And let’s not forget the 1950s surge in “juvenile delinquency” and teenage crime, and the immense anxiety and anger it produced in American society. People in the 1950s did not necessarily believe that things were going well with American culture or that the country was on the right track. Sure, it was better in many respects than global economic depression and war, but that’s not setting the bar very high.
Nowadays, (white) Americans tend to look back on the 1950s as a much “cozier” time of better security, optimism and contentment in everyday life. That’s mostly because the most familiar cultural depictions of that era in old sitcoms, etc., present it that way. It didn’t necessarily look that way to the Americans living through it, even if they were white.
And now you’re moving the goalposts by leaving off a short, but crucially important, phrase.
What you actually SAID was, “Yeah, I think it was the death of the US as we knew it.” (emphasis added)
Do you seriously not understand that a lot of people probably felt the exact same way after Pearl Harbor?
What I am trying to pound into your thick skull is this–
There are turning points in history; events that do, indeed, mark the end of something “as we knew it.” Mind you, this does NOT mean that the event in question is inherently bad–something can be enormously consequential in a good way. Every so often, something comes along that is just so big, that it marks the end of one era, and the beginning of another.
If you would bother to step outside of your own self-inflicted misery for a moment, you would see that humanity has lived through many such turning points. And yes, there are always short-sighted people such as yourself, who throw up their hands, and wail, “The end is nigh.” Guess what? Those people are very, very seldom correct.
It is the height of arrogance to think that you are correct when all those other doom-and-gloomers were wrong. You are truly on the wrong side of history.
Exactly right. The world is always changing “as we knew it”.
In fairness to the OP, people in our age group (commonly referred to as Gen X) are known for having a not particularly optimistic view of the future since basically birth. Our most optimistic time period was probably the mid to late 90s with the rise of the internet. And even before that bubble burst, films like Office Space, Boiler Room, and Fight Club presented a more cynical view of reality. Rather than becoming millionaires and rock stars, most people were destined to toil in soulless offices working jobs they hate for shit they don’t need.
I suppose I also feel a bit demotivated like the OP for similar (and different reasons). It’s a bit of a paradox actually. My job is ok, mostly because I get to do my own thing the way I want. And the company seems to be on board with that. But that could change at any time, And I’m not really sure if it’s going anywhere or if I even what I would want it to go to (beyond the vague “make ‘partner’ in x years”.
I guess I just can’t seem to pretend that creating elaborate Powerpoint presentations to dress up what is essentially selling and project managing esoteric back-office staff augmentation IT projects is that important to me. But I also can’t seem to figure out anything else that would be (that would also pay).
One thing that interests me is the relatively modern notion that our jobs should bring us emotional fulfillment. I don’t think that’s true of a large number of people doing working class jobs, so it appears to be largely a middle-class, white-collar phenomenon.
I personally love my job, but I feel like I’m one of the few people who does. I grew up with this notion that jobs should be emotionally fulfilling, and pretty much every time I landed in a job where I had no passion for the work, I quit. That’s an oversimplification because the places I left were each dumpster fires in their own way, but the fundamental idea, this job should make me happy, is a relatively new one, is it not?
How much does this very notion contribute to our unhappiness?
I agree, although I think the level of conflict and animosity we have right now is too high to sustain, so we at least need to get in a better place.
And I’ve had several girlfriends who have never been catcalled or hit on once in their entire lives. But yeah. Are we going to make this new rule equal in terms of sex/gender? Will women be able to hit on men, and will lesbians be able to hit on women? I need the user manual!
Also, hopeful vision! That’s what I’ve long felt about climate change. Pointing out the problem is 100% necessary, but other than that it’s mostly been complaining and blaming.
I know what you mean. Every era gets simplified and “dumbed down” if you will. I’ve seen this happen to my own growing-up decades of the 1970s and 1980s.
