Most ongoing social trends in the United States can be traced back to this. When foreigners are puzzled and ask me why is X or Y happening in America, this is usually the best answer. The majority of young people, but not the majority of the electorate, are in a tough or even dire situation, and so they do not have much interest in maintaining the status quo. The result is social upheaval, the varieties of which I'm sure we're all familiar with by now, and need not be repeated.
Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades.
Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.
> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times,
and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring
of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding
processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker
control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers.
Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature
of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control
in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States.
During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may
have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed
out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union
presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more
difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment
(Feiveson, 2023).
The environment we live in has become disadvantaged to the average person not only in economic terms, but in terms of life goals. The people responsible are, generally speaking, the current leadership in power, and have been holding on to that power despite their increasing age.
They have manipulated the systems to enrich themselves, at the expense of the future, and like all cyclicals in recent history, the economic pieces of it are driven by clever- re-imagingings of money-printing schemes.
Most people are worse off today than they were 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and its still getting worse. Eventually you have 27 grievances and revolutionary activity when the vast majority of people realize there is no out, there is only through, and that involves chaotically increasing violence which no sane person would wish for, ever.
I work in immigration and I akways say somewhat jokingly that if you want to make it in Berlin, you need 3 things: a job, a flat and a date. All of those markets are brutal, but if you have one of those things, it keeps you searching for the other two. Searching for all 3 at once is depressing and if people are unsuccessful for too long, they usually leave Germany altogether.
It does seem like more and more people are giving up on those basic goals. Each of those markets is now controlled by monopolistic platforms, and they're tightening their grip.
> Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market.
If we're going to discuss this problem honestly we need to admit the elephant in the room: it is much, much worse for young men than young women.
In jobs, from FT[0]:
"The unemployment rate for recent male graduates has risen steeply from less than 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the past 12 months. For young female graduates in the US, joblessness is unchanged over the same period, if not falling slightly."
"Most striking of all, recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium."
In dating, despite being much more selective, women match with around 40% of men they like, while for men it's more like 2%. Anecdotally I know many women in metropolitan areas can receive hundreds or thousands of likes in a week, while even a hundred is more than many (pretty average) men will receive in a lifetime. The number is zero, very often.
In housing it's more equal, but of course safety nets for young women exist through dating. Living in a HCOL metro area it's not uncommon for younger women to move in with their partners, and not have to pay much or any rent. That option is much, much rarer for young men, so if you don't have parents to save you, no one's coming.
The elephant in the room is the massive transport of wealth from the poor and middle class to the extreme rich coupled with the monopoly on incentives the extreme rich have on policy enactment. All that other shit is downstream.
I'm not American but I can sense the feeling is the same here in Europe. I wouldn't want to be a younger man right now. I feel like on top of every possible struggles they're facing: low wages, low sense of meaning, social media addiction, scarce opportunities for true connections... we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining", wish I knew how to help beyond my modest occasional contributions.
There are no utopias, any time. The primary thing too many people have their consent wrongly manufactured currently is the enemy of most all people and organized multicellular life is a small cabal of extremely rich people and their helpers. That's it. (Well, and the very quiet accelerationist domestic terrorists who are dangerous and totally crazy.) Not the very rich, the middling rich, middle class, the poor, brown people, the red team, or the blue team.
A functional society needs stable, sensible, countervailing factions that do not gain too much power unilaterally or permanently. Like the 5 House seats to be stolen through unscheduled gerrymandering in Texas.
National work stoppages and unionizing need to happen. Also, worker-owned co-ops too.
There's one-size-fits-all quick fix panacea, but a multitude of efforts that must be undertaken to achieve a more desirable, comfortable objective rather than giving all of the treasure to a greedy, corrupt few while the masses lack healthcare and housing.
