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I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.

• maxehmookau 1y ago
  An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though. In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely. Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
  • jaccola 1y ago
    Maybe (and I mean this genuinely, I don't know for certain) "Who cares?" is a cause of wage stagnation.
    • saltwatercowboy 1y ago
      UK real wages stagnated directly in line with the 2008 financial crisis [1]. Enough has been written about 'too big to fail' that I don't need to rehash it, but ascribing guilt to the workers of a chronically underpaid and historically innovative nation doesn't feel right. [1] Office of National Statistics via BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/production/_129008818_optimised-wages-real-whole-econ-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/p...
      • b112 1y ago
        Wage stagnation always happens at the start of any economic downturn. However, once over and the economy resumes, typically the stagnation ends, and wages jump. The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit. But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am not joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back in my driveway? Phone. While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone. He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or something else not for normal garbage) during the dump. My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even look at where it was headed. (And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life, decades of them, and yes it's worse.) Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was 40. The other 20. 40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20 year old? Staring at phone literally every second, monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a dozen times to do basic jobs. I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries of horror from people who have been told "if your phone is in your hand at work, you're fired". I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted to something, how normal "I don't like work" unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix is missing!" I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some such.
        • greedo 1y ago
          If you look at the rate of wage growth compared to inflation, it's pretty clear that wages have stagnated for a long time, with periodic bumps. The goal of most businesses is growth and increased productivity. The easiest way to have higher productivity is to constrain wages.
          • b112 1y ago
            I will agree that in certain parts of the world, this is quite true. However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course it's an economy still in the throws of massive transformation. Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess it could for the few unaddicted.
    • angry_moose 1y ago
      It might be part of the feedback loop, but from my experience it always starts at the company level. I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.
      • jmalicki 1y ago
        The effort you could put in would be to switch companies
        • foobarchu 1y ago
          Thats kind of part of the problem, though. Yes, switching jobs constantly is a solid path to higher wages in fields like tech (at least it was before this year, some of the most competent people I know are struggling to change jobs), but in my experience that act tends to reduce ones number of "give a damns".
    • actionfromafar 1y ago
      On a meta level in elections, maybe.
    • piva00 1y ago
      What would be the basis of that though? Just thinking about every point in my life where I ended up in "who cares?" was due to concerns outside of my control/power. When I feel I have some agency, power, and/or recognition it just naturally follows that I will care (in varying degree but I will care somehow); even if not for the larger organisation I will care about my immediate peers/team. If I'm not paid enough, or I don't have agency, or I don't feel heard and my point is proven later (multiple times), or a superior is an asshole, so on and so forth, I naturally end up in "who cares?" after some beating. Of course, it's all personal experience/anecdotal evidence, but in general I don't think most people just turned the "who cares?" mode on and wage stagnation followed, it seems to be much rather the opposite, you take away safety, money, agency, and any other aspect that might make a job more fulfilling and the only natural progression is people disengaging from the activity.
    • some_furry 1y ago
      I think the arrow goes the other way.
      • 0_____0 1y ago
        I was wondering if maybe this is the result of a tight labor market. A lot lf what I see kind of lines up with what happens if you have to make do with underskilled or otherwise sloppy staff. The throughline I think is that there's no consequence for being bad at one's job. Not to say I'm perfect - I am pretty sure I've been a mediocre employee before, but I've also never been sacked.
        • some_furry 1y ago
          I have a high work ethic but I mostly keep it to myself. That is: I don't hold strangers to my standards or expect them to feel the same way about their work that I do about mine. I've never been sacked for poor performance, but I have been included in mass layoffs and restructurings throughout my career, which always makes one wonder if they were secretly not meeting some metric.
    • tempodox 1y ago
      You must have a very strange sense of humor.
    • bigtex88 1y ago
      Absolutely not.
    • Spivak 1y ago
      This is my read on the situation. I have been weirded out when I get "excellent" service at a restaurant. Like my friend, you literally aren't getting paid enough to give this much of a shit. You're doing me a favor by working this drive-thru job so I don't have to cook while I'm sick. The gratitude goes the other way.
• Permik 1y ago
  From these kinds of observations in my own life I've just concluded that unfortunately some neurotypical got hired to do an autistic people's job.
• XorNot 1y ago
  > The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.
  • HideousKojima 1y ago
    And zoning, permitting, environmental impact reviews, etc. add significant extra drags onto many such projects.
