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'Nobody Wants to Work Anymore' Meme Cites Real Newspaper Articles
- _siis 4y agoWell this is not new, and its in most cases its usually said by very UN-intelligent, or otherwise dubious individuals, often with a socialist slant, blaming capitalism for being incorrect which is immaterial to the issue because at its core this is an XY communication problem based on a false narrative. If you want to get people to work, you have to compensate them appropriately, and not what you think is appropriate, but what they think is appropriate. If you have a system that degrades wages (via currency regularly), and its increasing in velocity and you don't meet that, of course you will lose people because its more economic for them to grow their own food or do some other more productive effort. What's sad is, there are many books that are well respected, that cover exactly what has and is happening, and they are willfully being ignored by the people that could make a change but don't. Labor relations is not new subject material, anything that interferes increases costs, and if its not worth their time to do the work in the first place, workers won't do it because they have options and there are fundamental limits to how far wages can fall below their real productive value. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1778) is just one such example, and the Wealth & Poverty of Nations by Landis, is another. The majority of people these days are either adding to the noise, not addressing the problem, or are actively making it worse because they personally benefit from doing so at everyone elses expense. Actually going out and doing something, is in the minority, because that's how most people alive today were raised, ideologically through the public school system.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoWe used to dream of a day when automation and robotics would take the burden from our shoulders, leaving us to lead our better lives. Now that it's happening (and has been for a couple decades) we only hear FUD from folks trying to get everybody back to work.
- mehphp 4y agoI agree the automation is happening, but I'm not seeing the part where it leads to better lives for the majority of people.
- Waterluvian 4y agoIt’s subjective and there’s a pithy response to any argument. But for me it’s night and day. I have far more time with my kids than my parents ever had with us, partly because I simply do not grocery shop or merchandise shop anymore. Yes there’s still plenty of humans involved but both are heavily automated with AMRs. This is hours a week of freed time. Again, to each their own. But for me it’s huge and I love and cherish it.
- capableweb 4y agoThat's you moving up the class-ladder, not the results of automation. As you said, humans are the cornerstone of that resource chain you're describing, for most part.
- Waterluvian 4y agoActually I moved down the class ladder. I make a fraction what my parents did. The home I grew up in is worth millions now. I could never afford it. But a number of services exist now that didn’t 30 years ago. Largely in part to many forms of normalization and automation.
- ahelwer 4y agoIt is just fundamentally strange that you are including gig economy work in a discussion of automation. That isn't automation! The people shopping for you are not automatons just because your interaction with them is mediated by an app! They are doing your chores for you and have less time with their families so you can have more time with yours.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
- athinggoingon 4y agoHow exactly is "automation and robotics" taking the burden from our shoulders? I live in a single family house. I still need to hire plumbers, electricians, handy men to paint my house, etc. I still need to hover over a porcelain bowl a few times a day and clog it up a few times a year. Toilet augers and plungers to the rescue.
- michaelt 4y agoThere was a time when if you wanted to know a phone number you had to manually consult a huge book, if you wanted to share a photo with family you had to manually carry the print to them, if you wanted to watch a movie at home you had to drive to blockbuster, and if you wanted to hurl abuse at a politician you had to wait for them to hold a rally in your city and queue for hours to get a front row seat. Now I can find phone numbers, share photos with family, watch movies on demand and hurl abuse at politicians, all without leaving my chair.
- rightbyte 4y agoOnline phone books are not as complete. People lose their digital photos. Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now. Politicians don't read pleb Twitter accounts.
- falcor84 4y agoYou lost me at "Blockbuster had better stock of films than Netflix has now". While "better" is debatable, my watch list of films I want to watch on Netflix will most likely outlive me
- rightbyte 4y agoObviously the 90s movie rental place had no movies made after the 90s. A movie rental place had more or less all blockbusters (pun intended) and a huge stack of old movies. Netflix today, not the old postal order Netflix, has nowhere near the assortment of a kinda crappy movie rental place of the late 90s.
- stuaxo 4y agoExactly; maybe we can take from this that there is (some) truth in that "nobody wants to work", so we should do something about it with automation, but we also need redistribution so that we don't end up in a society where nobody has any money except a few trillionaires.
- sokoloff 4y agoOr maybe, just maybe, people could find a way to break themself off a slice of that wealth by doing or creating something of value and nudging themselves along the number line between $0 and $1T. I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.
