nowhere any time soon.

Their mother's basement.

I sure as hell do not want to work.  I would much rather play on my property all day an build fun, but useless stuff.

Do you know how hard Matt, from DEMOLITION RANCH, has to train due to his youtuber lifestyle?  I think Dire Straits sang it best:

The question remains, how can they afford to live if they don't work and are able to?

They can’t. I’ve asked that question in multiple threads, and no can even come up with any far fetched GD theory.

Americans didn’t have enough savings to make it this long, and no one was living below their means.

The housing market should have crashed if everyone decided to live off of unemployment.

A++

Sooo ...

life is hard and we don't know how to fix it or live with it, so we're just gonna quit trying.

The system is broken and has been broken since FDR minimally.

It's just getting more obvious. Giving up is not the answer (this is coming from a dirty poor).

Employers quit trying long long ago.

The Boomers who were the subjects of Millennials complaining that Boomers were sitting in the good jobs blocking the millennial upward mobility decided to pull the plug and retire. So millennials finally got some upward mobility into empty positions but their slacker kids didn't want to start in the mailroom because they think everyone should start in the corner office. And if they can't get the corner office they assume that they're still owed a living wage of $30/hour minimum. With full loan forgiveness for their ivy league degree in underwater basket weaving.

Just watched a stupid movie on Amazon 2047 Virtual Revolution.  It argued that much of the stimulation that can be achieved in real life can be achieved via gaming.  I don't know how true that is.  I don't game personally, but I do waste way to much time on this website.  I really need to spend less time here, and more time taking care of my cattle.

Now for me...  Why I quit trying to "work" a real job.  Part of it was that I got tired of the bullshit politics.  I got tired of living to work.  I did not need to work to live anymore.  But I am a very rare exception.  I was retired involuntary and simply chose not to look for another day job.  I had enough saved up for retirement, and enough residual income it simply has not been necessary yet.  Who knows, maybe someday I will actually get a return on investment from the cattle.


FWIW, I am still a taxpayer.  I pay more every year than I ever paid when my only income was salary.  I retired at 45.  My brother-in-law was a tech guy - I think he retired at 40 (was also forced out, he was considered too old for his field and he did not have an ivy league diploma that the company decided it wanted for it's executives).  He will probably be going back into the work force to some extent this year or next - but he has had a good 10 year retirement and in all reality has not dipped into his savings all that much (a couple 100k over 10 years).  That said, his equity in real estate grew by about the same amount over the same time - so he is net -0- for 10 years of retirement.

I just talked to the local Express Personnel. They can't get uneducated manual laborers for less than $15/hr (plus EP commition of about $7/hr).

So $22/hr for a ditch digger.



And hiring outside of a service isn't much better.

The last guys I hired...

They were about 80% done stripping the carpet out of a room (about 10 minutes of work) ...I took my eyes off of them for a few minutes... look around and they were gone... and so was my $200 dewalt cordless drill.

I guess I wasn't paying them enough.

From what I have seen just anecdotally is a huge swathe of couples have figured out that in many cases one income (normally some sort of service job ,) basically just pays for child care and the expenses of going to that job (extra car , insurance for car , work clothes etc) and just said fuck it one of us is just staying home

I don't see any mention of mothers staying at home with their kids. Fail.

IF (big if) you believe the statistics, we have lost 900k to COVID, and many would have been working aged adults.

Stocks have been in a historic bull run, allowing many to retire a few years early.

Increased .gov bennies.

Working from home will create local shortages as people decide to take advantage of remote opportunities.

Not for me.  I'm a white male with no fallback position.  If I don't work, I will be divorced in short order and starving in a ditch.

I still resent every hour I spend working instead of doing shit I actually like to do.  Just because I need a job to live doesn't mean working is awesome.  I'm good at what I do, and my employer is happy with my performance.  I get frequent "attaboys" at work.  But at the end of my life I will still be bitter about the cumulative years spent on work instead of myself, my family and my friends.

Tag

I don't remember when most employers ever tried in my entire lifetime. There will obviously be outliers.

On the employers side: hard to make it in a union where the government punishes success and trying to do right by your employees. Even if the jobs you are trying to do aren't offshorable, you still have to fight either illegal immigrants who employers don't have to pay as much for, or people on visas who are brought in to be low rent indentured servants in skilled jobs. Throw in unions, than mix in perverse incentives (being publicly traded, for example) and moral depravity = mess we are in now.

We live in a land where it's cheaper to manufacture stuff in a comu-nazi country almost on the other side of the globe and ship it here ... than to make it here. Because of the above (and more).

You have to be a literal glutton for punishment to be a good employer in this environment.

No, I am not excusing bad employers in the least.

I only care about the number of deaths above the number of expected deaths for the year. Then what percentage of those were “working aged adults?”

I understand more boomers retired due to strong market/ COVID mandates/ etc.

Bennies here have fallen back to previous levels, long ago.