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    Yes, and... I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.
    • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
      Wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are trying to do it with way too few people and in your case, the squeaky wheel got the grease, and you jumped to the front of the line.
      • 0_____0 1y ago
        This is definitely true of the building department here. They're understaffed in part due to the inability to come to a new union contract agreement, which means that pay has stagnated.
  • imtringued 1y ago
    That's not a satisfactory explanation, because you're saying that the owner of the land can't make use of it and should have given it to someone else, but they don't actually care what the best use of the land is, so they take the slow way.
  • potato3732842 1y ago
• sndean 1y ago
  > a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while. In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there. They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
    • SamBam 1y ago
      I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are certain professions where you're more likely to find someone who cares. You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.) Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and finally working where ever offers them a job. You're only likely to even consider working at a bike shop if you want to work at a bike shop. Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
      • pixl97 1y ago
        I think some of it is about getting away from big box stores and working with smaller shops. Now, that's not saying that small shops are automatically good, but you'll find people way better at some of them than you ever will at a big store. Big stores tend to care about pushing numbers and not expertise.
• whobre 1y ago
  > Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible. To be fair, the society decided to encourage such behavior.
  • mlinhares 1y ago
    A bit much to say society did that, they have forced this due to their very well organized and connected unions and the power they have to cause the population to fear for their safety if the "cops are on strike". The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a violent criminal.
• bandoti 1y ago
  Honestly, I hate to say it because it’s become an annoying topic—but the problem is social media. Full stop. People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.” They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!” I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values. People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again. Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no-1-career-choice-social-media-influencer/459387 https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no... https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-gen-zs-career-aspirations/ https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-be-paid-influencers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...
  • disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    Honestly, maybe social media has accelerated the trend, but this has been happening for all of my life now (almost 44 years). One Nation under God has turned into One Nation under the influence of one drug Television, the drug of the Nation Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation - TV, the drug of the nation edit: stoopid HN parser
  • KronisLV 1y ago
    > that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.” I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout. Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world. I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.
• _lvbh 1y ago
  > There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
  • AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    Asia has the whole "lying flat" thing. It may be less widespread, but it's there too.
  • mattmanser 1y ago
    Friendship groups are like mini echo chambers. One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch. If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s. But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
  • energy123 1y ago
    For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago: > It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad. Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
    • close04 1y ago
      > Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad. That could be also because of the employer's rising expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden proven that all of you could do more. When another employer offers higher salary you might also go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it could be higher.
• MisterTea 1y ago
  This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better about being a insignificant cog. My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
  • voidhorse 1y ago
    Yeah I think this is spot on. It's just a side effect of widespread, pervasive alienation, in the Marxist sense. With LLMs we're at the point where the last enclave of relatively alienation free work is disappearing.
  • anal_reactor 1y ago
    Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow, some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an essential part of it. That's just how modern society works. To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them. Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.
• safety1st 1y ago
  I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods. It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing. Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway? We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this). But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing? Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars. Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
  • ambicapter 1y ago
    I’m doubtful because things always got a little worse all the time even before money existed. It’s the natural state of nature; erosion. Cleaning up after yourself and maintaining your space is a virtue for that very reason. Seems like that virtue is, itself, is in a state of disrepair (which implies an obvious course of action).
    • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      It really didn't always get worse for a while (at least in the US). McDonalds went from just a burger/rare treat to affordable, to so affordable we had to pass laws to limit how much food they gave out. Homes grew in size, stopped having shared bedrooms/bathrooms. Everyone started having dishwashers/microwaves in their kitchens. Clothes purchases moved from planned to spur of the moment. 27 inch TVs stopped being the norm. (I know this one is cliche, we'd rather decent lives than fancier circuses to distract, but at the time it was a 'wow the future is here' moment, big TVs only existed in rich friends homes, and they were HORRIBLE because they upscaled content designed for 27 inch TVs). Exercise clubs went from only for the rich tennis clubs to affordable gyms. Kids got their OWN computers. Meanwhile, quality was improving everywhere. Shoes, oh my god did shoes get better. Clothing quality got better to the point people in the 80s routinely just started wearing silk (SILK!!! can you believe it?) shirts. Sheet thread counts actually became a thing, holy moley the luxury. Computers went from Commodore 64s to modern wonders. Foods people ate at home/out got fancier, with all kinds of new discoveries. My entire life up until 2008, almost everything around was getting better/cheaper. Yesterday at the store I wanted ice cream. I walked the aisle. Half the brands can no longer call themselves 'ice cream' legally. None of it felt like food to me. There is boutiques super expensive 'ice cream', but there used to be buckets of family friends priced 'ice cream' not whatever slop they sell now for the masses. Every single 'old school' brand I'm familiar with was a hollowed out corpse living off the name but selling trash that I don't consider fit (and remember, this is the junk food, already not really fit, segment).