- waboremo 4y agoBreaking off a slice of that wealth, which by your own admission, is limited. And so what happens to people who can't? The additional problem to this framing is that anywhere between $0-[amount dictated to provide a stable life, including inflation] is a hellscape and has proven extremely difficult for majority of people to escape from for a variety of reasons. But sure, the solution is everyone being their own boss hashtag entrepreneur... but wait if everyone is their own boss... who do the bosses exploit so they can nudge themselves further down the number line faster than others?
- bobkazamakis 4y ago>Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. -- some idiot 50 years ago. Glad things have changed!
- vadansky 4y agoThe problem is we taught AI to make art before we taught it to make useful work. so when it finally catches up and we all have free time, but are we supposed to do? Just yell prompts into SD-9000?
- petterparker 4y agoI'm sure you can think of something better to do with your time than spend it on 'work'?
- gilleain 4y agoAs it happens, gave a 5-min lightning talk on text-to-img yesterday, and from discussions with colleagues afterwards one thing that works well is 'Mr Blobby' in various situations. Hmm, not on-topic for OP, but oh well.
- WJW 4y agoThe idea that people would be free to make art when automation obsoleted menial labor was because art was viewed as something inherently pleasurable to do, not because it is needed. You could yell prompts into SD-9000 if you want, or you can paint it yourself, you can even choose to do nothing at all. It doesn't matter which, as long as you are pleased with the result.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoI think its a bit like starting a hobby programming project. If you google your idea, you're most likely going to see that someone else already did it and all the fun will be sucked out of what you're doing. Better to just not look and do it for your own enjoyment. If you want to make art, make it, don't look at what stable diffusion or others are doing.
- fullshark 4y agoWhat we mostly do with our free time: consume and not create.
- refurb 4y agoAutomation still requires workers. And those workers would get more money. And have more stuff, better medical care, more experiences. And then someone would say “thats unfair they have more money than me”. Rinse and repeat.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAutomation needs 1 or two people to run a machine that replaced 200.
- refurb 4y agoRight, that’s my point.
- CalRobert 4y agoSo long as there remain any scarcities of necessities (housing, mostly) improvements in automation and robotics will only be put to use to help us outcompete our peers. It's more galling when you realize these shortages, at least of housing, are artificially created in order to make sure people keep working as much as possible.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe housing shortages are artificial, but there is no organized thought of keeping people working behind it. Mostly just homeowners voting in their self interest, and unintended consequences.
- CalRobert 4y agoThe connection between "I want my home price to go up" and "I want other people to have to work really really hard for me to sell them my home" should be less tenuous.
- eulers_secret 4y agoI have recently given up the notion of ever owning a house: it’s far too expensive. Even with rent increases, I can live in 500 sqft apartments and basically retire in my 30s/40s. If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time. The price of single-family detached homes is so out of line that it is absurd.
- jjav 4y ago> If I buy a house I’ll work until I’m 70. And I’ll be house poor that whole time. How will you pay for the ever-increasing rent on apartments when you're 70 and beyond? Owning a house is short-term pain but allows you to lock in a "rent" (mortgage) which will never increase and will at one point go to zero, hopefully before you retire.
- BurningFrog 4y agoIt's been happening since the Industrial Revolution started ~250 years ago. Today's luxuries becomes tomorrow's bare necessities. Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more.
- alecbz 4y ago> Each generation ends up having more than the previous one could dream of, and yet they keep wanting more. This makes sense though -- I think it's somewhat natural for people to want growth/progress. I've found that working towards goals is one of the things that makes me the happiest and most fulfilled in life.
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, I think it's mostly human nature. Not only do we always want more, we also want more than other people.
- uS436aRs6BbC30c 4y agoi personally don’t know anyone who _wants_ to work. people work because fulfillment of basic needs has been tied to making oneself “useful” in a capitalist society. given a choice the vast majority of humans wouldn’t work a day in their lives.
- casion 4y agoI love working and do it even if my needs would otherwise be met by public subsidies (I am disabled, obviously and legally). It helps that I'm paid for work that I'd otherwise been doing, but I have a decent history of working less great jobs because I find the prospect of overcoming challenges, that I'd not put upon myself, satisfying.
- sokoloff 4y agoFulfillment of basic needs was also tied (at least at the group level) to being useful in agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies. Nature is a harsh mistress and we've abstracted a lot, but not all, of that away.
