this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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I wish one of my close buddies would get this. He is nearly 30 and has never held down a job. He feels like life is pointless, has no money, cannot afford anything. He kinda wants a job, but all he can imagine are super unique positions like being a jeweler, a historic weapons restoration or other obscure jobs. I hate to burst his bubble but his jobs are often unrealistic for his experience and education level but he refuses to do some basic position.
For example, he has never owned or fired a gun and doesn't have a gun lisence but expects a museum will hire him to work on historic firearms. He refuses to attenpt to get any other positon. He is just waiting for his mom to get enough money to move to a different city so he can go to another college program to try to get this job. He won't even do the first step in my opinion which is getting a gun lisence and getting actual experience with real firearms.
these people are enabled by loved ones. he'll start trying as soon as he has to.
In my experience, entry level retail work is absolutely soul-crushing and the pay is barely worth showing up for.
People imagine getting a job and moving out of their parents' homes, living Melrose Place style in an apartment full of hotties, having a social life, hooking up, and building adult relationships. But OP's experience seems more like the exception than the rule. A lot of these places have incredibly high churn, no upward mobility, and are a huge physical/emotional suck that leaves you feeling exhausted the moment you're home.
Good for getting a leg up literally anywhere else, as they prove you can "be normie". But horrendous for any kind of actual professional career advancement outside of a casual recommendation going into your next job. And the pay is so bad that it often doesn't even cover the basic cost of living (car, food, utilities, etc). You're still going to be living with your parents. You're not going to have any kind of fuck-around money. There's no promotion path that gets you out of this hole. Its not where you want to spend one more minute of your life than you absolutely have to.
Yep, imagine that, work that anyone can do sucks balls.
Now let's go back about 80 years or so, when simply growing enough food for your family was a real concern for a large portion of the "First World" nations.
My parents and grandparents were always hungry. Always. It's why my grandparents emigrated to the US, and my parents moved from where they grew up to somewhere with opportunity, hundreds or thousands of miles away from family.
So yea, my soul-sucking jobs (usually 2 at a time until my 30's, sometimes 3 at a time) sucked. But they were still better than what my parents went through, by a long shot.
I had heat, hot water, food, and a car. Multiple changes of clothes and shoes, not just one or two (or none). I didn't have to sleep in the barn with the animals like my grandfather. Or in a cold house with nothing but a wood stove in the kitchen like my parents. And I could shit inside, not have to go to an outhouse in the winter (these still existed, even in cities in the US in the 50's).
Given the turnover rate, its not just anyone. The miserable nature of the work and the awful pay tends to make these jobs difficult to fill.
Subsistence farming hasn't been the primary means of employment in the US in over a century.
The inflation adjusted minimum wage of 1950 was $2 more than it is today. By the 1970s, the min wage was an inflation-adjusted $12.60. And that was with housing at less than a quarter of the going inflation-adjusted rate and utilities practically being free. Americans saw an explosion in quality of life between the 1940s and 1980s, peaking in the 90s at the dawn of the information age.
My home town of Houston is in its second city-wide blackout in barely more than a month. If our grid degrades any further, or a big enough storm tears up enough excess infrastructure, we could conceivably be back to wood stoves and out-houses by the end of the year. And we're hardly alone. From Flint, Michigan to Miami, Florida, core components of municipal infrastructure are failing in large part thanks to over-investment in consumer facing sales and under-investment in public works.