• RamblingCTO 1y ago
  The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees, there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.
  • RankingMember 1y ago
    I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down. Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement. I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to ultimately be ground down and devoured by a job and life circumstances that could never be sated no matter how hard he worked.
    • kot_manul 1y ago
      That's also the horse from Animal Farm right down to the exact quote and the situation. Granted, the horse got shipped off to become glue, rather than ground down by life, but the effects are pretty much the same.
  • doctor_lollipop 1y ago
    This, very much. My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets. And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house. So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.
  • weweersdfsd 1y ago
    This is it. It's rational not to give a damn in this environment, at least for anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or very well paid.
• sp0rk 1y ago
  > There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
  • adamc 1y ago
    Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.
    • tomslick 1y ago
      > And many work multiple gigs I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
      • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.
  • palmotea 1y ago
    >> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike. Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road. If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
• nancyminusone 1y ago
  The goal is the same as it's always been: get the most resources for the least amount of effort. This is true whether you're a squirrel, a person, a company, or a government.
• littlestymaar 1y ago
  For the past five decade, we have lived in a society where the dominant ideology was about how “egoism lead to the greater good thanks to the magical forces of the free market”. It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing. Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.
• Gravityloss 1y ago
  I wonder if this is how it felt in Rome or Byzantium or various other places in the years leading up to collapse.
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    IIRC the Romans had a cultural meme of mythologizing their past. So they probably did feel like this on the way down. But also on the way up.
• zwnow 1y ago
  Pay shit get shit work simple as that
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    Labor rates where I am are among the highest in the nation. People in the trades largely live in the outlying suburbs and pick up the lucrative work in the urban core. A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not return your calls, not show up to do the work etc. etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work product quality more than anything else right now right here. You are probably right somewhere else.
• bwfan123 1y ago
  > but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
• danans 1y ago
  > I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans. It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.
    • ausbah 1y ago
      people are hugely dependent on private sector companies as well. sure the financial impacts are passed onto the capital owners, but those are passed onto consumers in most cases no? i dont see a huge difference here also the wage differences between tech and a public service worker is laughable. if you underpay in a high pressure environment, of course they won’t care. we get what we pay for with publicly owned utilities
      • Ray20 1y ago
        >i dont see a huge difference here In the case of a company, you can simply refuse to pay them if you feel that the goods and services you receive are not worth the money they are asking for. If you try to stop paying to the government, you will be robbed blind and sent to prison for life. Quite a big of a difference, in my opinion.
    • danans 1y ago
      > the burden of a shirking employee Who says they are shirking? Perhaps they are working really efficiently, and doing their job in 1/4 the time.
• dkarl 1y ago
  > a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis. I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of everything important about them: their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention would call every single one of those desirable personal qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them, ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish. I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped this and still manage to respect the importance of their work, but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of expressing who they are in a positive way. You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that and being second best, because we don't live in a society that values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump, unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and plead economic necessity for taking a shit job. In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's shit, so it might as well be botshit.
• gardenhedge 1y ago
  I think it is a lasting effect of the pandemic. It'd the same outside the US. I would also add other contributors: inflation along with salaries not increasing, and housing crisis in many cities around the world
• dayvid 1y ago
  Part of it is COVID and also the destruction of pension and job security. Companies want to pay employees as little as possible and employees want to do as little work as possible.
• justin66 1y ago
  > The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common. (if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
• bigtex88 1y ago
  I'm fairly certain this is how things have always been.
  • 0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
    I'm fairly certain we had multiple big cultural shifts over the past decade and things are completely different now.
• WalterBright 1y ago
  it's Boston When I drove around Boston in the 80s, I discovered that each street had 3 names: 1. the name on the map 2. the name on the street signs 3. the name given by the person giving you directions I learned to navigate by counting intersections.
