Sorry, but I beg to disagree. Vehemently. That worked for my parent's generation, possibly also for the first half of the boomer generation. Hasn't worked out all that great for anyone since. Get an education? I know lots of people who did. Smart people, not lazy at all. And now most are living paycheck to paycheck. Not because they're living beyond their means. No, they're barely paying for the necessities.
In most places there's only so far you can move up. If the person who's been there 20 years is basically doing the same job as you, maybe for 20% more pay, that kind of tells you what you have in store if you stay there. You can't move up when opportunities largely don't exist, no matter how hard you work. Also, we're reaching hard limits on future growth due to resource constraints, and you have people in charge who don't even notice which of their subordinates are better. That's why everyone is trying to redefine the system. If it worked so well, why would they? My parents didn't have to redefine the system because it worked well enough for them that even people with high school diplomas could raise a family on one salary, and find housing for 1/4 of their take-home pay. And pay for college waiting tables or doing something similar. When you got that degree, you could literally write you own ticket like my aforementioned uncle did.
Also, maybe people are finally realizing there's more to life than work and being defined by your job, especially when things my parents took for granted are increasingly out of reach. Or put another way, what you do shouldn't take up so much of your time that you have no real life until you're able to retire. Worker productivity has increased more than 3 times since WWII but the workers themselves never benefited from these gains.
This isn't about blue versus white collar workers, either. Both are needed, although the former will be the first to be displaced by automation. Rather, it's about the notion that nobody is to blame except themselves for their own situation. I used to think that way also, until I saw lots of smart, capable people fall by the wayside through no fault of their own.
Lifespan is really one of the best metrics for measuring how we're doing overall. It was falling in the US pre-pandemic, even as it was still rising in other countries.
If you don't work, you don't eat.
Should this apply to my mother, too? She hasn't been able to work since her mid 40s, at least paid work. People contribute in different ways, not all in conventional ways.
We should not take meritocracy as a given and instead, re-organize society along different lines to restore dignity to work and a sense of the common good.
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