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Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every onc

Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions. From a Marxist perspective I think we're seeing the synthesis of deeply individualistic capitalist culture, and the renewed awareness of class consciousness and workers rights. In the past these kind of conflicts have led to the 5 day work week, The New Deal, etc. But the same conditiona can also lead to far-right authoritarianism.

achierius 2y ago
Love seeing this kind of analysis on HN of all places. At least today we can hope that our understanding of history will lead to people being less electorally friendly to the fascist right than they were the first time around.
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious. A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.
  - fn-mote 2y ago
    Interesting. > men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)
    - bdndndndbve 2y ago
      I'm not sure if I understand your point, but the point is there's a kind of credentialing treadmill where once women get into a particular field or class of institution it loses prestige and men flee to alternatives which become more prestigious. An example is undergrad biology becoming predominantly women and being seem as the "easiest" STEM major. I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less. This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.
      - fc417fc802 2y ago
        [dead]
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        Can you get a good job with only a 1st degree in biology? I doubt it.
      - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
        I may be cynical but I don't think men flee fields were women manage to enter. I do see this trend though. But I rather see it as men moving to the next cool thing, leaving the leftovers of their no longer prestigious / downward trending field for women to finally enter, who may see it as a victory without realizing the goalpost has yet again shifted on them/carpet has been pulled from under their feet already. Much like women no longer qualified as gamers for playing the same games that men grew up with (point n click, puzzle games...) because men flocked to newer genres since (actions/shooter) Bit of a dated caricature but fitting imho. If men wanted to keep women out, it is easily managed, case in point programming was seen as secretarial work until men decided it made good money and they should appropriate it. (Fully expecting to be downvoted for saying this)
  - myth_drannon 2y ago
    My observation is completely the opposite. Higher education is the source of today's youth radicalization. Harvard, Columbia, UPenn are all ground zeros of radicalization that we as society going to suffer from for decades.
    - bdndndndbve 2y ago
      What kind of radicalization do you mean? The kind that tries to violently overthrow the government after an election they don't like?
      - myth_drannon 2y ago
        The same leftist university students that brought Islamic revolution to Iran and cultural revolution to China. It all starts with universities. Today's protesting students from Columbia are tomorrow's political elite and mark my words, Germany's 30s will look like a walk in a park comparing to what will be in US. And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.
    - hjgjhyuhy 2y ago
      Yet people with lower education were (again) more likely to vote for the most radical president in the US history. Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege. Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Who is so fragile that they care about the gender of their coworker? This isn’t oil rigs or combat roles, where brute strength has legitimate value.
    - bdndndndbve 2y ago
      This is a proven trend that's happened in multiple fields. It's not about the gender of your individual coworkers, it's about the relative prestige of a field. When women become more prevalent the credential or field becomes less valued and men flee.
      - sgarland 2y ago
        Either I’m dramatically misunderstanding, or others are. I’m asking, why does women entering a field make it less prestigious? Who are these snowflake men that can’t fathom working alongside women?
        TylerE 2y ago
        Have you been paying attention to the sort of people who have been grabbing all the power in this country of late? Those people.
        supertrope 2y ago
        Discrimination and disparities have self-reinforcing loops. There is a gender pay gap. This is a very complex problem with multiple causes and effects: sexism, maternity leave, married couples making the rational economic decision that the lower earning spouse looks after the kids at home, etc. A person looks at a field, sees that it's lower pay and prestige, and sees that it's filled with women. If they are more sexist than average they draw the conclusion that women's work is worth less and justify discrimination's effects as caused by innate differences. Even if they are less sexist than average they are concerned that other people's sexism has demonetized that line of work. Thus the rational move is often to also perpetuate the disparity by avoiding the "pink collar" job, or not care that a high end job has features unfriendly to women. Advantage begets advantage. The inverse is also true. Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.
  - rini17 2y ago
    I had some mandatory philosophy at STEM university. It utterly failed to evoke any intellectual curiosity, perhaps even inoculated us against trying to get interested. And don't let me start on history education.
nostradumbasp 2y ago
I do agree with you. People need to band up with one another and work this out together. In the mean time though, most people are already in a situation where its far too late unless they can shake their situation and start new somewhere else. I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...
Animats 2y ago
> Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions. Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that. Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side hustles" for long. That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s. The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's cheaper to hire an additional person. "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888. [1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-generally-ok-for-california-workers/ https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-g...
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It is insane that 8 hours of work per day was considered a reasonable target, back when they didn’t have modern automation. Where did we go wrong? Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so that we’ll be needed.
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    This is the point of dialectical materialism - before the 8 hour workweek there was an even longer work day with worse conditions. The people born into those circumstances struggled against capitalists (in the sense of people who have capital) to make 8 hour workdays the norm. The next generation was born with 8 hour workdays being standard, and capital pushed back and squeezed in other areas where labour wasn't resisting. Capital has now squeezed so hard that labour is organizing again and realizing they need to fight to retain any of their rights.
  - Animats 2y ago
    Teen Vogue had a good article on this back in 2022.[1] Similar to the OP here, but better written. [1] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/work-culture-america https://www.teenvogue.com/story/work-culture-america
Ko224bt 2y ago
>> I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions. Let's have a look at China, or the former communist countries (soviet union etc). All people in those communist regimes are slaved, being under surveillance and often suppressed (except the regime, of course), with the government being the suppressor (as opposed to greedy companies). History is full of evidence, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway Thinking capitalism is the culprit is naive. Power will find its way. Legal regulations of working hours, holidays, health insurance as well as unions work very well for most modern western countries. In many countries there's a constant fight between unions and companies. That is a good way to balance power. No need to bring back cruel communist regimes.

