"Bare Minimum Mondays" sounds exactly like the kind of thing a "gospel of productivity" would promote.
If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the fact that housing is too expensive. Which is frankly a derivative of the fact that for decades the US has promoted wealth building on the backs of real estate, which is unsustainable for obvious reasons.
Also, replacing work, which even if it doesn't pay as well as it did earlier, is shown to largely have a positive impact on the mental health of people, with TikTok is a horrible trade-off.
Building wealth through housing means the cost of your house goes up relative to inflation and for it to be an actual good it has to go up relative to alternative safe investments like investing in an index fund, which obviously means that for people who don't already own homes, housing is now relatively more expensive than it was for people before them...run these obvious choices for half a century and housing will naturally get prohibitively more expensive, especially when you throw in the fact that available land will only get more scarce and therefore more expensive, and zoning, and NIMBYism).
The ill effects of poor housing policy are deep and insidious
Gentrification, and backlash against it is the most obvious societal outcome of failing to keep prices under control. But it goes further
House prices drive out low income workers(gentrification). Loss of lower income families in turn raises the cost of doing business for any business that deals with unskilled or otherwise cheap labor. In turn these businesses must raise prices, which feeds back into housing prices among just about all other industries.
Meanwhile, poor citizens learn to hate new condo buildings, gnash their teeth at the Starbucks that opened in their neighborhood, and fantasize about shooting guns at nothing in the night to keep the yuppies from moving in. After all, having wealthy neighbors is demonstrably destructive to your way of life.
In fact, having an improved standard of living, can be seen as destructive. After all, if they clean up the local park and add universal pre-K, does that mean the yuppies will move in and drive up rents? These things would be obvious community wins outside the lens of housing prices.
Under the specter of housing as investment, it is in the rational interest of all renters to make their city as least attractive and unpleasant as possible to live in as possible, with as few high paying jobs and businesses, except for ideally one good job for the renter themself.
On the flip side, for homeowners, housing-as-investment incentivizes the kind of exclusivity you might otherwise only find with diehard bitcoiners. Ideally housing production should be 0 or negative. Construction and development is no longer viewed in the lens of whether it is good for the city, nor good for the people involved, but if it is good for my personal investment.
And thus, at a societal level, we have built for the young a culture of loathing wealthy companies that bring high paying jobs and the yuppies who work those job; and for the old, a culture of loathing any change, any construction or development at all, that might interfere with the life built through homeownership
We are truly not in it together, and have not been since exclusive zoning became the norm
Why should house prices in USA be any different than any other country? Adjusting for the current different real estate prices are much more in many other major cities around the world than that of in USA.
"What’s more, Gen Z’s older friends and colleagues, the millennials, do not bring with them the messages of hope they inherited from their Gen X forebears"
Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
Although Gen X is categorises by apathy and cynicism, subsequent generations still feel that Gen X just managed to squeeze in with the boomers before the door narrowed. Especially regarding property prices.
A lot of it is probably just timeless inter-generational resentment but it doesn't help that boomers still haven't retired and caused a logjam.
It seems like Gen-Z has come up with terms that describe basic human behaviour, and the media is running with it as some shocking new phenomena. Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
Media propagandists serving the capitalist class invented those terms, not Gen Z. Zoomers are not in power anywhere.
>Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
It's not "half assing" but rather "acting your wage" aka being aware enough to realize you're not paid enough to put yourself in danger or lose sleep over some bullshit when you're barely paid enough to survive.
The author doesn't consider our parents and their parents didn't own a modern house walking distance from dinning and entertainment which is what most people aspire to today. They also married very young, had three kids before 25 and signed up for 30 year loans to pay their cookie cutter suburban homes. You could technically do the same today, it's just that living that type of life would be absolutely terrifying for many. On a separate note, I work with many Gen Zs and they don't fit the stereotype everyone talks about. In my experience they are hardworking, motivated and make amazing teammates. They aren't complaining about how stressful is to work 40hr/week from home.
>Own a house walking distance from dinning and entertainment
My parents and their parents did. Neither were rich. Perhaps not super bougie places but they had various community things nearby like dancing, bowling, bars, gyms, malls, etc. Detroit and detroit metro.
What's terrifying there? I mean the 3 kids at a young age sounds like more than I could have handled but everything else you wrote sounds like the dream.
