5 ms·

It's a messed up world for a young adult, but it's also full of more _accessible_ potential than ever. If people would stop and make an honest assessment of th

by m52go 8y ago

It's a messed up world for a young adult, but it's also full of more _accessible_ potential than ever. If people would stop and make an honest assessment of their situation, why they're not where they want to be, commit to grinding until they get there, and actually DO IT...things would be better. Unfortunately it's become fashionable to point fingers, assign blame, and make a ruckus about being 'oppressed'. That may get you more Twitter followers, but it won't lead to economic betterment.

arcaster 8y ago
As a millennial, this is why my generation is pathetic. I'm not sure where I read this, but a quote that really resonates with me as a millennial who went out and found / fought for nearly all their opportunities "I love being a millennial, because it's so easy to be better than most of my generation".
- holografix 8y ago
  I’d invite that person to consider how much of her/his success is due to luck and I’d draw parallels with the peasant who working twice as much and providing more grain is allowed a bit more privilege. I’m all for meritocracy. But only if the game is fair.
  - ericd 8y ago
    It's more than a bit hyperbolic to compare our current economic setup with that of medieval serfdom. The difference in economic mobility is extreme. Yes, we have some issues we need to sort out - NIMBYs and zoning laws tamping down on new housing supply in cities, and a broken healthcare market are the largest ones. But it's dangerous to forget that the system we have is overall overwhelmingly better for most people than what came before the 1900s, let alone before the 1400s.
- test6554 8y ago
  As a millennial, I feel like if I were not in a technology field, I would be screwed. But as it stands, I bust my ass doing what I love, and society happens to value the work I love to do. It would be comforting for me to attribute my good fortune to being a badass or super talented, but I know that my chosen field is just highly valued. I know some people who have followed their dreams and it has led them straight into the poor house doing years of unpaid internships all for a job that is rare, but still only one or two steps above minimum wage. But I do think there's an attitude and professionalism problem. The term "funemployed", the way beards, tattoos, and casual drug use are coming back in style. The oversharing. And the fact that somehow the generation that grew up with computers still has way too many people on the wrong side of the digital divide.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > why my generation is pathetic. Your generation is not pathetic. Your generation has had the deck well stacked against you economically before you were born.
  - arcaster 8y ago
    Found the millennial who majored in art and took out ludicrous student loans. Good luck blaming others for your problems... Poor you.
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      No you found the middle aged guy that was able to pay for an engineering degree by working a part time job. And graduated with 10k in the bank.
chc 8y ago
This seems to ignore the actual trends of economic inequality in America. It's easy to brush off people's problems and say, "Ah, they just need to work harder." But the numbers show that there actually are real issues with our society. Any theory that starts with "Millennials just need to get with the program" ignores the reality that people are largely following the program our society has prescribed — e.g. college attendance is much higher now than it was in the '60s — and yet it's not working out for a huge number of them.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  There are comments in this thread that say, well people should get a STEM job if they don't want to be poor. Ignoring that outside engineering and software most STEM jobs pay poorly. That only allows for 3-5% of workers to be 'not poor'
rpowers 8y ago
As a millennial, I agree. There is definitely something going on that has made my age group crave attention.
amelius 8y ago
> If people would stop and make an honest assessment of their situation, why they're not where they want to be, commit to grinding until they get there, and actually DO IT...things would be better. For most people, salary is completely decorrelated from how hard they work. It's quite depressing, actually.
nfRfqX5n 8y ago
kind of. but, the system built on debt and is set up for you to fail.
api 8y ago
There's a lot of accessible potential but the market today is so fast that I feel like it amounts to something like a random casino. The window for any particular hustle sometimes lasts as little as six months to a year. Nobody can actually do anything in that time frame, so who ends up winning the big bounties attached to these windows ends up being whomever just happened to be working on this or that thing for some random serendipitous reason or happened to be in the right place at the right time. The canonical example would be someone who mined a bit of Bitcoin in 2010 and archived it and forgot about it for six or seven years. That's an extreme one but to varying degrees the whole economy seems to look like that. I think this is a problem because it completely decouples reward from sustained focus and planning. If you pick something of value and apply yourself to it, chances are it will take too long and you'll miss the window. You have to be there before there is any rational reason to think something will be valuable, otherwise you miss out to the people who randomly happened to be standing there when money fell