There are nominal wages, real wages, and real real wages. Real real wages have drastically reduced. Economists think that being able to afford six iPhones and a 4K TV offsets not being able to afford rent, but it doesn't. Economists will also assert that since a 4K TV (with 25 times as many pixels as SD) costs $200, an SD TV costs $7.99 for the purpose of inflation calculation.
The moderately to fairly rich are the bread and butter of a good number of psychologist and psychiatric practices. When the majority of fundamental Maslow hierarchy of needs are met, then comes the desire for "meaning", quarter-/mid-/three-quarter-life crises/thrill-seeking, and wild-hair philanthropy.
As in all things, there will be winners and those who fail to try with sufficient determination :)
For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!
another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc.
it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.)
They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)
This is all US data BTW.
Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.
But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.
So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
I always try to communicate a strong sense of hope to my teenage kids.
Many nations have an inverted population demographic, including the US (especially without immigration).
I think the US is "as little as 10 years" away from a significant skilled labor shortage.
Well, the Boomers won’t move on. They refuse to acknowledge their age. They refuse to give up a single iota of power. Their rictus grip on the entirety of the world will damn us all.
Most of the powerful capitalists are not boomers: Musk, Altman, Thiel, Andresson, Zuckerberg.
Trump and Gates were the two stand-out boomers I found during a quick check. Plenty of powerful people are either younger than the boomers or older than the boomers (e.g. Elison, Biden, Buffett).
Housing unaffordable, pay-later bs, pervasive advertising, degree useless, family unaffordable, AI replacement, gig economy, social media dopamine nonsense, talk of another great conflict, national debt issues, climate change, weaponized media, offshoring, political polarization, lack of third place etc
Prior generations faced arguably bigger ticket challenges (stormy beaches in Normandy) but there is a relentlessness and pervasiveness to the problems now that I think may be new and cumulatively more psychologically impactful.
The mechanization of humanity has been deeply perverse. I wish technology was also offering more en-nobling ends, the option to lean in and become more of an expert on systems, but the tyrant of the application feels absolute: tech remains black boxes all the way down. Like corporatism at large, diluting responsibility seems to be the name of the game. I want to see tech that loves inviting people under the hood if they want, that's designed for plugins & the user's existing LLM/agents to come drive machine-toachone style.
I don't necessarily know how that would help economically, but spiritually I think it would be lifting to have a different socio-techncial contract; I think tech could offer some dignity & open doors in a way that escapes the plight of rank consumerism that's eating humanity's collective soul away.
It's really so so sad thinking that the US is so quickly developing such a similar "lie flat" hopelessness. I thought we had a lot more years before the mill of capitalism ground us down to this.
What I see is mass affluence. People spending hundreds of £s to see Oasis or Taylor Swift concerts. It used to be there were only so many high paying jobs like doctors, dentists, lawyers, but now you have eg. umpteenth product managers at Meta making hundreds of thousands for re-skinning the Marketplace app or whatever.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadHere's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.
> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).
They have manipulated the systems to enrich themselves, at the expense of the future, and like all cyclicals in recent history, the economic pieces of it are driven by clever- re-imagingings of money-printing schemes.
Most people are worse off today than they were 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and its still getting worse. Eventually you have 27 grievances and revolutionary activity when the vast majority of people realize there is no out, there is only through, and that involves chaotically increasing violence which no sane person would wish for, ever.
It does seem like more and more people are giving up on those basic goals. Each of those markets is now controlled by monopolistic platforms, and they're tightening their grip.
If we're going to discuss this problem honestly we need to admit the elephant in the room: it is much, much worse for young men than young women.
In jobs, from FT[0]:
"The unemployment rate for recent male graduates has risen steeply from less than 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the past 12 months. For young female graduates in the US, joblessness is unchanged over the same period, if not falling slightly."
"Most striking of all, recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium."
In dating, despite being much more selective, women match with around 40% of men they like, while for men it's more like 2%. Anecdotally I know many women in metropolitan areas can receive hundreds or thousands of likes in a week, while even a hundred is more than many (pretty average) men will receive in a lifetime. The number is zero, very often.
