Looking for decent jobs.
And getting them.
Well, we have sorta answered it- there are no significant numbers. What has occured, due to Covid and now very low unemployment, is young people who won’t work in crappy jobs for bad managers for peanuts.
And those bad managers are complaining about it.
My understanding is that people didn’t move out of their family houses for much of human history, unless they married and moved into someone else’s family house. Families were much larger and more interdependent. The amount of time for which the nuclear family has existed is relatively short and maybe only affected a few generations in the US. My theory is that this shift toward isolated single family units resulted in very unhappy parents, especially women, which fueled the cultural revolution and women rejecting the increasingly unreasonable expectations this new family structure imposed upon them. I have this theory because based on my experience, I think the model of the nuclear family fucking sucks. It is extremely difficult to raise children without logistical support, and even harder when both parents have to work outside the home. On the flip side, I would imagine that it is extremely difficult to be elderly when you have one kid who also works and also has a kid taking care of you, instead of a family network. No thoughtful person would have invented this system for the common good.
I think I come from a similar background as you, because I was raised with the expectation that I would be financially independent from the age of 18 and that was the cultural norm, with many kids including myself leaving before that age. (Although maybe we did not live in similar circumstances if you’ve always received the benefits of living in Canada, where there is a substantial safety net relative to the US.) The idea of kids in their twenties living with their parents would have given my parents the vapors. But I look back on that attitude critically, as it’s a poor way to generate upward mobility. And it also was a radical departure from the recent past.
I don’t know any. Supposedly there are troves of young adults who stay home playing video games, but not in my limited sphere. Everyone I know who is not in the labor force is in school, caring for others, disabled, or retired.
To other jobs, given that the labor force is the largest it’s ever been.
Agreed. I also know of a few, but given the Doper demo I don’t think you’ll find many among us.
I’m pretty sure they’re out there, but they aren’t (generally) the children of educated middle class professionals. One couple I know have two daughters in their 30s, one of whom can’t hold down a job to save her life but doesn’t have to, mommy and daddy cover her expenses.
As I described, I think the folks you’re looking for are more likely to be the children of a more rural, less affluent group. But I live in an urban, university town with lots of varied employment opportunites, so the anecdotage I have is the TV interview I’ve already mentioned.
Lack of hard data here is not very telling.
There are many who go to work, then come back home and spend 8-12 hours playing games.
It just hit me- I do/have known some of these “lazy young people” but they aren’t actually lazy. I’d bet that a lot of these small business owners are my age.(60 ish) And they probably remember a time when lots of stores and restaurants depended on high school or college students and SAHM working part-time. When I was in high school, even the well-off kids had jobs. Well, now the high school students spend their time on extracurriculars to get into good colleges , college students aren’t available for big chunks of the year and those SAHMs are working full time not 4-12 at the Dunkin Donuts. Even newspapers get delivered by adults. If those jobs paid enough to live off, they could probably fill them in no time. But it’s not worth it to work for minimum wage if you don’t absolutely have to - when I was young, I needed money to go to the movies, for example. I went to at least two movies a month and needed to pay for the ticket , snacks and bus fare. Watching Netflix at home doesn’t cost anything. If I didn’t need that money when I was young, I wouldn’t have worked.
We shouldn’t make normative judgments like that. It’s not ‘laziness’, it’s the way society has changed that changes the incentibves around this. It’s like child labor - child labor existed when children had to work to survive. When people became welathy enough that they didn’t have to send their kids to work, the practice stopped. Hell, I got my first job at age 12, stuffing flyers and delivering them, because that’s the only way I could get spending money. My kid didn’t have to do that.
We are wealthier, we live in larger homes with fewer people. We made the choice to raise kids with much more control and supervision over them. We locked young adults down at home during the prime years of learning independence and starting jobs. Work from home has allowed many of them to remain underemployed while earning just enough to be comfortable.
It’s not one thing. Societies change and evolve. And people respond to the changing incentives that change brings. In the meantime, we’ve been destroying the jobs that young people get that teaches them about work. We expect all of them to go to college, which takes the pressure off of moving out if a college is in your home town.
Also, for young people themselves, the internet and social media makes it a lot more tolerable to live with Mom and Dad. When I was a kid, there was no socializing unless you could get out of the house or invite friends over. Now, young people lead rich social lives without leaving their bedrooms. That’s also an incentive change.
Add it all up, plus myriad other factors, and it’s not surprising that more people in Gen Z aren’t working, and still living at home. They’re just responding to the incentives around them.
Also, we should remember that we’re talking about general social trends happening on the margins. Plenty of Gen Z work hard, and plenty moved out at about the same time earlier generations did. But it only takes a percentage of them to behave differently for the stats for the entire generation to change. Change always happens on the margin.
Certainly. I should remember that the experience for women may have been different. My wife left home at 18, but she went to nursing school in another town.