on them. As such it ends up reducing to a lotto or a bad MMORPG where you run around and loot kind of randomly materializes here and there. The roles that do require sustained focus and rational planning are careers, and now you're in the early 21st century real estate hyperinflation trap. Most of the career jobs that pay well are in places where the rent or mortgage costs are so high you'll never accumulate wealth, and most of the places with affordable housing are places where there are no good upwardly mobile jobs. If you follow a rational career path your choice is between two different ways of going nowhere. The only way to get ahead is to win one of those random hustle lotteries and vault out ahead of real estate's unstoppable inflation. (Certain other necessities like tuition and health care are inflating without bound too, but I picked on real estate for being the worst offender.)
holografix 8y ago
That’s a very tone deaf response. Accepting a life of toil and misery because the government provides you with no support and because of the selfish economical choices of the previous generation really wouldn’t be a game that I’d be willing to play quietly.
Analemma_ 8y ago
Comments like this are infuriating because they demonstrate an axiomatic commitment to a totally bogus premise. That is, "if you just work hard, you will be successful", and the completely evil logical converse of that statement, "Therefore, if you're not successful, it must be because you didn't grind enough." You just take this as obviously true, without ever considering that it is completely possible to grind yourself into dust and still be just spinning wheels, because of structural factors that previous generations erected and then demanded Millenials claw their way out of. Are you aware that the ratio between average house cost and the median hourly wage of a 20-something worker is an order of magnitude higher for Millenials than it was for people in the seventies? Meaning, essentially, that you have to work ten times as much to get the same result? No, and for all you know Millenials are working twice and hard as you were, and then you take the 5x shortfall as proof that they're just pointing fingers.
- qaq 8y ago
  what would happen to that metric if you exclude NYC, SF etc. ? I think if you add "if you just work hard, you will be successful" in the appropriate field then it does hold true in most cases. If someone choses to spend 50-100K on a degree that has 0 relevance in the job market is it really a fault of the system?
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    > what would happen to that metric if you exclude NYC, SF etc. ? It wouldn't budge much: when you leave big cities, houses get a lot cheaper, but work quickly dries up too, so you're right back where you started. It's the nature of the economy at present that the cities are where the jobs there; that's why everyone keeps moving in despite the skyrocketing rent.
mattnewton 8y ago
I think this is a load of nonsense, as a successful millennial who works hard. Working hard is just table stakes; you also need to be lucky, which I have been. I can look back on numerous occasions where there were literal lotteries that prevented me from getting wrecked, starting with a lottery my young parents got for affordable housing in an area with nice schools and a lottery I got selected for a math and science academy. And there are many more areas where luck played a subtle but serious factor. You also need generational support; in my case my parents worked crazy hard to get me into schools where I could work hard and roll the dice. This snowballs quickly. Deriding people who are unemployed and have inescapable debt as caring about Twitter followers ignores the real dispair facing multiple generations of Americans who worked very hard, got a degree, and were rewarded with a hostile marketplace that didn’t need their labour. They got a raw deal, Netflix and cheap opiates for expensive healthcare and poor pay.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  This touches on a strange phenomena: If your parents were wealthy or middle class and you are middle class, nobody judges you. But if your parents were poor, and you are poor as an adult, that's somehow a moral failing, despite the fact that your level of economic mobility was identical to your middle-class peer above. Nobody scolds someone making 60K/year for not 10x-ing their income, regardless of the opportunities they were given.
thatfrenchguy 8y ago
Yeah, I’m a millennial foreigner from a lower middle class working in the US in a tech job. Ask your colleagues around about what their parents are doing, and we’ll talk about accessible potential again, or most likely you’ll see horrible inequality.
loco5niner 8y ago
> If people would stop and make an honest assessment of their situation, why they're not where they want to be, commit to grinding until they get there, and actually DO IT...things would be better. Hear Hear. I have to admit, I'm blessed. Good job with good co-workers. Amazing wife. Great family/church/community. Yet, I really need to do this. I'm not where i should be, and it's do to my own laziness/procrastination/etc. It's too easy to blame someone else for my own shortcomings. PS - Here is a related quote I've been reflecting on recently about my habit of procrastination. So far, it's been quite helpful. "If I'm honest about it, the actions I've engaged in today satisfy my short-term pleasures rather than my long-term goals."
EADGBE 8y ago
I'm in agreement with you mostly; it's just the un-accounted for "oh-shit" moments. Like real "oh-shit" moments, though. A lot of comments in here relating to health care; that's a good example.