- smeej 4y agoI wonder what the breakdown is between people who, if all their needs were satisfied at some agreed-upon level, would choose to engage in activities that produce something or who wouldn't. And of the ones who wouldn't, what would their reasons be? For some, I can imagine a great taste for art and travel and appreciation, which isn't "productive" per se, but is self-motivational. For others, perhaps trauma of various kinds makes the prospect of producing anything and subjecting it to scrutiny overwhelming. I'm sure there are some people who truly are just plain lazy, but I think if people truly don't want to do anything, there's usually a reason, and if that reason were overcome, most people, just because they're humans, would want to do something.
- Ajedi32 4y agoMost people would want to do something but not necessarily something useful. Just think about what hobbies people have, and ask yourself what percentage of those are as economically valuable as what those same people do in their day jobs. I'd suggest there are almost no cases like that, otherwise those people would quit their jobs and spend all that time on their hobbies instead. (And indeed, some have.)
- kortex 4y agoI'm sure if we dig deep enough, we can probably find clay tablets impressed with gripes about lazy workers and insolent children. Socrates famously groused about "kids these days". > Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. - Socrates, ~400 BCE [1] [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/?amp=1 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/?amp=1 [2] previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426
- babaloon5 4y agoWe have this kinda, first chapter of history begins at Sumer.
- bmacho 4y agoWhat if the "kids these days" is not constant, but periodical? People say "kids these days" when kids get lazier, and don't say nothing, when parents get stricter.
- javajosh 4y agoIf you measure laziness by counting the angry shouts of a parent, then a stricter parent will sound the same as a lazier kid.
- kshacker 4y agoI wonder if the famous survivorship bias plays a role here? The people writing this are those whose writings survived generations so they may have been good and motivated and could complain about the young ones, but eh slackers who may see the young ones as more motivated maybe never wrote anything to influence the society's opinions.
- mywittyname 4y agoI'm sure everyone felt like they were overworked by their parents when they were younger and parents can readily identify chores that they were responsible for as kids which are not omitted from their children's current regime.
- capableweb 4y ago"Nobody wants to work anymore" HN edition: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22nobody%20wants%20to%20work%20anymore%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (mostly meta-comments about others being of that opinion though, still interesting conversations around those comments) Results date from yesterday to 10 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426116): > Because it seems that once you declared basic income and nobody wants to work anymore
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- manholio 4y agoI'm sure that with the right search engine one could find a century worth of mentions for absolutely any common phrase, for example "people are working harder and harder", "children don't like to work anymore", "there are not enough jobs", etc.etc. Such memes only prove the people spreading them don't understand selection bias and cherry picking. "Nobody learns statistics anymore."
- monkpit 4y agoThis is missing the point of the meme. The point is that the phrase “nobody wants to work” is a meaningless constant refrain that goes back decades. It’s not new, and it’s not true.
- coutego 4y agoYou mean that "Nobody wants to work anymore" is a successful meme, then.
- manholio 4y ago> The point is that the phrase “nobody wants to work” is a meaningless constant refrain that goes back decades And you are missing the point of my rebuttal: that by the same method anything can be made to appear like a constant meaningless refrain, regardless of actually being one. It should be clear to anyone with even lacklustre intelligence that finding recurring instances of the phrase "there are not enough jobs" throughout history does not rule out that there were times when that concern was indeed warranted.
- zulban 4y agoYou're criticizing the meme but you just restated its core point.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y agoTrue story, as an american, most people I grew up with are not working corporate jobs. Of my cousins, probably 60% are willfully unemployed and refuse to work for anyone. They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products. Anything to not have to work. The crazy thing is they are generally very happy and have had not trouble dating. Its the people day in and out in their 150k-300k a year corporate job that seem the most miserable to me. For reference I'm white upper middle class, and all the people spoken about above are college educated.
- binarymax 4y ago"They make money through odd jobs, day trading, selling online products." ...Is this not working?
- TotoHorner 4y agoAlso, day trading isn’t some way to make you money. It’s a great way to lose money while you think you’re working though.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y agoIts barely working. Maybe 5-15 hours a week. The income is actually surprising though, can range 5k-15k a month
- EliRivers 4y agoCan't deny that while I work full-time, I certainly produce the vast majority of the value I produce in a fraction of that time. 5-15 hours seems about right; if anything, closer to 5 than 15.
- muro 4y agoSounds pretty smart, if they can get so much money for only so little time.
- PopAlongKid 4y ago>The income is actually surprising though, can range 5k-15k a month Is that gross, or after paying income and Social Security & Medicare tax, like wage earners do?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
- onion2k 4y agome, a hard worker ...you say, while posting on HN.
