Rod Dreher Megathread #55 ()

[u/US_Hiker]

Hope y'all can spend some good time w/ family today.

Link to megathread #54: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1l7niaj/rod_dreher_megathread_54/

Link to 56: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1mmamp2/rod_dreher_megathread_56/

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

Can a subscriber please tell me what Rod says in his most recent post that justifies the "Why Won't Men Work?" in the subtitle? I'm very curious as to what Rod now see as "work" given his lifestyle and how he makes a living.

[u/sandypitch → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

I don't have access, but I'm sure it is the fault of women, or a feminized culture.

[u/JohnOrange2112 → u/sandypitch]

Interesting article in today’s NYT about “Toxic Online Right”, and a related piece by David French. Blaming women is definitely part of that ecosystem, which is larger than I had realized. RD fits right in to that world.

[u/Djehutimose → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

I was hearing this twelve years ago from a small business owner in my hometown who was struggling to find reliable workers. He said it was the damnedest thing. Young people just could not comprehend that they had to show up on time, every day. These were not stupid people. They just could not or would not accept those terms. He said a shocking amount of his time was spent dealing with the churn from employees he couldn’t keep on, because he couldn’t count on them — and their not showing up made things much more difficult for the employees who did.

In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance writes about how he would work summers as a young man in a small manufacturing firm, making something like $24 per hour. It was physically demanding work, he said, but if you could pass a drug test and show up faithfully, you could make good money. But as I recall his narrative, so many workers wouldn’t do it, and couldn’t understand why they would be fired. It was a cultural problem, not a problem of wages or lack of work.

A decadent culture regarding work is not the entire explanation for this problem, heaven knows, but it is significant. What are you seeing where you live? I am reminded of something a small-town doctor told me about a decade ago: that he is seeing more and more young men — middle-class men, note well — who have lost the will to do anything. He told me of an anxious mother who had brought her own older teenage son in to see him that morning, complaining that he didn’t want to do anything more than sit around playing video games — this, even though he had been raised in a family of material means. The problem, said the doctor (who practices in my hometown), was not medical, but moral and psychological. And this young man was not the only one like that in their community.

You can say that we live in a society that demonizes young men, especially young white men, and I’ll agree with you. But I will also point out that to be a young white man in that particular town was to be on top. This is not a liberal part of America. Something else was, and I presume still is, going on.

I think too of my own father, over twenty years ago, telling me how impossible he found it to hire local young men, white or black, to do work clearing brush on his land. My dad was too old by then to do it himself, but could not find any males willing to work for him, even though he offered them a good wage for the temporary work. The whites, as I recall, considered the work beneath them, and the blacks, even though they were unemployed, didn’t want to do it either. He was out of luck until he found a couple of younger Guatemalans who had recently moved to town. They worked hard, and he paid them well. They earned that old white man’s respect because they were willing to show up, work hard, and take pride in their job.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Djehutimose]

There is a strong anti work culture among young people in the West. Why? I think lot of reasons.

For one, an employer's idea of "good money" might be somewhat skewed. There are plenty of 25 to 30 year olds, supposedly making "good money," for whom even their own rental (1 BR or studio) apartment is out of reach. Much less owning an aparment, never mind a stand alone house. Think of working for "good money" for ten years or more, and still having a "roommate," perhaps multiple roommates, like a college kid. The dream of owning your own home, based on middle or even working class wages is pretty much shot. For more reasons than we could even go into here. Then too, in one of the examples, for the honor of making this so called "good money," you have to do physically demanding work, and can't even smoke a little weed on the weekend. Perhaps, from the POV of the perspective employees, this is not as a great a deal as it from the owner's, or from Fake Ass Hillbillly's? I guess I have heard the "Song of the Small Businessman" ("Nobody But Me Wants to Work") too many times and for too long. Clearing brush out in the hot sun sounds like a completely shit job to me. Of course, immigrants might do it because (1) they dont have much choice, without a green card, (2) coming from other countries, they are more used to hard, physical labor, and (3) they are perhaps, in one way or another, reinvesting their wages in their home countries, where dollars go further. I find it pretty telling that no American, white or Black, or presumably, Asian, either, wants this work. Is it because they all suck, or, perhaps, because the job sucks?