by m52go 8y ago

arcaster 8y ago

As a millennial, this is why my generation is pathetic. I'm not sure where I read this, but a quote that really resonates with me as a millennial who went out and found / fought for nearly all their opportunities "I love being a millennial, because it's so easy to be better than most of my generation".

holografix 8y ago
I’d invite that person to consider how much of her/his success is due to luck and I’d draw parallels with the peasant who working twice as much and providing more grain is allowed a bit more privilege. I’m all for meritocracy. But only if the game is fair.
- ericd 8y ago
  It's more than a bit hyperbolic to compare our current economic setup with that of medieval serfdom. The difference in economic mobility is extreme. Yes, we have some issues we need to sort out - NIMBYs and zoning laws tamping down on new housing supply in cities, and a broken healthcare market are the largest ones. But it's dangerous to forget that the system we have is overall overwhelmingly better for most people than what came before the 1900s, let alone before the 1400s.
test6554 8y ago
As a millennial, I feel like if I were not in a technology field, I would be screwed. But as it stands, I bust my ass doing what I love, and society happens to value the work I love to do. It would be comforting for me to attribute my good fortune to being a badass or super talented, but I know that my chosen field is just highly valued. I know some people who have followed their dreams and it has led them straight into the poor house doing years of unpaid internships all for a job that is rare, but still only one or two steps above minimum wage. But I do think there's an attitude and professionalism problem. The term "funemployed", the way beards, tattoos, and casual drug use are coming back in style. The oversharing. And the fact that somehow the generation that grew up with computers still has way too many people on the wrong side of the digital divide.
Gibbon1 8y ago
> why my generation is pathetic. Your generation is not pathetic. Your generation has had the deck well stacked against you economically before you were born.
- arcaster 8y ago
  Found the millennial who majored in art and took out ludicrous student loans. Good luck blaming others for your problems... Poor you.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    No you found the middle aged guy that was able to pay for an engineering degree by working a part time job. And graduated with 10k in the bank.

chc 8y ago

This seems to ignore the actual trends of economic inequality in America. It's easy to brush off people's problems and say, "Ah, they just need to work harder." But the numbers show that there actually are real issues with our society. Any theory that starts with "Millennials just need to get with the program" ignores the reality that people are largely following the program our society has prescribed — e.g. college attendance is much higher now than it was in the '60s — and yet it's not working out for a huge number of them.

Gibbon1 8y ago
There are comments in this thread that say, well people should get a STEM job if they don't want to be poor. Ignoring that outside engineering and software most STEM jobs pay poorly. That only allows for 3-5% of workers to be 'not poor'

rpowers 8y ago

As a millennial, I agree. There is definitely something going on that has made my age group crave attention.

amelius 8y ago

nfRfqX5n 8y ago

kind of. but, the system built on debt and is set up for you to fail.

api 8y ago

There's a lot of accessible potential but the market today is so fast that I feel like it amounts to something like a random casino. The window for any particular hustle sometimes lasts as little as six months to a year. Nobody can actually do anything in that time frame, so who ends up winning the big bounties attached to these windows ends up being whomever just happened to be working on this or that thing for some random serendipitous reason or happened to be in the right place at the right time. The canonical example would be someone who mined a bit of Bitcoin in 2010 and archived it and forgot about it for six or seven years. That's an extreme one but to varying degrees the whole economy seems to look like that. I think this is a problem because it completely decouples reward from sustained focus and planning. If you pick something of value and apply yourself to it, chances are it will take too long and you'll miss the window. You have to be there before there is any rational reason to think something will be valuable, otherwise you miss out to the people who randomly happened to be standing there when money fell on them. As such it ends up reducing to a lotto or a bad MMORPG where you run around and loot kind of randomly materializes here and there. The roles that do require sustained focus and rational planning are careers, and now you're in the early 21st century real estate hyperinflation trap. Most of the career jobs that pay well are in places where the rent or mortgage costs are so high you'll never accumulate wealth, and most of the places with affordable housing are places where there are no good upwardly mobile jobs. If you follow a rational career path your choice is between two different ways of going nowhere. The only way to get ahead is to win one of those random hustle lotteries and vault out ahead of real estate's unstoppable inflation. (Certain other necessities like tuition and health care are inflating without bound too, but I picked on real estate for being the worst offender.)

holografix 8y ago

That’s a very tone deaf response. Accepting a life of toil and misery because the government provides you with no support and because of the selfish economical choices of the previous generation really wouldn’t be a game that I’d be willing to play quietly.