- ajross 4y ago> Lately the government seems to be wanting to take more from me to give to those types Relevant to the article, this particular rhetoric too has been a consistent and regular complaint in the conservative discourse over the years. While it's true that some forms of social safety net assistance like medical care are definitely getting more expensive (because the care itself is getting more expensive as we discover new tests and new treatments, of course), most of the stuff you're complaining about has been getting significantly stingier over the decades. Is there a particular benefit program that is upsetting you? Are you absolutely sure it's getting more generous?
- monero-xmr 4y agoPandemic payouts and college debt forgiveness, lately.
- ajross 4y agoAre those going to people who "don't want to work", though? That was your original frame: assistance for unemployed/underemployed, not just assistance for people other than you. Most statistics I've seen show that student debt holders are employed at a greater rate than the general population (not surprising, they have bills to pay). And of course pandemic relief was quite famously disproportionately aimed at employERs. All those PPP loans did nothing for the unemployed, as they only went to firms with existing payrolls. I really think if you look at this in a more detached way, you'd maybe find that the "government helps people don't want to work" frame of these arguments is misplaced (which is the point of the linked article).
- rascul 4y agoI never did want to work. Not now and not then. It's nice to get paid, though.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoI'm not sure why anyone bothers with Snopes these days. They've become just as lazy as many of the sites they supposedly critique. This article (listicle really since they're just aggregating these other sources and putting a stamp on it) "confirms" > a brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages. by providing references to quotes from a pastor, a home owner, a few small business owners, a former labourer, and farmers. If these are the evil capitalists that socialists are railing against then I think they'll have a hard time recruiting.
- UIUC_06 4y agoRight, as I said in a separate post. They used to be sort of a fun Mythbusters for the Web. Now they're just a site trolling for clicks from left-wing users.
- commandlinefan 4y ago> They've become just as lazy Well, in this particular case, they seem to have expended a lot of effort to painstakingly search newspaper archive to support a meme posted by... "the Great Socialist Cat Memes Facebook page". I'm not sure they're necessarily lazy, they're just suspiciously specific about where they're willing to put in any effort.
- black_13 4y ago
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoPeople does not want to work >>for your company<< because they can have better opportunities than what >>your company<< offers. That's free market capitalism which companies are fighting for.
- p0nce 4y agoExactly what is going on really. Employers unable to envision that maybe it might not be worth it to work for your company are getting punished as information flows faster. The youth is not lazy, just has better information.
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoHas anyone ever wanted to work? There's a reason it's called "work" and they have to pay you to do it.
- k__ 4y agoOften it's the other way around. Just look at nurses. They are chronically underpaid, yet still do their jobs.
- yamtaddle 4y agoTeaching relies heavily on "just do this extra bit you don't really have to... it's for the kids, after all". Stay a little longer, get this extra thing done, just buy that thing yourself, come in a little early to help with this other thing. You're sick but this kid emailed to say they didn't understand the lesson the sub taught... and you could help, so you do. Implicitly, when not explicitly. It gets a lot more obvious that's what's going on after you leave education and see what a normal job is like. Which might be less insulting if the pay were competitive, but it's not that hard for a competent teacher to leave for another sector and see a 20-50% TC increase. You lose the Summers but everything else is better.
- JohnFen 4y agoYes, I know lots of people who want to work. They derive satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from it. That they get paid isn't the primary thing for them -- that's just a necessity of life. But they wouldn't feel that way working just anywhere. They have found a great match with an employer who treats them well.
- bfung 4y agoIt's true. The people saying Nobody Wants to Work Anymore are the ones who truly don't want to work - they just want to tell other people [what|how|when|where] to work. There's also those who don't want to work by telling others they can generate currency/value using computers to generate some semi-random numbers and writing it down, declaring the random number has value. /s
- skizm 4y agoSimilar: https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1601/ https://xkcd.com/1601/
- karaterobot 4y agoOne of the fallacies I find most annoying is "people said this thing in the past, too" with the implication being that it wasn't true then, isn't true now, and can probably never be true. None of those things follow. To be clear, I think the statement "nobody wants to work anymore" is incorrect. But that's irrelevant, I'm talking about the quality of the argument.
- matai_kolila 4y agoI think the implication can more aptly be stated as, "We survived this sentiment then, we can survive this sentiment now."