achierius 2y ago

Love seeing this kind of analysis on HN of all places. At least today we can hope that our understanding of history will lead to people being less electorally friendly to the fascist right than they were the first time around.

bdndndndbve 2y ago
The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious. A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.
- fn-mote 2y ago
  Interesting. > men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    I'm not sure if I understand your point, but the point is there's a kind of credentialing treadmill where once women get into a particular field or class of institution it loses prestige and men flee to alternatives which become more prestigious. An example is undergrad biology becoming predominantly women and being seem as the "easiest" STEM major. I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less. This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      [dead]
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      Can you get a good job with only a 1st degree in biology? I doubt it.
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      I may be cynical but I don't think men flee fields were women manage to enter. I do see this trend though. But I rather see it as men moving to the next cool thing, leaving the leftovers of their no longer prestigious / downward trending field for women to finally enter, who may see it as a victory without realizing the goalpost has yet again shifted on them/carpet has been pulled from under their feet already. Much like women no longer qualified as gamers for playing the same games that men grew up with (point n click, puzzle games...) because men flocked to newer genres since (actions/shooter) Bit of a dated caricature but fitting imho. If men wanted to keep women out, it is easily managed, case in point programming was seen as secretarial work until men decided it made good money and they should appropriate it. (Fully expecting to be downvoted for saying this)
- myth_drannon 2y ago
  My observation is completely the opposite. Higher education is the source of today's youth radicalization. Harvard, Columbia, UPenn are all ground zeros of radicalization that we as society going to suffer from for decades.
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    What kind of radicalization do you mean? The kind that tries to violently overthrow the government after an election they don't like?
    - myth_drannon 2y ago
      The same leftist university students that brought Islamic revolution to Iran and cultural revolution to China. It all starts with universities. Today's protesting students from Columbia are tomorrow's political elite and mark my words, Germany's 30s will look like a walk in a park comparing to what will be in US. And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.
  - hjgjhyuhy 2y ago
    Yet people with lower education were (again) more likely to vote for the most radical president in the US history. Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege. Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Who is so fragile that they care about the gender of their coworker? This isn’t oil rigs or combat roles, where brute strength has legitimate value.
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    This is a proven trend that's happened in multiple fields. It's not about the gender of your individual coworkers, it's about the relative prestige of a field. When women become more prevalent the credential or field becomes less valued and men flee.
    - sgarland 2y ago
      Either I’m dramatically misunderstanding, or others are. I’m asking, why does women entering a field make it less prestigious? Who are these snowflake men that can’t fathom working alongside women?
      - TylerE 2y ago
        Have you been paying attention to the sort of people who have been grabbing all the power in this country of late? Those people.
      - supertrope 2y ago
        Discrimination and disparities have self-reinforcing loops. There is a gender pay gap. This is a very complex problem with multiple causes and effects: sexism, maternity leave, married couples making the rational economic decision that the lower earning spouse looks after the kids at home, etc. A person looks at a field, sees that it's lower pay and prestige, and sees that it's filled with women. If they are more sexist than average they draw the conclusion that women's work is worth less and justify discrimination's effects as caused by innate differences. Even if they are less sexist than average they are concerned that other people's sexism has demonetized that line of work. Thus the rational move is often to also perpetuate the disparity by avoiding the "pink collar" job, or not care that a high end job has features unfriendly to women. Advantage begets advantage. The inverse is also true. Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.
- rini17 2y ago
  I had some mandatory philosophy at STEM university. It utterly failed to evoke any intellectual curiosity, perhaps even inoculated us against trying to get interested. And don't let me start on history education.

nostradumbasp 2y ago

I do agree with you. People need to band up with one another and work this out together. In the mean time though, most people are already in a situation where its far too late unless they can shake their situation and start new somewhere else. I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...

Animats 2y ago

> Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions. Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that. Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side hustles" for long. That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s. The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's cheaper to hire an additional person. "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888. [1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-generally-ok-for-california-workers/ https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-g...

bee_rider 2y ago
It is insane that 8 hours of work per day was considered a reasonable target, back when they didn’t have modern automation. Where did we go wrong? Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so that we’ll be needed.
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  This is the point of dialectical materialism - before the 8 hour workweek there was an even longer work day with worse conditions. The people born into those circumstances struggled against capitalists (in the sense of people who have capital) to make 8 hour workdays the norm. The next generation was born with 8 hour workdays being standard, and capital pushed back and squeezed in other areas where labour wasn't resisting. Capital has now squeezed so hard that labour is organizing again and realizing they need to fight to retain any of their rights.
- Animats 2y ago
  Teen Vogue had a good article on this back in 2022.[1] Similar to the OP here, but better written. [1] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/work-culture-america https://www.teenvogue.com/story/work-culture-america

Ko224bt 2y ago

>> I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions. Let's have a look at China, or the former communist countries (soviet union etc). All people in those communist regimes are slaved, being under surveillance and often suppressed (except the regime, of course), with the government being the suppressor (as opposed to greedy companies). History is full of evidence, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway Thinking capitalism is the culprit is naive. Power will find its way. Legal regulations of working hours, holidays, health insurance as well as unions work very well for most modern western countries. In many countries there's a constant fight between unions and companies. That is a good way to balance power. No need to bring back cruel communist regimes.