In other news

You thinking there's something wrong with that is yet another example of how patriotic and nationalistic you are.

not in your home at the 5th floor of 8 of a brutalist building built in the 60s copying soviet architecture which is where the working class lives in the major urban areas

i also hate the people who made those aliens my countrymen yes. We have an uninterrupted 1k+ years history in my city. Those people are my "countrymen" since 1860. Like 2 days ago

Well, they haven't actually had a North v South civil war, unlike some places one can think of.

I’ve been thinking about the younger generations and I’ve been trying to encapsulate the problem. Here is what I came up with:

The idea that hard work leads to success turned out to not be a lasting truth and Gen Z is the first generation to see through the illusion en masse.

Thoughts?

"hard" doesn't guarantee anything and never did. Smart always did and still does. It's a game and you have to outplay the environment. Always has been.

Doesn’t matter what the reality is. “The American Dream” very much guarantees that hard work will lead to success. It’s never been true, but that is explicitly the equation being sold with that term.

Also, you are wrong in claiming that smarts guarantees success.

Part of it is a slogan for businesses and the higher ups to keep people working and making them money.

But hard work, smart or otherwise definitely leads to a financially better life - at least all else equal.

It's not even just like musicians putting in the hours to make the impressions and the gigs or the athletes. You're going to have an advantage if you're putting in more grunt work in a competitive industry or your a tradesman who sponges up all the information in that trade to use for yourself.

The pendulum swung why the hell too far into the other direction in thinking that doing anything isn't going to pay off because it's all a setup. Those people will get ****ed in life. And it will be those people who will be the ones complaining that the world is rigged against them.

smart working in the context we are talking about, is about doing whatever it needs to get more than avg (ie winning at 0 sum games, being smarter than other people at the game).

If you make more than the median wage you are guaranteed a decent life tbh, You MIGHT achieve that by "hard", you ARE guaranteed that by "smart". Ofc doesn't mean you are guaranteed to ever reach 100/hour

Yes, but this doesn’t scale. “Work hard” used to scale.

Our entire public education system has been built on (1) pay attention + (2) follow directions + (3) work hard.

Elementary level kids will still buy into that formula, but it no longer works for many high school kids with internet access full of horror stories of the slightly older demographic.

Or am I overreacting? It seems like the end of a paradigm for the younger generations, specifically young men.

He said, confidently

sorry but you don't know what you are talking about here. That was fascists temporarily rebuilding a puppet state (controlled by nazis) in the north while allies liberated the south first (they disembarked in sicily), it wasn't northern italians v southern italians, and we had NO battles with northern italians in the field fighting southern italians.

We had battles with a few northern italian fascists or conscripts battling allies and losing badly very quickly, just to delay the allies on the peninsula. Hitler used us as a delay decoy basically.

In other news, students in american colleges went through a "eastern germany like" experience recently, with the abomination of radical leftist orthodoxy violently forced upon them

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/54...

This is stasis level of compliance in ideology

I don't think you are overreacting. Young men these days are a lost cause. Masculinity is now apparently "toxic" and we now have a rise of something called "femboys" whatever that means. We have legions of left wing "educators" in our school system telling students this nation is racist, oppressive, and the American dream is dead. We have students who elect to not stand for the pledge of allegiance. This is why we have seen a rise in incels, school shooters, and people who just don't want to try to seize the American dream as they have been told its dead.

In reality the opportunities available now are incredible and overwhelming at some times. Its hard to know what to put my efforts in as I have created 5 streams of income in recent years and continue to add others. My main nut is doing psychiatric medication management both in office and online.

You are over reacting a bit. There is , among z gen people, a realization of the idea that college doesn't necessarily guarantees a decent middle class life, especially if you take too much debt to go through it. Men seem to be understanding this a tad more than women yes.

But in general in the "z gen sphere" it's all about talking how community colleges or learning a trade and so on are still very nice paths to a middle class life, and with less delay than college

We are seeing closure of many "liberal arts" colleges. Good riddance

There was one I used to go party at "New College" in Florida which was nothing but a Marxist indoctrination camp

When that happens it isn’t always the principle cause but there is always a monetary problem about it .

And it’s been a thing for many years now in many countries.

Meh, for 3 decades you could raise a family with 1 wage, have a house and a car.
Isn’t that what was the American dream ?

you can today as well if the square feet they bought in the 80s are ok with you as well as the same expenses for technology and stuff. you can actually get a tad more for a family of four than in the past.

Median house size per person DOUBLED in 50 years. 2x. They lived in smaller houses. Did you know that? or you just checked median house prices without correcting for that?

Is it really true that hard work doesn't lead to success?

I'm not too successful but I'm pretty sure it's because I don't work too hard

It depends on what you work hard at.

Success is subjective

What are your goals in life? I just want to be able to do 3 vacations a year, shop at Whole Foods/costco, own a beach home/mountain home, and have my trad wife never work another day in her life unless its helping manage our rental properties. Easily attainable in today's climate

See, now you've really gotten to the heart of the issue. The internet was a mistake.

Before, the ****ups of every generation had to wallow in their misery in relative obscurity. Now, because we live in the future and despite being broke and useless, those people have a computer in their pocket 100,000 times more powerful than what we used to land on the moon, and they use that computer to share woe-is-me stories with other ****ups around the world.

Working hard and making smart choices is still a recipe for success in America.

Of the many highly successful people I know, approximately none of them spend much, if any, time on the internet crowing about how well they're doing.

But if you're right and we also add in the fact that we're destroying the developing minds of entire generations by virtue of how the internet and smartphones are designed, then yeah, we aren't setting ourselves up for much continued success.

Saw this yesterday: https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/alarmin...

Those 3 concepts are incredibly important for building a solid foundation for your future. Showing up to work, doing what you say you'll do, and making good choices with your limited resources are all vital to good adulting outcomes.

At any given time, there are 1,200 Major League Baseball players and the majority of those spots are occupied by established players who project to hold their spot in MLB for years to come. So let’s say there are ~ 200 spots realistically up for grabs over the next window (3-4 years) for the top minor league prospects.

At the upper level of the minor leagues (AA, AAA) there are around 1,500 players vying for those 200 spots.

Many of these players are in a dilemma. Just about all of these players work hard. The dilemma is this: (1) Do you continue what got you here and depend on persistence or (2) Do you assume the path of persistence leads to failure and take on significant risk by trying to recreate yourself?

I’m wondering if this dilemma is unavoidable for the younger generations now — where previous generations never had to consider recreating themselves.

Further, I’m doubting that young people are being taught how to transform themselves when facing this reality. It seems they are simply checking out instead, which is a failure on our part as the stewards of society.