- zulban 4y agoWhen you summarize the argument as just the "past", you're rounding off the actual error. Most often when people say "nobody wants to work anymore" they're not talking about the entire historical past. They're business owners or parents or investors talking about their personal experience, compared to just a few years or decades ago. In that case, 150 years of people saying this every decade does show that these people are simply out of touch, yelling at clouds. Unless someone wants to argue that every few years there's a complete reversal of sentiment.
- goatcode 4y agoGeneration 0: each child kills 0 people on average. Generation 1: each child kills 1 people on average. G0 comments that kids are killing more people these days. Generation 2: each child kills 2 people on average. G1 comments that kids are killing more people these days. Generation 3: each child kills 3 people on average. G2 comments that kids are killing more people these days. Generation 3 points out that "lol people have been saying that forever. Nothing is happening. Our generation aren't that bad, because previous generations had the same narrative." Please.
- z3c0 4y agoI'm catching a whiff of straw... There's a fundamental distinction between a relative statement eg "People are working less than they were before" and an absolute statement eg "Nobody wants to work anymore". What you've demonstrated falls into the former.
- goatcode 4y agoRelationships in time work transitively -- if each successive generation is worse, they're by definition worse than any have been before. See: Peter Gibbons and how his life is the worst its ever been, each new day.
- quacked 4y ago"All of these new social practices are going to crash society!" (Societies crash) 1000 years later: "People have always been saying that!"
- rsynnott 4y ago> The piece began, "According to a new survey released by TinyPulse, 1 in 5 executive leaders agree with this statement: 'No one wants to work.' These same leaders cite a 'lack of response to job postings' and 'poor quality candidates' when describing why it’s hard to hire right now." Alternative interpretation: 20% of executives are bad at hiring. Like this very much seems like a case of blaming the general public for their failings.
- WeylandYutani 4y agoIn the Netherlands part time contracts are the norm. Most people are able to have a decent lifestyle with a 30-36 hour work week. Then you hear stories about Japan or Korea and I think to myself "those countries aren't even richer than we are what the HELL are they doing all day at the office?!".
- UIUC_06 4y agoAside from the truth or falsity of the claim, which is amply discussed in this thread: Snopes is, supposedly, a neutral Mythbusters site for the Web. "Urban street gangs initiate members by making them drive at night with lights off and kill anyone who flashes lights at them" -- busted!. Great stuff. Instead, they bend over backwards to cite irrelevancies about political figures they like: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-us-mexico-border-president/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-us-mexico-border... > But we were unable to find a documented Biden visit to the U.S.-Mexico border during his presidency. We reached out to the White House to learn more and will update this post if we get more information. > We should note, however, that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Texas border in June 2021 and toured immigration facilities. In December 2019, before the presidential elections, Jill Biden also visited asylum seekers in camps on the Mexican side of the border. How is relevant that Harris went to El Paso? The press secretary said Biden went there. We "reached out to the White House to learn more" -- what more is there to learn? They already busted it. .. and investigate, scrupulously, anything favorable to their side: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walker-texas-resident/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walker-texas-resident/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-musk-could-threaten-free-speech/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-musk-could-threaten-fr... It's fine for Snopes to be a "fact checker with an agenda." They just need to disclose the agenda.
- josephcsible 4y agoThe problem isn't that people don't want to work. That's perfectly normal and expected. The problem is that we give them so much free stuff (paid for by the people who do work, of course) that they don't have to work.
- coutego 4y agoIt's very ironic that the meme 'meme' mutated itself to become something much less sophisticated (an image with a caption shared on the Internet) than its original (and true) meaning. Just another proof that meme natural selection favours the less sophisticated ones. But it's 2022 and we all know that. Truth to be told, the same happens in gene natural selection. All animals are insects, other than a rounding error.
- kkfx 4y agoThe real modern issue is simple: - advertising say you can make millions just doing some comfy fun things like having sex on cam (OnlyFan and co), or publishing some casual videos about nail arts etc; - other advertising say you can just make money, not that much but still more than many classic jobs just running a bit on a bike (Just Eat, Uber Eat, Foodora, Glovo etc the "raider platform"); - in the past IF you worked hard you got something in return, nowadays on one side many advertising tell "in 2030 you'll own nothing and being happy", the reality again tell that working poor do exists, that even if you work hard inflation makes money value less faster than the income growth etc. Long story short YES, it's true almost nobody want to work for starvation wages. The real meme should then be the classic https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg