How old were you when you realised hard work and sacrifice weren’t worth it? Some realise it at retirement, when after a lifetime of indispensability and missed weekends to reach the prize — a powerful job — they are smoothly replaced and forgotten within a month or two. For others the revelation strikes later, perhaps ending up on one of those “top regrets of the dying” lists drawn up by palliative nurses. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is always in there.
I think the general rule is that the penny drops some time in your fifties or sixties. Having spent your thirties and forties twitchily looking over your shoulder at your peers, trying to work out who is doing it right (the subtext, I can tell you, of many a tedious pub chat), it suddenly hits you. Most things are basically out of your control.
The philosophy driving Anglo-American economies — work like a maniac and you can achieve anything — is quite obviously untrue except for a lucky few. Everyone else can relax, become more fun to talk to, and maybe get into gardening. That’s a good lesson to learn in your sixties, with retirement on the way. But learn it much earlier than that and you have a problem.
Most of us have to work quite hard just to make a living, and the happiest workers buy into the idea that life is fair, it is all worth it and great rewards glitter just over the horizon. Without that romance and that spur, the daily grind just becomes more grinding. Those kids who could not wait for a marshmallow are of course in line for much less satisfying lives: the test predicts that they will fall in and out of work, even abuse drugs. The workplace is not set up for them. It works only for those who keep the faith.
>>90350 >For others the revelation strikes later, perhaps ending up on one of those “top regrets of the dying” lists drawn up by palliative nurses. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is always in there.
I find this a bit irritating. It's become a cliche, and personally I find it misleading. Why is it people who are literally on the cusp of death are seen to be in a right or clearer state of mind than those who aren't? Why does what you feel in your last moments matter more than what you were feeling for the majority of your life? Is it not possible that people feel happy and fulfilled for decades, then have a sudden shock and will feel regretful about a myriad of things towards the end, rationally or not?
It seems more likely to me that the problem isn't hard work or ambition, but in an economic system that drives you to "hard work" it's really a way of dying people saying, "I wish I had more time".
If you actually go back over people's lives, they were generally doing what they had to in order to maintain some standard of living that either a) was the absolute maximum they could achieve given their circumstances, b) they were unwilling to give up, or c) it never occurred to them to give up. I imagine the majority of people fall into a).
>Some realise it at retirement, when after a lifetime of indispensability and missed weekends to reach the prize — a powerful job — they are smoothly replaced and forgotten within a month or two.
This is also stupid -- I would expect a well functioning organisation to have people who could take my place when I leave, particularly when I've warned them of my retirement. And if I have a powerful job, then it makes sense that others will find it desirable and want to go for it.
>The philosophy driving Anglo-American economies — work like a maniac and you can achieve anything — is quite obviously untrue except for a lucky few. Everyone else can relax, become more fun to talk to, and maybe get into gardening
Sounds like the conceit of a privileged opinion writer, ignoring the fact that the majority of people have to work insane hours just to keep any semblance of material comfort and self-identity going. The economic system gives them a very limited set of choices.
I think you're looking for nits to pick mate, you seem to broadly agree with the thrust of her point, it's just that women aren't very good at writing rhetoric.
The's an implied assumption that you, as the reader, already understand and share her belief in the coercive nature of the economic system, to begin with.
Indeed I do already believe that our economic system is coercive, but the article still strikes me as totally wrongheaded. It's framing this excessive work as a choice when it is more often not.
You could argue that (considering it's in the Times), it's framed as a choice because it's directed not at workers, but at the people responsible for workers.
I realised a while ago that a lot of what pisses me off about people like Owen Jones, for instance, is that he's simply not writing for me. He's writing for the kind of people who have fashionable dinner parties with other professional couples. It comes off hilariously out of touch because if it had any air of authentic working class credibility, the people who need to hear the message would be uncomfortable trying to engage and relate with it and thus subconsciously dismiss it.
>>90399>>90400 Polly Toynbee earns over six figures for her Guardian work. I'm pretty sure if you were in a position to make shitloads of money for writing that kind of bollocks you would. Not sure on Owen Jones but I believe he's made a fair amount from his books.
