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I mentor college students as part of a structured mentoring program. Some of the young people who come through the group have wildly pessimistic views on the wo
by PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I mentor college students as part of a structured mentoring program. Some of the young people who come through the group have wildly pessimistic views on the world, especially as it pertains to jobs and capitalism.
Part of our job is to defuse some of the more self-defeating views, but it’s increasingly difficult to compete against the non-stop onslaught of pessimism that comes from their subreddits and Twitter follows. When someone has been conditioned for hours each day to believe that capitalism is evil, that no one should have to work, that UBI is as simple as taxing Jeff Bezos a little more, and that jobs are “wage slavery”, it’s hard to compete with healthy mentorship advice.
Some of these online communities are downright toxic. Some of my most difficult mentees subscribed to “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) communities on Reddit that felt like the notorious incel communities we’ve all heard about, but with the vitriol directed at jobs and bosses.
There are even explicit anti-work movements, like /r/antiwork on Reddit, that have a stated goal of ending work. No alternative is proposed and no one explains how society would function if no one works, but instead they complain about having to work at all. Someone consuming this material on their phone before, during, and after work every single day is obviously going to become bitter and miserable.
This doesn’t explain everything, of course, but it is a growing factor among the most disgruntled young people I see coming through our program.
- praptak 5y ago> /r/antiwork on Reddit, that have a stated goal of ending work This got me interested, so I checked it out. The top thread is literally about r/antiwork NOT having this goal: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/o032ek/for_anyone_who_might_think_otherwise/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/o032ek/for_anyone... And "not wasting your life working for something you don't believe in" is quite a different beast. I believe even Paul Graham could say this, albeit with totally different idea about what you should do instead.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> This got me interested, so I checked it out. The top thread is literally about r/antiwork NOT having this goal: It's the same way that incel communities insist they're NOT about hating women, but rather something deeper and more respectable: It's a veneer of misdirection so they can justify their continued complaining about having to work. Like I said, they want to end "work" but they don't ever explore ideas for how society would function or how they'd get their food, clothing, and housing if work was abolished. They tend to romanticize primitive, pre-industrialized societies as the easy times, while assuming we could abolish work and still maintain our iPhones, internet, food, and shelter simply by [other] people's innate desire to build these things for free.
- throwaway24124 5y agoHow do you counter/defuse these views?