Insightful and thought-provoking, thank you.
I know several people who do not work by choice. Every one of them lives in poverty or close to it. Two are older Millennials, one is a young boomer/older Gen X.
The first is an aunt of mine. Back in 2008 she lost her job along with a bunch of other people in real estate and so she decided that was a good time to have some foot surgery she’d been putting off. Surgery went well but recovery was slow and by the time she was cleared to return to work (she had a desk job in a cubicle farm) she had developed a taste for staying at home doing bupkis so she just… never went back. She figured out a few years later that she could find a friendly doctor to help her get on disability and gasp! earn money for doing nothing! (Her words, I’m not denigrating on people with true disabilities). So that’s what she did. It took a couple of yers because that’s the way the game is played, but now she collects a check to cover a disability that doesn’t likely exist. Her disability checks cover the mortgage, her husband still works, and so she basically “retired” at 45. She’s 60 now.
Second is a cousin. Comes from a long line of losers. Her mom never worked, neither did her mom, so cousin figured staying home and living in poverty was basically the family business so she dropped out of high school, worked menial part-time jobs until she also found a convenient malady to claim disability, and now that’s what she does: gets a check for $1100 a month (an amount I earn in less than 3 days), lives in an ancient single-wide trailer in a dilapidated trailer park, has no health insurance, and shops for groceries at the dollar store. Cousin is 40 I think, maybe 41. She’s lived like this for two decades.
A third has a BA in business marketing. She lives in utter poverty: She and her wife live with their 4 kids (one an adult), only the wife works. A 5th kid is an adult and lives independently. The wife is a trained chef but instead works for a company that washes and cleans fleet vehicles so she earns peanuts. The family is about to lose their house. The house has only space heaters for heat as they do not have the money to fix the heat pump. They do not have (or did not for several months) the money to fix their car so they had no transportation. I’ve known this woman for 12 years and other than working a season as a receptionist at H&R Block, she has not worked. Her family gets food stamps but with 6 people in the house, it doesn’t go far enough. It could, but neither she nor her (trained chef) wife cook so they basically get frozen meals and cold cereal and eat that 3 meals a day, all month long, every single month, every year. Oh, and her fridge died a few years ago but because they have no money they could only afford a little used dorm fridge from FB Marketplace, so they can only get a couple days worth of groceries at a time. So they have to walk a mile or so to the grocery store twice a week instead of doing a proper shopping. The water heater needs replacing as the current one only gets water warm, not hot. As God is my witness I do not get it. Her earning potential is much greater than mine, but she choses to not to work. She’s perfectly healthy and able to work, just doesn’t want to do it. Her youngest is 11 or 12 so she could even work from home. Nope. She’s 38 or 39.
My aunt is the only one who doesn’t live in poverty and that’s only because 1) her husband, a truck driver, still works and makes decent if not great money and 2) 3 of her 4 kids are living independently (her 4th is an adult but has some chronic health conditions that pretty much prevent him from working; he’s the one that should be on disability, not his mom).
I personally do not get it. The idea of not having the money to pay bills fills me with anxiety; I’ve shared here before my wife and I are parsimonious to the point of being neurotic about it. We save every extra dollar we can and we have put ourselves through college because we knew we needed financial stability and long-term earning potential – no other reason. This idea that someone else will support us and care for us and provide for our needs, as Sam_Stone alluded to above is the natural result when people aren’t willing to support themselves, is completely alien to me. Besides, in my case there is nobody else. My friend I noted above relied for a time on an adult son to help support the house, that son is now living independently so she – and the kids – only have the support of the wife. She’s choosing to live in house with poor heat, no car, no fridge to speak of, and a lackluster hot water heater. You know, all the things money could fix. I just don’t understand the mindset.
Oh! I just remembered a fourth: my SIL. Her husband works but she does not. They have zero extra money at the end of the month. They have a house supporting in various degrees 11 people (a bunch of miscellaneous family live on their property in travel trailers and they use BIL and SIL’s house for bathing and laundry and sometimes cooking). SIL was raised with the philosophy that woman do not work outside the home and despite the fact that this is 2023 and their personal finances dictate that she really needs to bring home some income, she just doesn’t. Again, I don’t get it. They have enough money for monthly expenses, but only just.
As for retiring early, I spent 14 years as a hospice worker and now work as a teacher in a cloistered boarding school for troublemakers, misfits, and criminals. In my previous career a successful day was when one of my clients wasn’t screaming in pain, puking up blood, or having a family member melt down at the bedside. In this career a successful day is when I don’t get threatened with death by some kid who snuck a pair of scissors or a cafeteria butterknife into my class. While I have enjoyed both my jobs every single day of my adult life I have come home from work mentally and emotionally exhausted. I spend my weekends laying on the couch reading, surfing the web, or playing video games because I need the escape. Extended family thinks I’m lazy.
