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THEORY 2 young people always dream of post-work utopias and various socialisms, each generation eventually grows out of it as its skilled and ambitious members advance in their careers and gain a stake in the system, this amounts to nothing but some youthful political signaling
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THEORY 3 zoomers literally can't handle even a white collar workday because they're spoiled/snowflakes/clinically depressed. they're just broken. this ultimately implies persistent labor shortages and low productivity in the US, spelling doom for the current American economy
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THEORY 4 white collar jobs have accidentally become spiritually intolerable. things like corporate mission statements, remote work, culture and diversity programs have shifted the focus away from the work itself and its products, making employees feel unmoored and alienated
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THEORY 5 everything is fine and everyone is normal, except for the 1 million people who are on Twitter all day and follow the sorts of accounts who'd share this post. these are just the whiniest and most anti-work fringe of the English-speaking world and not representative
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THEORY 6 old generations were brainwashed by consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses, but zoomers are actually post-materialist and will happily make the conscious trade-off of stagnant material living standards in exchange for working 15 hour weeks like Keynes predicted
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THEORY 7 most white collar jobs are actually BS jobs that provide no economic value, American GDP is sustained by a handful of 10x engineers in SF, fracking, and military-backed exporting of dollar inflation. realizing this makes working these jobs intolerable
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THEORY 8 the 40 hours working each week are fine, but the other 72 waking hours are mentally and emotionally exhausting because instead of physical activity or chilling with friends young people are alone, dealing with BS chores, or immersed in the social media psychosis machine
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THEORY 9 the internet made global labor competition possible, so entry-level white collar jobs are much more shitty and demanding of young Americans than was the case 20 years ago because they're now competing with outsourcing and offshoring
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this seems like one of the most important questions right now and we're blind-men-and-elephanting it, with most everything written on the issue consisting of cherry-picked data to support one story or another instead of comparing the relative powers of all of them systematically
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THEORY 10 having 2-3 hours of work each day but having to spend another 6 hours pretending to because your boss is sitting right behind you or some system is tracking your computer activity is way way more exhausting than actually doing something for 6 hours and goofing off for 3
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Theory 11: you’re way overanalyzing a casual remark that got hit by viral lightning gods for no specific reason The virality is the only reason it’s worth analyzing at all, and is itself kinda meaningless in a sand grain/avalanche way