But I also grew up hearing about the 1950s and early 1960s (basically before Kennedy was killed), and people, including my parents and older relatives, genuinely had nostalgia for this time. The movies Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married are a testament to this fact. Heck, the movie Grease (which I saw in the the theater right after it came out) was one of the biggest pop culture phenomena of the 1970s. Oh, let’s not forget American Graffiti and its offspring, the show Happy Days (the Fonz was another huge pop culture phenomenon).
Now, if the assertion here is that such nostalgia was misplaced, I can understand that opinion. If people are saying there wasn’t huge nostalgia for those years by a lot of people, I would say that’s factually incorrect.
But the era does get dumbed down and its rough edges forgotten. There were even then a lot of drugs and crime, sleazy magazines like Confidential, etc. And I personally don’t feel a whole lot of nostalgia for it.
I do understand what you’re saying. I’m saying that I think you’re incorrect and that I have never seen anything in the media to indicate that people had this belief. It’s not as though people saw the war as a good thing, but people were lining up at recruiting offices in order to fight. Nor do I think that many people thought we were going to lose. (Were there some individuals? I’m sure. But that kind of thinking was not visible in the culture at large.) If you have any cites to the contrary, I’d be happy to take a look.
Pearl Harbor was indeed a turning point. I simply disagreed with you about how people reacted to it.
With 9/11, we got punked. A very small number of people were able to do an immense amount of damage. If it weren’t a historical fact, I think it would be quite unbelievable as fiction. Pearl Harbor was an immensely stupid mistake for Japan to make and an incredibly shocking attack, but it was one military against another.
I haven’t been saying “the end is nigh.” If anything, we are in a spot where we are mismanaging abundance and opportunity. Our society is engaged in self-inflicted misery right now. Donald Trump’s presidency was that. All of the ongoing fighting between the left and right is that and nothing more.
I have more or less been saying the opposite of doom and gloom. I am saying the scales are falling from our eyes, and that’s a necessary process, and we will get through our malaise, but it’s a painful period.
Well, I have been a blue collar worker for the past three years, or an amalgam of blue and white. I’ve been working as an interpreter in a steel mill. I think a lot of people find meaning in that kind of work too–these are pretty well-paid workers, it’s true, but there is definitely pride taken in getting the product out the door. Just an observation that perhaps cannot be extrapolated to blue collar work in general.
But I think you are correct. When did people start thinking and talking about “job satisfaction”? I doubt much earlier than the 1950s.
Every blue collar job I’ve worked supplied a daily feeling of accomplishment and even of completion. I could look in my emptied truck, or back along the miles of laid pipeline behind us, and see an immediate picture of I and my team’s work.
Rarely does something similar exist in white collar work, and if it does it will be on a much longer timeline. And it seems to me that our jobs have moved further from the actual product over time and it’s affecting us negatively sometimes. I know it was something I had to come to terms with when I moved to “inside” work. A successful power point presentation just isn’t the same thing.
I can see that. Most of my working class job experience is in the restaurant industry, and while there were occasionally people who got really into it, most of them just seemed to be there to collect a paycheck.
My nonprofit job now is pretty objectively measurable. I submit grant applications, I get checks. I have a nice database that shows everything I’ve submitted, and a dashboard that shows how much I’ve raised in a given year. The number usually grows from year to year. And it’s all for a cause I care deeply about. It is pretty much the perfect job for me.
I got lucky. But that “luck” also required trading in higher earning potential for work I found meaningful. I know many young professionals who just aren’t that happy with their work and who don’t find a lot of meaning in it. It’s why you see a lot of them quit their jobs to try to be entrepreneurs and I can’t help but wonder if we are all looking for meaning in the wrong place.
One question that arises with respect to technology opening up new jobs is whether those jobs are very satisfying or even worth doing. Further, I think it’s more than possible that society, in the aggregate and on a more or less organic (i.e., without official decision-making going on) basis gives a certain number of people jobs just to have people working. The purpose of doing so can be for the benefit of the managers (having more “headcount” makes you more important) or for the economy as a whole (have more people working just to keep consumption at an acceptable level).