I’ve been ‘work from home since pre COVID.’ Even work from home jobs are struggling to fill open recs.

I’ve been in the tech world, which has never been boomer heavy at any point, and everyone I know is scrambling to backfill positions.

It’s just all so strange.

It's awful hard to believe that there's some free money conspiracy that millions of people are taking advantage of but not telling anyone about.  

Good list.

It spans the spectrum from woke to conservative. From lazy sponge to black pilled nihilism.

They are selling drugs.

"President Barack Obama in a June 3, 2020 ‘Town Hall’ meeting, placed a Mark of Cain upon my race, deeming it a ‘plague of our society’ and declared that I bore an ‘original sin’, one which I carry because of my skin color and/or gender. There are no measurable objectives of success in this, so it will never end – I am forbidden to speak my view or exist as a full rights-bearing citizen in the meantime. I am not the horrible monster these people have crafted as the focus of their hate."

"If I am to work, I have to shave and shower every day, and workout for an hour each day in order to be at my optimal appearance. I can do that, but what a pain in the ass, just to pay a bigger tax and medical insurance bill."


Attached File

That list reads like there is no incentive to work hard.  True or not.  Put in a lot more effort to earn more to have it taken by doctors, insurance & taxes.

Easier to work less and have more free time with similar income they keep.

What they don't realize is yes your disposable income kind of levels off for a while, but eventually it will start in increasing

I have a friend with a 24 and 26 year old living at home. About 1/2 of that seems to apply (and 1/2 is plenty).

To me, this is the strangest thing that is going on in our country right now, and I can't even think of a crazy conspiracy theory that would explain it away.

GD always has the answer for everything (whether it's the right or wrong answer is debatable) but they always have a fucking answer. But for some reason, no one can figure this out.

We've removed all downsides and natural repercussions for being a lazy POS.

POS-type people take advantage accordingly.

Amen brother.


I see it all the time at work now. The reality isn't that the workforce doesn't want to work, its that people are burned out and hate their lives, and their jobs.

The boomer hate I feel comes from a majority of Millennials working under a Boomer at the beginning of their career. When they were bright eyed and bushy tailed. And the middle manager Boomer or Gen Xer decided that instead of working to create good employees they would create extra capital for an atta boy from upper management and thought the only way to do that was "cracking the whip". And instead of treating them as people they were treated as a number, as a unit of production that can be removed at a whim, abused and underpaid. It created resentment and ruined a generation.

I see kids who are now 18-21 working 10+ hour days 6 days a week producing like it was peak wartime, being paid 13-15 bucks an hour for skilled work. Then being told "well when I started I made 7 bucks an hour" while refusing to acknowledge that 7 bucks an hour in 1973 was worth the equivalent of 43 an hour today. Then they tell you that its your fault you can't own a home, meet a woman and have kids and drive a new car. All while bragging about setting record profits and making record sales while posting cringe boomer memes from their Iphone in the office.

Then you factor in the inflation eating away those "high new wages for unskilled work" and most people in a year are bringing home less then they did 3-4 years ago all while being told that they are lucky to have such a grand time of opportunity. And the fucking ridiculous part is the wages for skilled labor is are somehow still stagnate. You get those Millennials who have been working for 10 years being paid within 2 bucks of the new guy, and then the bitterness comes, when in reality both are being fucked.

I watched a kid get fired 2 weeks ago because "he failed to meet production quotas". His parents had just moved across the country and he just got his first apartment with his fiancee. He had just finished a crash course in the trades and got a basic cert, and was basically taken, set up at a table and given a cumulative hour of instruction in 90 days and told to produce. After 90 days he hadn't made significant progress because no one was there to teach him. He was always on time, he worked his full shift and was a generally friendly guy who wasn't afraid to work hard. The guy who is a minority who is also terrible at his job, and who in 6 months as gotten to within one point (we use a point system) of being fired from being absent, chronically late, and who also spends more time in the shit house then the rest of the shop combined is still working there. The Gen X/Boomer who fired the white kid literally told me he had the wrong skin color.

Merit means nothing anymore. The "work harder and faster and better and you'll be at the top" bullshit means nothing. Day after day you come to realize the only thing hard work gets you, is more hard work. All while those who pop out kids or who jump the border live like kings.

And social media leads to more depression because all those fuckers who are also miserable, show only the highlights of the very best moments of their lives which convince you that your life is never going to be worth anything. Your absurd schedule of mandatory OT means that your chances of meeting a girl at the bar are all but dead, not that those are open anyways. So you spend your time not at work, drinking and playing video games to escape the misery that is your life. All while staring at the same wall you first stared at when you got your first chubby. And sooner then later you start wondering if suicide isn't an option. And for a depressing number of Millennials it is. And for the rest they seek help and are now saddled with prescriptions they hate, for a price they can't afford and have to keep working the same shit job that made them depressed in the first place to keep what shitty coverage they can afford. Then you factor in the student loan debt for a career you hate or were forced into by your parents, the car payment for a 10 year old beater that's falling apart and a rent for an apartment you share with 3 other fucking dudes.