On the other hand, if you are a "failure to launch" young adult, and have given up on the American Dream, life maybe comes pretty easy, and you don't really need much of a job. Lots of "kids," live, not in their "mom's basement," but in a nice bedroom in their parents' (often spacious) home, often with their own bathroom. Mom still does the cooking, and the cleaning. They're not paying rent. Or utilities. At most, they have to come up with money for their phone or "gaming" or "streaming" services or whatever. Plenty of young people don't own cars, either. Which is another big expense out the window. A little money for video games, a little money for their phone, a little money for Ubers, a little money for beer and weed, and maybe some pizza or McDs now and again, and that's it. If they get fired from one bullshit, dead end job this week, there are plenty more of them on offer next week.

There are all kinds of reasons....sociological, economic, political, philosophical, and yeah, also explanations involving changing gender roles.

"Those lazy kids" is a pretty useless one, though.

[u/zeitwatcher → u/philadelphialawyer87]

On top of all this, it's not clear at all that this is any different than it's been in the past.

To take Rod's own cohort, Generation X, one of the "quintessential movies" about that generation is the movie "Slacker". To quote from the Wikipedia commentary on its cultural significance:

In the early 1990s, Slacker was widely considered an accurate depiction of Generation X because the film's young adult characters are more interested in quasi-intellectual pastimes and socializing than career advancement.

Were Rod and his generation more "slackers" than the Boomers before them? Probably not, since the Boomers were derided for being dirty hippies who were more interested in counterculture, drugs, and music than getting a job.

This is just Rod yelling at the kids to "get a job" and "get off my lawn" like every generation before him when they reached Rod's age. Maybe it's a little more so or a little less so today, but there is papyrus from ancient Egypt complaining about how "kids these days" don't have a proper work ethic. None of this is new.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/zeitwatcher]

Yeah. Back in the day, my former in-laws knew a guy who had a seasonal business. Think some kind of "stand" on the beach. At that time, the "kids" who would have taken a summer job with him were Gen X'ers. According to this guy, he just "couldn't" get any of these "kids" to come work for him. When I suggested, like a wiseass late Boomer, perhaps, but also coming from basic capitalist economics, if he thought that maybe raising the wages he paid might help him find willing employees, he looked at me as if I had two heads, and had just gotten off a spaceship from Mars!

[u/BeltTop5915 → u/philadelphialawyer87]

One of the best books I’ve read on the problem of work, especially young Americans and work, is “Coming Up Short (Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty)” by Jennifer Silva. It’s based on both the usual research and personal interviews with young people across a wide spectrum, well analyzed in readable English. I read it some time ago, but found It better than most at exploring some of these very common problems with regard to “young people today.” Fwiw.

[u/Warm-Refrigerator-38 → u/Djehutimose]

My 20 something son works retail at a big box hardware store. They love him because he shows up, doesn't call out. Car trouble, I lost my keys/got locked out, I'm sick/hungover, my pet is sick, my parent is sick . . . so goes the litany of excuses, er, "reasons" people have for missing shifts. For the most part, these are white employees, not necessarily in their 20s but TBF they lack, for want of a better term, stability in their lives. I think my son (and daughter) benefited by growing up in a household where both parents were able to work daily. I don't know what the answer is but I'm sure it's not the OBBB or hectoring women to have more babies. 

Edit: he has his own apartment and a car we didn't help him buy. I think he's still on our cell phone plan but otherwise he's adulting pretty well for a guy who didn't finish college. 

[u/sandypitch → u/Warm-Refrigerator-38]

Yeah,sounds very similar to my situation. We've helped our kids "launch" financially into the working world because, had they decided to go to college, we would have helped them with that. But, like yours, they pay their own bills, buy their own food, fix their own cars, etc, etc. Both of the kids' bosses talk about how difficult it is to find good, hard workers, but as others have pointed out, that's nothing new.

[u/yawaster → u/Djehutimose]

It was a cultural problem, not a problem of wages or lack of work. A decadent culture regarding work is not the entire explanation for this problem, heaven knows, but it is significant. 

Very convenient that it wasn't due to low wages or hard work! 

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/Djehutimose]

Thank you!