My missus likes to play a joke by changing my desktop background to this. He's disappointed in me for relapsing on my vegan diet and getting a 20 McNugget share box to myself.
>>90407 This must be a joke but it does baffle me how people will so easily share passwords. I sometimes will be given a bird's laptop and she will just go have a shower. Do normal people not have secret gardens? If I made an /emo/ thread on here saying that I'm having an affair with a woman at work I bet it could cause a load of shit.
Don't even get me started when I'm given a card and pin-number "yeah, before I go, let's be dead kinky with some handcuffs. It'll be a laugh, trust me."
I'm happy to share certain passwords, but not all of them - and my secret garden is secret enough that a partner probably wouldn't even know it existed.
I don't have anything to hide, really, I have never cheated and rarely do anything nefarious, and if you're going out with me, you're probably going to know that I buy drugs off the internet occasionally, so that's fine. But I'd never give anyone my "master" passwords for things like SSH, my Google account or facebook - I realise the last two are ironic as using them means everyone can see my data, but you get where I'm coming from. Facebook I only have for messenger, and I only really limit access to that because my girlfriend doesn't need to see the horrifying amount of women I speak to when I'm single, and I'm too lazy to delete all the chats.
As for money, nobody but me and maybe my mother would ever know the pin to my current account, the one with all the real money in - but if you need to use my money, by all means take the credit card with a grand on it that sends me a push notification every time it is used - to me it's worth losing that sort of money to discover your potential life partner is a clumsy thief.
If I'm giving you my laptop, it's either logged into a guest account, or I've deleted my history/closed all 40 porn tabs I keep up because I'm an old man who doesn't like bookmarking stuff. And, like you say - .gs is my secret garden, really, and even if you find your way here, you'll never know what I posted specifically.
If you use the same password/pin for everything, however, then you have other problems.
Any other girlfriend and I'd agree with you, but I don't even have to hide my naughty texts to other birds from this one so what is there to worry about.
>>90407 That image is probably his most effective and life-changing piece of work, even if he didn't produce it himself. Your partner is to be commended.
If I could be bothered, and had the skillz, an Owen Jones/Comic Sans meme website would be top of my list for an internet (serious) business.
>>90420 Not in the slightest - they're not making as much money as they planned (nor is any bank at the moment), but they're easily doing the best of the challenger banks out there.
>>90421 >Smartphone bank Monzo warns the coronavirus pandemic has raised doubts over whether it could raise money in the future and continue operating.
>Having already seen losses increase 142 per cent to £114million in the 12 months to February 2020, it said growth had slowed and its revenue had been 'significantly impacted by the pandemic'. The challenger bank, which has around 4.3million customers and issues a 'hot coral' coloured debit card, said it was 'exposed to the risk that revenues are significantly lower for a long period of time', and the pandemic 'makes the fundraising environment more challenging'.
>Its directors warned the loss-making bank faced 'material uncertainties that cast significant doubt upon the group's ability to continue as a going concern'.
>>90422 "material uncertainties that cast significant doubt upon the group's ability to continue as a going concern" is the standard wording required in an audit report for when outside circumstances might bring you down. Any company that doesn't get that assessment in their report this year has insulated itself well.
>>90423 Exactly - I work for a different bank (not a challenger) - we'll all have that on our financial reports this year.
Monzo are doing the best because of the rate they've grown and the quality of their customer experience - just about every other bank (who aren't a challenger) wishes to buy them - so I would take any talking them down with a pinch of salt. Revolut are bigger, but they've had issues with AML and so would be far more wary of them as a customer.
We'll see - I've used it as my lunch/travel/contactless bank account for a long time now. I'm not about to start paying my salary in there (but know plenty who do), but I think they'll get there and would recommend them to anyone.
>>90425 Yeah, given they seem to have a significantly above-average rate of account lockouts which they refuse to explain (therefore denying the customer the ability to resolve), I wouldn't trust it as a primary account any more than I'd trust PayPal as a primary payment provider.