Hustle culture is a form of CYA for poor managers. If I, incompetent manager, hammer on my employees to hustle, I can claim I am doing my best to manage my team and any deficiency must be their fault because I've set the standard.
Nevermind that every job is different and the outcomes are measured very differently and sometimes "hustling" or "staying busy" is actually a substandard way of achieving most tasks consistently as the short term benefits of hustling give way to burnout.
Bad managers are asking employees to constantly sprint when business is a marathon. It's a weak form of leadership generally ascribed to the "professional" managers with (only) business school backgrounds who can't understand what their employees actually do nor understand the system of the company as a whole.
It's a classic short term quarterly profits mentality.
Employees have for centuries been doing this sort of thing. Looking busy by optimizing for busyness over actual productivity because they realize managers are only concerned with looking good and skating by, not the actual business outcomes.
Note for those starting a business: design your corporate structure so that middle managers incentives are visibly aligned with the actual success of the company and not with visible working culture. And then set the pace properly.
A motor cannot work at 100% duty cycle and maintain it's longest possible service life before being rebuilt.
I find it quite ironic that the author cares so much about housing costs and presumably money, but at the same time she chose a profession that has a low average salary.
If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
If everyone picked low-GDP professions like her then in the extreme case you’d have a country like Democratic Republic of Congo with low housing costs but also you’re practically squatting in nature in a hut.
If everyone picked high-GDP professions, society would collapse. Imagine a world where everyone is a CEO and nobody knows how to fix a water main or run a cafeteria.
>If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
We should start by paying better for the things people already do. Rewarding those who keep the lights on incentivizes keeping the lights on.
1. The price of a 1 bedroom apartment in Congo’s capital city center is literally double that of Berlin.
2. My personal definition of a failed society is one that fails to fulfill the basic needs of its people.. and yes, that includes people with a profesion that has a low average salary.
Working harder and smarter are two different things. Productivity has nothing to do with working harder, otherwise china's labor force would be the most productive in the world. It's not. Mexico has twice the productivity of China
Most productive countries are those who work smarter. See the list for yourself
How does that work within the context of an office place? Not all corporations have internal cultures that encourage competition between coworkers. And at some point it's no longer productivity that causes one to get ahead, but politics.
I think these types of writing while appropriately labeled as opinions, are doing a dis-service for the general public especially the youth, the specified generation.
Well, someone's gonna have to do the slog-worthy work, otherwise no one gets civilization. You can whine about it as much as you want (who knows whining better than a journalist!?).
The problem around here seems to mostly be there is no housing at all for slog-worthy workers. You can con them into taking out crazy college loans they'll never pay off and an individual can remain in denial about astronomical healthcare and nonexistent retirement prospects during their day to day, but workers have yet to develop the ability to teleport to and from work so that no housing needs to be built near these poorly paying jobs.
asdajksah2123|3 years ago
If the article had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the fact that housing is too expensive. Which is frankly a derivative of the fact that for decades the US has promoted wealth building on the backs of real estate, which is unsustainable for obvious reasons.
Also, replacing work, which even if it doesn't pay as well as it did earlier, is shown to largely have a positive impact on the mental health of people, with TikTok is a horrible trade-off.
Building wealth through housing means the cost of your house goes up relative to inflation and for it to be an actual good it has to go up relative to alternative safe investments like investing in an index fund, which obviously means that for people who don't already own homes, housing is now relatively more expensive than it was for people before them...run these obvious choices for half a century and housing will naturally get prohibitively more expensive, especially when you throw in the fact that available land will only get more scarce and therefore more expensive, and zoning, and NIMBYism).
helen___keller|3 years ago
Gentrification, and backlash against it is the most obvious societal outcome of failing to keep prices under control. But it goes further
House prices drive out low income workers(gentrification). Loss of lower income families in turn raises the cost of doing business for any business that deals with unskilled or otherwise cheap labor. In turn these businesses must raise prices, which feeds back into housing prices among just about all other industries.
Meanwhile, poor citizens learn to hate new condo buildings, gnash their teeth at the Starbucks that opened in their neighborhood, and fantasize about shooting guns at nothing in the night to keep the yuppies from moving in. After all, having wealthy neighbors is demonstrably destructive to your way of life.