In housing it's more equal, but of course safety nets for young women exist through dating. Living in a HCOL metro area it's not uncommon for younger women to move in with their partners, and not have to pay much or any rent. That option is much, much rarer for young men, so if you don't have parents to save you, no one's coming.
[0]:https://archive.is/D2cBy
The rich in the US are taking advantage of it, by making the US pay for all welfare while they barely pay any taxes.
If you are an American young professional which needs to work in order to survive, you are being ripped off everyday by just existing.
A functional society needs stable, sensible, countervailing factions that do not gain too much power unilaterally or permanently. Like the 5 House seats to be stolen through unscheduled gerrymandering in Texas.
National work stoppages and unionizing need to happen. Also, worker-owned co-ops too.
There's one-size-fits-all quick fix panacea, but a multitude of efforts that must be undertaken to achieve a more desirable, comfortable objective rather than giving all of the treasure to a greedy, corrupt few while the masses lack healthcare and housing.
From the conclusion:
(I paraphrase) Mental Health has worsened rapidly in the last decade in the US, especially for young women.
It goes on:
""" It does not appear that the declining mental health of young workers is driven by a decline in the
youth wage compared to the wage of older workers; this ratio has increased. Real wages have also
been on the rise. As Feiveson (2024) has noted the relative prices of housing and childcare have
risen. Student debt is high and expensive. The health of young adults has also deteriorated, as
seen in increases in social isolation and obesity. Suicide rates of the young are rising. Moreover,
Jean Twenge provides evidence that the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted. Some
have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs.
There is a good deal of supporting evidence from a variety of surveys including from Pew, the
Conference Board and Johns Hopkins on the parlous state of young worker well-being in the USA
that we documented here. The concern is that we are observing the consequences of past well-
being shocks. We should note that 10.1% of workers aged 20 in 2023 said they were in despair.
They were aged 17 when COVID lockdowns were implemented in 2020. They were 10 years old
in 2013 as the smartphone and the internet exploded. In addition, of course, they were in high
school ages 14-18 in 2017-2021. We know from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that the well-
being of high school students deteriorated sharply around that time.15
Jean Twenge suggested to us that an explanation for this, maybe that childhood and teenage years
with low levels of in-person interaction and more time online, such as have occurred since 2014
or so, results in depression and pessimism and dissatisfaction across many domains (including
work). Social media glamorizes others' lives plus online news and social media encourage
pessimism about jobs and the economy in general. This likely results in dissatisfaction across
many domains, perhaps especially work. With an additional side element perhaps of "the whole
system is rigged anyway, so why try?"
This rise in despair/psychological distress of young workers may well be the consequence of the
mental health declines observed when they were high school children going back a decade or more.
Increasing access to the internet and smartphones seem to be the culprits. """
For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!
it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)
This is all US data BTW.
Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.
But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.
So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
I think the US is "as little as 10 years" away from a significant skilled labor shortage.
Trump and Gates were the two stand-out boomers I found during a quick check. Plenty of powerful people are either younger than the boomers or older than the boomers (e.g. Elison, Biden, Buffett).
Housing unaffordable, pay-later bs, pervasive advertising, degree useless, family unaffordable, AI replacement, gig economy, social media dopamine nonsense, talk of another great conflict, national debt issues, climate change, weaponized media, offshoring, political polarization, lack of third place etc
Prior generations faced arguably bigger ticket challenges (stormy beaches in Normandy) but there is a relentlessness and pervasiveness to the problems now that I think may be new and cumulatively more psychologically impactful.
I don't necessarily know how that would help economically, but spiritually I think it would be lifting to have a different socio-techncial contract; I think tech could offer some dignity & open doors in a way that escapes the plight of rank consumerism that's eating humanity's collective soul away.
It's really so so sad thinking that the US is so quickly developing such a similar "lie flat" hopelessness. I thought we had a lot more years before the mill of capitalism ground us down to this.