I can understand why more accounts get locked - they're on the hook for fraud, and by necessity there's a sensitivity/specificity trade-off in fraud detection, so if you're in a financially weaker position the PR hit of false positives is a better bet than having to cough up on false negatives.
Millennials all over the world have lost faith in democracy
Millennials in democracies throughout the world are more disillusioned with their system of government than any young generation in living memory, a study has found.
A survey of nearly five million people showed that those in their 20s and 30s, born between 1981 and 1996, had less faith in democratic institutions than their parents or grandparents did at the same stage of life. The collapse of confidence is particularly pronounced in the “Anglo-Saxon democracies” of Britain, the United States and Australia. However, similar trends are seen in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Europe.
“This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works while in their twenties and thirties,” Roberto Foa, lead author of the study from the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University, said.
Of the 2.3 billion people in countries covered by the report, 1.6 billion, or seven out of ten, are in nations with declining democratic satisfaction from one generation to the next. This did not mean that voters would support autocratic alternatives, Dr Foa said. Rather, they were frustrated that their systems were not working for them.
The report shows a slump among young Britons, fuelled largely by inequality. In 1973, 54 per cent of British 30-year-olds reported being satisfied with democracy and 57 per cent of baby boomers expressed the same sentiment when they turned 30 a decade later. For members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, satisfaction reached a high of 62 per cent during the 1990s and 2000s. For millennials, it has sunk to 48 per cent.
Inequalities in wealth and income, the difficulty of climbing on to the property ladder, the burden of student debt and a greater dependence on support from parents have created a perception that “the chances of success or failure in life depend less upon hard work and enterprise, and more upon inherited wealth and privilege”.
Doesn't surprise me that's the spin the times would put on things; a more accurate title would be that we have less and less democracy. Democracy does not matter that much if the only options available are the neoliberal consensus or nothing, hence the recent descent into nationalist and alt-,right lunacy.
Fair point, it's not unique to The Times, then. I still find it a curious way to frame the research, that perhaps begins with the nature of the study itself, which assumes that we actually have meaningful democracy. The scope of options has been narrowing (or skewing back dramatically in favour of private power) for the last half century or more.
To then publish a report claiming people are dissatisfied with something leaves us open to the suggestion that people want something other than democracy, rather than to fix or improve democratic institutions. I have a feeling it would be very easy to spin this into a "group x are anti-state" or "anti-whatever" when that's not the case.
>>90854 >The scope of options has been narrowing (or skewing back dramatically in favour of private power) for the last half century or more.
Isn't it a case of reverting to the mean? The post-war consensus was the exception rather than the norm in terms of power and we've since been shifting back to things have always been, with this correction accerlated by the financial crisis.
>I have a feeling it would be very easy to spin this into a "group x are anti-state" or "anti-whatever" when that's not the case.
I expected the comments to be full of "Millennials don't like democracy when people don't vote the way they want them to" but some of the top rated ones are:-
>If people want to talk about "entitlement", that word could have been invented for the boomers. Still, don't touch the triple lock pension. Don't change a thing. Just have a go at the snowflakes.
...
>I think an important point in the article is that millennials are not against democracy but dissatisfied in the way the democracies work in practice. I think that's a pretty fair comment. There are glaring issues here in the UK and elsewhere that devalue the democratic process.
...
>Which generation is entitled? The one that loaded the country on debt, deliberately didn't build enough houses to make it's assets more valuable, signed off outrageous unfunded pensions for the next generation to pay for, went to university for free, burned all the fossil fuels, and still gets free travel cards. Ah yes, millennials are entitled.
...
>It’s not the concept of democracy per se - it’s the electoral system and the quality of politicians that’s the problem. There is insufficient competition in our two party system and the candidate selection process is rigged.
Heck, these are top comments on the Mail's article about it:
>When democracy can be purchased without investigation such as the brexit referendum, can you blame them.
...