The day retire will be a truly happy day and if I could retire tomorrow (I’m 42) I would not feel one iota of guilt about it. However, all I have is a small public pension and social security so I may never retire at all.
Anything I might have wanted to say has wilted under the sustained fire of the last post. What a shitshow.
There’s a reason @Dinsdale has become a misanthrope, overseeing as he has hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars going to the optionally working lazy. Who, ref the OP, are generally not young, but rather middle-aged plus.
@Lancia you have more than earned your spot in the cushy side of afterlife by your earthly works. Transfer to the Department of Motor Vehicles to finish out your state pension. It’ll be a LOT easier on your psyche.
I was on the site council of my daughters’ high school, and the principal said that a recurring problem was that kids, still in high school, got kicked out by their parents the moment they turned 18. That kind of sucks.
My daughter’s friends who didn’t go away to college and lived at home were all going to college at the time, near by. Some of them stayed at home while they were working, not from laziness but because rental prices around here are nuts. They all moved out as soon as possible. In the Bay Area why pay a few thousand a month for a room in a shared apartment when you can save that for a nest egg and to pay off your college loans.
I was thrown out of the house for brief periods of time in my teens, by age sixteen my parents were living somewhere else and my Mom visited me once a week. At age seventeen I realized I’d do much better on my own since I was basically on my own anyway. I stayed with my Aunt and eventually became legally emancipated, which is a long story for another day. My story wasn’t that unusual, really? We had kids working to support their parents, some of my gay friends were tossed out as teens. I had a close friend whose relationship with her mother was roughly as disastrous as mine - she went to live with her own Aunt, in another state. We were lucky we had someone there to catch us, but when I lived with my Aunt the only thing that came free was rent. I worked full time as a server for everything from gas to groceries.
I had to take my own ass to the Medicaid office and the credit union with my little emancipation certificate to open my own checking account.
It’s sort of a reality of the rural working class, or at least it was at the time. Comparing my experience to that of the upper middle class kids I grew up with, we might as well have lived on different planets.
I have no idea what working class norms are today, but I do perceive that times have changed in terms of what’s considered acceptable in raising kids. When I mentioned to my therapist that I had been mostly living alone at age sixteen, she nearly fell out of her chair.
While I agree it was neglect, I have to assert that sixteen year olds are not invalids, and it annoys me to see them treated as such. I’m not really sure which is worse.
That’s heartbreaking. These people are so damaged.
Revisiting my brother for a minute - I do not cast (much) doubt on his anxiety diagnosis, and the constraint with going off state-funded aid (SSI, food stamps, etc.) and then having to reacquire it later are a real hassle and risk. Those things are conditions of his situation, meaning there are not really solvable.
But his attitude toward his entitlement is what gets me hot - openly hating on immigrants. Calling them names - racist names. I am sure this has to do with, perhaps, feelings of competition for those benefits that sustain him, but the irony is lost entirely. On one hand, someone who has not contributed much to society but feels entitled to the benefits he receives because he’s “sick”. Fine. On the other hand, people wanting to come here to work, and improve their lot in life and that of their family, which they are responsible for - he wants them all sent back. “Build the wall”, says he. When I point this irony out to him regarding his own sucking off the public teat, and to get him to back-off the attacks, he just hand-waves it away - doesn’t see it at all. Baffling. As you can imagine, the topic does not come up much any more.
In my experience, a lot of those sort of people are barely productive even when they are working.
Then again, a lot of people seem to be making some money putting content on YouTube and TicTock (often of them playing videogames).
You don’t need to make a ton of money doing it to justify not taking a retail or fast food job.
Good point.
Yeah, maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a heated living space, a working fridge, and a reliable source of hot water. And tasty food and health care.
This. Unless you have a 1st-percentile household income and keep your living expenses down a small fraction of that, you’re unlikely to save enough in 18 years or less to give you a comfortable life for the subsequent ~50 years. Social Security and Medicare won’t kick in until you’re in your 60s. Until then, Health insurance costs (or health care costs) are going to be huge, and as you get older and your body wears out, you’re not going to want to DIY everything. When SS does kick in, it won’t be much since you only worked ~18 years. Plus, requiring your nest egg to last 25 years longer than normal exposes you to a much greater sequence-of-returns risk.
I wonder how far ahead the average FIRE enthusiast has really mapped out their numbers, or whether they realize how much financial risk they’re taking. Or understand how difficult it is to get a high-paying job again after they’ve been unemployed for 10-15 years.
I guess the example of my brother I gave earlier, his income was in the 90th to 95th percentile of earnings during his working years, but spent as if he was in the 75th percentile most of that time.
At age 41 he had a net worth of over $5M. And in ten years since then, spending $75k a year more than he earns, his portfolio has grown to over $7M.
But this would be impossible for anyone below the 90th percentile.