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic. Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing". [1] https://kai.kendal.org/ https://kai.kendal.org/
  • bombcar 1y ago
    Once you realize the builders build for the lenders and for nobody else, everything becomes crystal clear.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      Not sure how the lenders benefit by building apartment buildings that can't find renters though I can see how they might systematically fool themselves into believing in a luxury market that doesn't exist. Affordable units might be less profitable on paper but it's a choice between getting less rent than you wish you would get vs getting no rent at all.
• 0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
  They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. Not a new principle. Turns out that extreme capitalism results in extreme inequality results in similar outcomes as socialism.
  • constantcrying 1y ago
    The person in question was literally paid by the government, which is notoriously and world wide chronically inept, "despite" being complete isolated from any capitalist motive.
    • dr-detroit 1y ago
      [dead]
• WalterBright 1y ago
  I did some business with the a city department at one time. I discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or will "be back later".
  • ewhanley 1y ago
    This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or not caring if you are referring to the management/administration responsible for staffing and scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      Sure. LOL.
      • ewhanley 1y ago
        Nah, but for real - why wouldn't they take PTO?
        • WalterBright 1y ago
          Because they already used up their PTO?
          • abenga 1y ago
            Every place I have worked has had meticulously tracked PTO days that most people delayed taking until the end of the year; there were notably fewer people in the office in December.
      • whogaf 1y ago
        [dead]
  • kridsdale1 1y ago
• michaelrpeskin 1y ago
  This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world, it transitions to "second world" where things look like the first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust, but the society hasn't really recognized that. https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world
  • qwerpy 1y ago
    Thanks for the link, I thought it was a good read. I assumed it would dance around the causes but he was pretty direct with it. Getting society to recognize what's happening and then take meaningful action seems intractable. Suppose that's why the path looks like 3rd -> 1st -> 2nd -X. I'm not aware of any society or even a single city that really breaks out of it once they land in "second world".
  • kridsdale1 1y ago
    I think that’s a good way to describe the 15,000 years of stagnation we see in the Star Wars universe.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • tim333 1y ago
    The original second world was a bit like that in that it used to refer to the soviet and socialist countries. Looked like the west but not quite right.
• dfxm12 1y ago
  Maybe people are bad at their jobs. Maybe they have poor management who is always increasing the scope of their job, in an attempt to maximize their profits at a cost to customer satisfaction. In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.
• almosthere 1y ago
  Society standards have been dropping since 2010, COVID accelerated it. Most of it is people mad that they are barely making it, and often they are in service of people that don't even realize prices have risen. I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.
• AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  There’s two things going on: 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society 2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to. In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to. Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own. That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity. “God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories. So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun? You don’t.
  • Balgair 1y ago
    > 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take: "in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century." https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine. Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way. I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now. Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
• babyent 1y ago
  Why not just filter out those kinds of people? I filter out people like that because A. They’re not on the same level B. I won’t hire them and I wouldn’t work with them C. They serve no purpose to me in my life because I don’t even want to hang out with them
  • testing22321 1y ago
    Because you have to deal with them anytime you want to get anything done - planning and approval offices, tax departments, construction crews, contractors and on and on. Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people doing their jobs decently.
    • babyent 1y ago
      True, and oh man I can relate so much to that. Ugh..
• nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
  Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in frames, fire hazards, etc. I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.
  • 0_____0 1y ago
    Hah! When we renovated we found century old liquor bottles in the walls. Some things don't change.
• bumby 1y ago
  >really? A parking garage takes six years? I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much. We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them. (To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
• constantcrying 1y ago
  >Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to. This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality? >There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.
• komali2 1y ago
  > I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans. If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible. One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work). As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors. Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."
  • Ray20 1y ago
    >she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation. If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.
• h2zizzle 1y ago
  >Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston). I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper signage, probably based in the area's age and relative insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston, Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.
• kittikitti 1y ago
  Can you explain the meaning of kvetching and where it comes from?
  • deathanatos 1y ago
    Just Google it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvetch https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvetch > To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly. I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully. It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)
    • tim333 1y ago
      And before that yiddish / jewish.
• mieubrisse 1y ago
  I wonder if this is actually true, or if it's an instance of selection bias - the instances of things not working draw our attention more than the instances of things working. "This thing is working just fine" doesn't draw eyeballs.