>The older generations have not taken their responsibility to listen and lead seriously- Brexit has been a massive betrayal of trust and the constant government lies surrounding Boris and trump means politicians reputations have reached rock bottom - the government had better be careful this could be an even more desperate and dangerous situation halfway through next year. All the things we have taken for granted could be gone forever
That said, beyond that it's people who've only read the headline complaining about snowflakes, the liberal media and loony lefties indoctrinating children in school.
>>90855 >Isn't it a case of reverting to the mean?
Right you are, though I hope the "mean" isn't a constant. I don't want to be fatalistic, and think we could return to and improve on the gains made in the post-war era.
Interesting comments, too, it seemed many also saw right through that one. I'm hopeful that the comments you posted are representative of the general reader, but it's hard to tell if that's the case.
>>90852 I think what The Times says is true, it's just that they don't understand how this problem has happened or they don't want to highlight it. I'm not sure how cynical I'm feeling so I can't come down one way or another on their motives. It's repeatedly baffling and frustrating to me how all these failings in our current system are as plain to see as the bone in a compound fracture, but no one with any real power is arsed. It's not as if changing our current socio-economic system would ruin rich people's lives, it's not the Byzantine Empire; no one needs to be blinded and locked in a dungeon. Going back to what I said about what I said about The Times' possible motivations, what are the political motivations for this? Is it cult-esque group think or are they just hopelessly amoral and don't care? Perhaps it differs from person to person. Either way, the mothership isn't coming, but the powers that be insist we keep showing up for a group reading of What Xenu Can Do For You anyway. I could go on and on, but I have things to do so consider yourselves lucky.
>>90852 >Democracy does not matter that much if the only options available are the neoliberal consensus or nothing, hence the recent descent into nationalist and alt-,right lunacy.
So why was satisfaction highest during the 90s and 00s? Surely John Major wasn't that good.
Get off your soapbox for 5 minutes and you will notice that the surge in confidence coincided with a crisis in people not voting. That should give you a clue as to the real reason being today's divisive politics where every election result is a disaster for someone and the government asks us what to do in referendums.
I actually don't know what point you're referencing here. Unless you want me to guess at and maybe misinterpret your point, you should just say what your stance is.
>Get off your soapbox for 5 minutes and you will notice that the surge in confidence coincided with a crisis in people not voting.
It's hard to interpret this without the numbers, but I'd be inclined to believe that a surge in confidence during low turnout is a sign that disaffected people chose not to vote, whereas now they vote but not satisfied with the democratic system as a whole. I'm not sure I see anything inconsistent between my views and what you're saying.
"There's no point in voting because they're all the same" isn't necessarily a bad thing if they're all competent moderates and everything is going pretty well. High turnouts can be a bad thing if most of the electorate are voting for the lesser of two evils.
I've heard Tories say that they'd happily have Blair back and Labour supporters say that they'd happily have Major back; I think confidence in democracy was high in the 90s simply because Westminster was broadly competent and reasonable.
>So why was satisfaction highest during the 90s and 00s?
Maybe because people earning the median wage could reasonably afford to buy a house without having to relocate to Scunthorpe or somewhere similarly grim.
>>90860 I'm saying people were satisfied with the neoliberal consensus during its peak. Suggesting we don't have an alternative right now or that our democracy is somehow now more flawed is a load of bollocks because we have radically different visions at work. Its that confidence in the consensus that has been eroded and replaced by more 'winner takes all' style politics where both sides seek to attack the existing neoliberal system from different tracks.
It's rather symbolic that the lowest voter turnout was mere months before 9/11.
>>90861 >I think confidence in democracy was high in the 90s simply because Westminster was broadly competent and reasonable.
I disagree given the 90s began with the poll tax riots and a government that was eventually thrown out of office due to sleaze. And the following decade that had the Iraq War and a curtailment in civil liberties attached to a general fear of a new trend in terrorism.
There's certainly wider issues that are driving partisan divisions but they're mundane explanations to do with continual challenges to our prosperity (not to say we didn't have those in previous generations) and a loss of social cohesion that challenge democracy everywhere. If we had a system that offered no real alternative during a time of prosperity then it wouldn't matter and if we faced hard times together it wouldn't knock as hard at our faith in the community consensus.