All while being told to suck it up, and pull yourself up by your bootstaps. You just needed a firm handshake etc.

Is it any wonder people have given up? Is it any wonder why people don't want to work anymore and would rather live on a razors edge? I mean its not like they have ever been living high on the hog anyways.

Depression is whats killing the work force and Millennials in particular.

Worked everyday since 1978.. With the exception of being told to clean a walk-in freezer back in 1980, I have loved every job I have had. I'll retire in 2-5 years and will continue to be happy, stay busy, and probably pick up a few more hobbies to go with my current list: motorcycles, gardening, wood working, exercise, travel, sex (not alone), home improvement, fishing, kayaking, camping...etc.


Suck it you self-pity, poor me, whiny bitches... with work comes reward. Go get a skill.

<--- enjoys yelling at clouds, hates long walks on the beach...

I have always wondered what it must feel like to love a job. I mean to want to wake up chipper and head in bright and early to get there because you love it. I doubt I'll ever know what thats like.

Working since I was 13 and I keep wondering when the reward part comes.

I don't really care how people earn/support their living-
except when I or somebody else has to pay for it.

I don't want to support a bunch of other people

Compensation of the top CEOs increased 1,322.2% from 1978 to 2020. There has only been an 18.0% growth in average worker’s annual compensation in that same time period.

From 2019-2020 (pandemic:) while millions were out of work, CEOs’ realized compensation jumped 18.9% in just one year. Typical worker compensation, of those who remained employed, did rise 3.9% over that year.

There's no rocket science here. Living rent and utility free with multiple generations in a house is very cheap. When you don't buy a bunch of crap life is cheap. When you have 4 people sharing 1 car with no payment it's cheap. One average producer pays the mortgage and utilities. 3-5 other people live there.

Its not difficult to exist on 5k a year for people without billa. Benefits pay well over that.

I know a dude who did something like that (his company folded, but same no degree good job situation.  A couple months turned into years without a job.  It nearly destroyed him, mentally and financially.

This.  For some scummy people, "being a lazy POS and living free off the taxes of others" is a perfectly acceptable way of life.

Then why hasn't the housing market crashed? If everyone is now cramming into one house, we should have a massive surplus of homes. But we don't. People are buying more homes than ever at higher prices than ever.

If we just went from 4 people each owning a car to 4 people now sharing a car, the used car market wouldn't be anywhere near as high as it is. But again, that's not the case.

Your theory would make sense (and would be my first guess too) if the markets reflected it. But they don't, they're the exact opposite.

How are these new lazy people able to afford their same middle class home and car?

Unemployment benefits today, are the same as they were pre-covid, here. Why haven't these new lazy people been kicked out their homes?

About five years ago I did a poll question in GD: Should you be happy at your job or just suck it up and work....
I was shocked at the responses... 80%+ said, just suck it up and work.

UI is only part of it.
The effects of a year+ of massive amounts of free govt money, UI in amounts greater than many people have EVER made in their lives, free govt money for each and every kid (still ongoing), student loan suspension (with the continual promise of forgiving them entirely, thus encouraging people to NOT pay them at all), and "loans" to non-existent businesses are still lingering.

People with a couple kids can make a new car payment just on those govt funds alone.

Yep.  All the evidence points to people quitting shitty jobs and getting better ones, not quitting and living in mom's basement.

Texas's maximum benefit allowed for UI is $20 higher than it was in 2019. As others have posted, there aren't "massive amounts" of money being given out in secret to all of these people.

Student loan suspension wouldn't help anyone buy a home. The debt is still owed.

Sure some scammers too advantage of PPE loans, but not to any extent that would cause these markets to skyrocket from coast to coast.

There isn't any market at all, that indicates a significant number of people quit their good paying jobs and decided to live off of unemployment. Yet we have massive employment shortages in every industry at every various salary levels.

True.  But in Socialist America, one doesn't actually need that income.  It's all provided.  Electricity, cable internet, big monitor, and one has virtual life at parents house for next to nothing.   Guy doesn't care about a great car or big house he can call his own to raise his family - because he doesn't have a family.  He doesn't have a family, because we destroyed the nuclear family expectation.  So... he's checking out.  And for him, at really no cost,  because there is no family to support anyway, and as the comments said, get your income below $40k and everything is free - so why slave away as a hated labeled person due to your race/gender for nothing of value to you, to achieve no lasting achievement you have anyway?

Same dude is probably a suicide risk- for the same reasons.  

While lots of us are happy going to work, the reality is this isn't going to get better any time soon, and is likely much worse as an entire COVID generation has learned just staying home is just fine for them.

Yeah, all that personal observation and thinking through the logical implications is nice, but it doesn't give an easy way to bash the stupid young people so shut the fuck up commie.

"Where have all the soldiers gone........."