Analemma_ 8y ago

Comments like this are infuriating because they demonstrate an axiomatic commitment to a totally bogus premise. That is, "if you just work hard, you will be successful", and the completely evil logical converse of that statement, "Therefore, if you're not successful, it must be because you didn't grind enough." You just take this as obviously true, without ever considering that it is completely possible to grind yourself into dust and still be just spinning wheels, because of structural factors that previous generations erected and then demanded Millenials claw their way out of. Are you aware that the ratio between average house cost and the median hourly wage of a 20-something worker is an order of magnitude higher for Millenials than it was for people in the seventies? Meaning, essentially, that you have to work ten times as much to get the same result? No, and for all you know Millenials are working twice and hard as you were, and then you take the 5x shortfall as proof that they're just pointing fingers.

qaq 8y ago
what would happen to that metric if you exclude NYC, SF etc. ? I think if you add "if you just work hard, you will be successful" in the appropriate field then it does hold true in most cases. If someone choses to spend 50-100K on a degree that has 0 relevance in the job market is it really a fault of the system?
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  > what would happen to that metric if you exclude NYC, SF etc. ? It wouldn't budge much: when you leave big cities, houses get a lot cheaper, but work quickly dries up too, so you're right back where you started. It's the nature of the economy at present that the cities are where the jobs there; that's why everyone keeps moving in despite the skyrocketing rent.

mattnewton 8y ago

I think this is a load of nonsense, as a successful millennial who works hard. Working hard is just table stakes; you also need to be lucky, which I have been. I can look back on numerous occasions where there were literal lotteries that prevented me from getting wrecked, starting with a lottery my young parents got for affordable housing in an area with nice schools and a lottery I got selected for a math and science academy. And there are many more areas where luck played a subtle but serious factor. You also need generational support; in my case my parents worked crazy hard to get me into schools where I could work hard and roll the dice. This snowballs quickly. Deriding people who are unemployed and have inescapable debt as caring about Twitter followers ignores the real dispair facing multiple generations of Americans who worked very hard, got a degree, and were rewarded with a hostile marketplace that didn’t need their labour. They got a raw deal, Netflix and cheap opiates for expensive healthcare and poor pay.

spamizbad 8y ago
This touches on a strange phenomena: If your parents were wealthy or middle class and you are middle class, nobody judges you. But if your parents were poor, and you are poor as an adult, that's somehow a moral failing, despite the fact that your level of economic mobility was identical to your middle-class peer above. Nobody scolds someone making 60K/year for not 10x-ing their income, regardless of the opportunities they were given.

thatfrenchguy 8y ago

Yeah, I’m a millennial foreigner from a lower middle class working in the US in a tech job. Ask your colleagues around about what their parents are doing, and we’ll talk about accessible potential again, or most likely you’ll see horrible inequality.

loco5niner 8y ago

> If people would stop and make an honest assessment of their situation, why they're not where they want to be, commit to grinding until they get there, and actually DO IT...things would be better. Hear Hear. I have to admit, I'm blessed. Good job with good co-workers. Amazing wife. Great family/church/community. Yet, I really need to do this. I'm not where i should be, and it's do to my own laziness/procrastination/etc. It's too easy to blame someone else for my own shortcomings. PS - Here is a related quote I've been reflecting on recently about my habit of procrastination. So far, it's been quite helpful. "If I'm honest about it, the actions I've engaged in today satisfy my short-term pleasures rather than my long-term goals."

EADGBE 8y ago

I'm in agreement with you mostly; it's just the un-accounted for "oh-shit" moments. Like real "oh-shit" moments, though. A lot of comments in here relating to health care; that's a good example.