>>90864 Funnily enough, Fukuyama has actually been saying something along these lines. That the traditional working class feel betrayed by cosmopolitan social democrats and in general people lack a feeling of dignity in modern society like they don't matter.
Not exactly revolutionary thought but consider where it's coming from.
>>90861 I don't think anyone really wants Major or Blair back. They want back the calmer times of the 1990s because they haven't given enough thought to how the events of the 1990s lead us to the events of the present. 1 month into a Major or Blair re-run they'd realise that neither of them have the midas touch and that everything is still shit, only now it's shit presided over by a grandfather instead of a gigalo.
>>90865 >in general people lack a feeling of dignity in modern society like they don't matter.
I think Michael Young (who coined the word "meritocracy", and not as an ideal) was before his time on this. He did do a book on it, but this comment piece is just as instructive: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment >In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government.
>The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment.
>They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves.
>It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that. >They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came.
>Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.
>With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them.
...
>The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.
>They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.
>So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.
>Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied.
The only issue I have with the analysis post-2001 is that being pre-recession it doesn't have much to say for the downwardly mobile middle class, who have their certificates but still get beaten over the head with the "without merit" stick.
I read a good article on the downwardly mobile middle class some while ago, that suggested they might be partly to blame for the modern day left becoming seemingly toothless. The downwardly mobile iddle has taken up the flag out of self-interest because it finds itself under pressure, but these are not people who object in principle to the unsatisfactory conditions of working minimum wage stacking shelves at Tesco. Merely that it is they/their children (who have degrees don't you know) who should have to do it. They believed in the meritocracy, they just never considered its window might shift.
The debate over financial support for Tier 3 lockdown has really been pissing me off. The only reason we're discussing it is because we've spent the last decade gutting the welfare state, but there's a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that fact. We kept voting in a government that shredded the safety net, but it's only a problem now that middle-class people are hurtling towards the ground. We're studiously ignoring the elephant in the room - that we condemned millions of people to poverty, degradation and misery simply because we thought that we were better than them and would never have to share their fate.
A lot of people feel personally offended that the government is saying "if you lose your job, you should claim unemployment benefit", as if they're not really unemployed. They're acting like being mortgaged up to the eyeballs with an Audi on PCP is somehow morally different from having a massive telly on tick from Brighthouse. They were only too happy to tell manufacturing workers that they should just "up-skill" when their jobs went to China, but there's no way that they're going to retrain to become a healthcare worker or a lorry driver or a web developer. The whole thing just stinks of hypocrisy, callousness and the old deserving vs undeserving poor dichotomy.
I'm just a wet centrist social democrat Blairite bastard, but I'm glad to see the austerity chickens come home to roost. If anything good comes out of this shitter of a year, I hope it's a bit of empathy for people who have been shat on by life.
Trouble is the middle class tend to see their self-interest as aligning with capital, not the proletariat. This country's ingrained snobbery always cancels out any logical assessment of one's position in society, and therefore vulnerability to economic impact. Our preconceptions of class obscure the fact that earning £35k a year as a junior manager in the office puts you roughly on the same wage level as an experienced mechanic, which is undoubtedly a povvo job for people who only did BTECs. The difference is the mechanic likely has far greater job security.
Essentially this is the main con-trick the Conservatives have exploited to secure their position in office for the last ten years. You're one of us, not one of them.
>>91363 Does this assume that grandparents give directly to their grandchildren, or their parents pass the money through without skimming too much?
Setting your life up on the assumption of a future inheritance is weird. Waiting until your parents die to pay off your mortgage runs a hell of a risk of them dying broke or living for ages, and you holding a mortgage you can't pay or renew, just when you were hoping to relax a bit.
I wouldn't turn down an inheritance, but people bleating about inheritance tax can fuck off. Tax it like income.
I think inheritance tax is just a stupidity tax, as it's so fucking easy to get around. If your parents/grandparents have the sort of assets to make it an issue, they almost certainly have an accountant or money manager who has sorted it out for them anyway.