In fact, having an improved standard of living, can be seen as destructive. After all, if they clean up the local park and add universal pre-K, does that mean the yuppies will move in and drive up rents? These things would be obvious community wins outside the lens of housing prices.
Under the specter of housing as investment, it is in the rational interest of all renters to make their city as least attractive and unpleasant as possible to live in as possible, with as few high paying jobs and businesses, except for ideally one good job for the renter themself.
On the flip side, for homeowners, housing-as-investment incentivizes the kind of exclusivity you might otherwise only find with diehard bitcoiners. Ideally housing production should be 0 or negative. Construction and development is no longer viewed in the lens of whether it is good for the city, nor good for the people involved, but if it is good for my personal investment.
And thus, at a societal level, we have built for the young a culture of loathing wealthy companies that bring high paying jobs and the yuppies who work those job; and for the old, a culture of loathing any change, any construction or development at all, that might interfere with the life built through homeownership
We are truly not in it together, and have not been since exclusive zoning became the norm
la64710|3 years ago
manv1|3 years ago
Messages of hope from Gen X? What is this author smoking?
stcroixx|3 years ago
bravetraveler|3 years ago
I'm a millennial that gives their gen X brother a place to live... his life was a continuous reminder that hope [where we grew up] was misplaced.
I succeeded despite everything
pygar|3 years ago
A lot of it is probably just timeless inter-generational resentment but it doesn't help that boomers still haven't retired and caused a logjam.
jspash|3 years ago
(I'm just a Gen X-er continually amused by the show)
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
missedthecue|3 years ago
It seems like Gen-Z has come up with terms that describe basic human behaviour, and the media is running with it as some shocking new phenomena. Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
CapstanRoller|3 years ago
Media propagandists serving the capitalist class invented those terms, not Gen Z. Zoomers are not in power anywhere.
>Half assing it at your job is not a new thing.
It's not "half assing" but rather "acting your wage" aka being aware enough to realize you're not paid enough to put yourself in danger or lose sleep over some bullshit when you're barely paid enough to survive.
Mizoguchi|3 years ago
boppo1|3 years ago
My parents and their parents did. Neither were rich. Perhaps not super bougie places but they had various community things nearby like dancing, bowling, bars, gyms, malls, etc. Detroit and detroit metro.
UncleMeat|3 years ago
lotsoweiners|3 years ago
DeadMouseFive|3 years ago
Nevermind that every job is different and the outcomes are measured very differently and sometimes "hustling" or "staying busy" is actually a substandard way of achieving most tasks consistently as the short term benefits of hustling give way to burnout.
Bad managers are asking employees to constantly sprint when business is a marathon. It's a weak form of leadership generally ascribed to the "professional" managers with (only) business school backgrounds who can't understand what their employees actually do nor understand the system of the company as a whole.
It's a classic short term quarterly profits mentality.
Employees have for centuries been doing this sort of thing. Looking busy by optimizing for busyness over actual productivity because they realize managers are only concerned with looking good and skating by, not the actual business outcomes.
Note for those starting a business: design your corporate structure so that middle managers incentives are visibly aligned with the actual success of the company and not with visible working culture. And then set the pace properly.
A motor cannot work at 100% duty cycle and maintain it's longest possible service life before being rebuilt.
xyzzy4747|3 years ago
If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
If everyone picked low-GDP professions like her then in the extreme case you’d have a country like Democratic Republic of Congo with low housing costs but also you’re practically squatting in nature in a hut.
CapstanRoller|3 years ago
If everyone picked high-GDP professions, society would collapse. Imagine a world where everyone is a CEO and nobody knows how to fix a water main or run a cafeteria.
>If you are worried about costs, do something that pays better.
We should start by paying better for the things people already do. Rewarding those who keep the lights on incentivizes keeping the lights on.
pchangr|3 years ago
frankreyes|3 years ago
Most productive countries are those who work smarter. See the list for yourself
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...
xyzelement|3 years ago
Your output is driven by the guy who's gonna eat your lunch otherwise, not by your vibe.
Apocryphon|3 years ago
ravagat|3 years ago
wktra|3 years ago
[deleted]
precompute|3 years ago
toomuchtodo|3 years ago
ridgered4|3 years ago