In the case of Japan, it is openly speculated and perhaps widely believed that companies retain a certain amount of deadwood as a form of social program. By law, it’s hard to fire people. Back in 2001, I said to my manger (who disliked me and wasn’t especially inclined to agree with me without actually agreeing), “About half of the people in our department are deadwood.” He instantly responded, “No, I think it’s more like a third.”
Yes. In the mill, I was interpreting for a maintenance advisor from Japan. If the mill was up and running, then things were good. If it was down for a problem (which often happens), then we needed to figure out why.
As a side note, people might imagine a modern hot strip mill to be fully automated with very little to do. Well, it’s fully automated and computerized, but there is an incredible amount for people to do, including the operators of the “automated” system. I highly doubt that it could be made to run human-free in the next 100 years. The maintenance alone requires dozens of people to work on the thing, whether during breakdowns or planned downtime.
This week at work I placed supply orders for a new lab. Then I was told to cancel them, order something else. Then I was told to not cancel the first orders because we needed the supplies anyway. It’s that “get all your dirt out of the boss’s hole” shit that burns me down.
The term “zombie company” was originally coined to refer to Japanese companies that could only stay afloat due to bailouts. Which would imply entire companies or even industries that create little economic value and are mostly staffed by dead wood.
I’ve read Graeber’s book and, while it is a bit tongue-in-check, I’m inclined to agree about a significant portion of jobs or even entire industries being complete bullshit. I work in “management consulting”, one of the most bullshity of bullshit jobs. But it’s a popular, highly lucrative, career for MBAs and other highly educated types without any real practical skills.
Personally I derive more satisfaction doing basic carpentry, plumbing, HVAC repair and other handiwork around our second home or our investment property. My job is basically just a sort of income and occasional opportunity to get an expensed trip somewhere.
Yeah, I was there when they were consolidating all the banks. I started out with an account at Asahi and ended up with one at UFJ. (And part of the joke was all these banks becoming these entities with no branding or identity beyond the perfunctory. What’s a “UFJ”?)
Yeah, I work in marketing and advertising myself, though the interpreting angle has paid more the past few years. I am lucky in that I have to deal with less bullshit than a lot of people–I write mostly about cars and real things at least. But I have definitely seen Japanese companies in various industries struggle to differentiate the commoditized. “No, really, this $3,000.00 refrigerator is really nice. It has mirror-like class panels on the front and will go very well with your high-end lifestyle. Nobody cares? Oh fuck, what now…”
I get it. I’m working on an 1890s house now, though I am mostly paying for the work (but I can clean!). Being in the house reminds me of a time when things were real.
That particular phrase may be relatively recent (at least according to Google Ngrams, which finds it taking off around 1930 and peaking around 1980), but the concept is definitely older. Consider, for example, William Morris’s 1884 essay “Useful Work versus Useless Toil”:
I think the modern equivalent of “workism” is “hustle culture”. The concept fell out of favor a bit during COVID and seemed to be replaced by “quiet quitting”. But I see a lot of parallels in @Kimstu’s link.
"…hustle culture refers to the mentality that one must work all day every day in pursuit of their professional goals.
In the 21st century, thanks in part to the Great Recession of 2008, overworking became popular among younger generations who felt like they needed to work long hours and start a side business to achieve success in a tough economic climate. Positive depictions of “rise-and-grind culture” (especially on social media) quickly normalized working harder, faster, and longer."
That seems horribly depressing to me. I just picture these Millennials and Gen Z types on their laptops all day in some coffee shop working on business plans for some dumb-ass half baked idea or spending on their time developing content for their podcast. As far as I can tell, the main output of “hustle culture” is a never ending stream of bullshit social media content about hustle culture.
I find it ironic that the white collar middle class should talk so much about working bringing emotional fulfillment, particularly as our work is the least fulfilling.