• miiiiiike 1y ago
  Hahaha! I spent the morning explaining to a network installer who bought the wrong jacks and tools for the project that I wasn't going to keep the incorrect jacks and pay for the correct ones just so he wouldn't have to accept the return of "products that no one wants." Correct, no one wants them, me especially. Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.
• homefree 1y ago
  Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-Future/dp/0593798694 https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F... Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    The founder of Palantir is certainly not the person I'd seek to articulate what things "made the West great".
    • homefree 1y ago
      Well he should be, but I wouldn't expect an anti-capitalist to have very good judgement about who is worth listening to.
  • rxtexit 1y ago
    I just doubt all this is true though. It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual. The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress. People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.
• dividefuel 1y ago
  I've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see. Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own. People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?
  • trinsic2 1y ago
    I don't know if this helps, and I am pretty out of touch with the work culture because I run my own business (boy am I glad I stuck with this in the 2000's because now its so crazy in the job market) but you know where working hard really matters? its with the people you come into contact with that value your hard work that counts. I don't necessarily work hard expecting a return (but I understand fiances are soo tight for people right now that it maters a lot), I work hard because I enjoy what do and I want people to have a good experience. I'm not sure if that is available for everyone in this day and age, but I would strongly encourage everyone that is finding this situation untenable to find something you love a start doing it. The people that values this work will come, it takes awhile to build it, but it does happen eventually.
• alphazard 1y ago
  This is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities presented to people at work. There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance, and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the quality of their work. A yearly meeting where your wage is adjusted to keep up with inflation or reflect your time in the workforce isn't something you can control. This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented. The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    > There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Sure there is, that organization is called having your own business, or consulting.
    • alphazard 1y ago
      Yes, this is the obvious exception, and good career advice. But it doesn't solve the problem for the consumers, which is that important services are done poorly or not at all. Not everyone can work for themselves, and if you want the people who collect a salary to do a good job, the incentives need to come from compensation.
• immibis 1y ago
  This quote from The Expanse summarizes our society right now: > Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability. > Amos: That sounds bad. > Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.
• TFYS 1y ago
  I think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of making more wealth.
• h2782 1y ago
  > but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and priceless an even lower energy route I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking. AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4... You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• THroaway225 1y ago
  I just travelled to a province to pay for some private healthcare i cant get at home. Its a simple procedure, but a specific one. I sent the treatment plan to the customer service liason I was dealing with and triple checked that the doctor i was seeing was familiar with it. Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document I sent. No one even told him about it. The customer service liason is "very sorry for the miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this occurred!"
• JohnBooty 1y ago
  My experience is that people want to do their jobs well, but SYSTEMIC reasons tend to prevent this. Typically (almost ubiquitously, really) this comes in the form of time constraints. I mean, come on, we're (nearly) all engineers here. How much suboptimal code have you shipped? How much of it was due to a lack of skill or motivation vs. time constraints or other external factors? Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston). Again, I'd bet dollars to pennies that it's a systemic issue. Voters tend to demand lower taxes as their #1 or #2 issue, especially in local elections where big-picture issues like abortion etc. are not decided. So, are Boston's missing street signs a symptom of people not caring? Or a symptom of that department probably being underfunded? I obviously don't know, but my money would be on the latter. In my experience the only people not trying their best on an indivdual basis are people who have been completely screwed over and beaten down by their jobs. Everybody else is trying, if only out of rational self-interest (wanting promotions, or at least needing to keep their jobs)
• Vegenoid 1y ago
  It’s a result of people disliking the system. Personally thriving by gaming the system is seen as the enlightened thing to do, because people don’t respect or appreciate the system, often viewing it as actually harmful and malicious.
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  I'll add one: New house construction. There are now multiple building inspectors who are making ad revenue on youtube by showing how bad the standard of construction is.
• xnx 1y ago
  Nothing that all of these examples are public sector monopolies or related (e.g. permitting). Being bad at your job definitely exists in the private sector, but there are competitive forces that work against it.
• LoudFrog 1y ago
  We could make the same argument about this lazy post.
• bghooper 1y ago
  [flagged]
• QuantumGood 1y ago
  If you don't build motivation for competence by navigating difficulties in everyday life (fetching water, building a fire), where do you find that motivation? Putting humans in boxes with a screen in front of them and everything they need to survive around them without requiring much effort produces a different human.
• richardfontana 1y ago
  > Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston). This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.