I don't think some lingering hope of promotion is the likeliest motivator for people who pour themselves into relatively poorly compensated work. Many people ta

I don't think some lingering hope of promotion is the likeliest motivator for people who pour themselves into relatively poorly compensated work. Many people take pride in something for its own sake, and/or for the value it provides to others. I would argue these people are a massively underappreciated force in the world, and a big reason anything works at all. For every ladder climber slashing and burning their way through the social fabric, there are dozens of people quietly going about their days cleaning up debris, providing largely unseen services, perhaps even with little awareness of the significance of their contributions. This is of course a caricatured oversimplification, and I am in no way defending abusive arrangements, but I worry that the relative proportions of each type seem to be changing, and not in a promising direction. I also worry about the normalization of scorched earth, such that a young person might never learn, or learn only later, that the latter is not the only or the most rewarding approach to life. Finally I worry there is a similar lesson still to be learned at the species level: reciprocal partnerships with ecosystems and other living beings tend to produce better long term outcomes than opportunistic extraction