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Some Advice for a Young Woman
Or man, for that matter. This has recently gone viral on the Internet:
Gen Z girl finds out what a real job is like
— 🌈 Tess T. Eccles-Brown, PhD (@TTEcclesBrown) October 25, 2023
Reponses to it fall into two broad categories:
- Grow up, snowflake
- That poor girl. You meanies don’t understand what she is going through.
I guess I have to save any disdain I feel for her parents. They pretty obviously failed to prepare her for life. I mean that. I have three adult children who went through the same transition as this woman. (She isn’t a girl. She is an adult.) Only they were prepared because mom and I prepared them, starting when they were 12. They started thinking about the type of lives they wanted to live when they were adult during their teen years and took steps to achieve their goals.
More than that, they were aware that they would not have the resources to live the lives they wanted to live straight out of college. Compromises were necessary and they knew they had to pick and choose what was important.
That is the advice I would give this woman. You cannot have everything — not at once and not straight out of college. Decide what is most important to you and determine what you have to do — and what you have to sacrifice — to get it. Want to live in the city? Look for ways to make it affordable. Find a roommate or two roommates to split the cost of an apartment — live two or three to a room. Don’t want a long commute and don’t want to share a room? Get a job in the suburbs.
As for “the deep sense of alienation from work and prosperity that young people feel”? (That was a comment from someone in category 2 – “Poor thing.”) Well, ok. Feel alienated. It won’t make anything better, but you can feel alienated if you want. If you want to drop out, go ahead. But you cannot get something for nothing unless someone else is getting nothing for something. If you are good with living off of someone else’s labor without recompensing them, what does that say about you?
I am not trying to be mean. I am trying to be realistic. Life really isn’t fair. But if you work hard, you do eventually win through. But here is the hard truth:
Nothing is going to change that, either. Take agency for your life.
Published in General
For some time I’ve been seeing YT videos – mostly “shorts” – of women crying about “why did you tell us to get jobs? Work is HARD!”
Also reminds me of a story I probably first read in Reader’s Digest perhaps 50 years ago or more. About the daughter who had just gotten married. Short and sweet, One day she calls her parents, crying about some argument with her new husband. She wanted to come home. Her father told her, “You ARE home.”
Excellent response, Seawriter! I hope she wakes up from being woke!
It was impossible not to laugh at this silly creature, though I too have to wonder what kind of parents/parenting would have produced this level of immaturity. Well, come to think of it, what kind of schooling did she have? Kids in grade school and high school are gone most of the day, and there’s homework to do afterwards. I would think school would have prepared her at least somewhat for the real world, even if her parents failed in that regard.
She did not grow up on a farm.
The use of profanity in combination with the overuse of “like” was grating.
I really feel sorry for her. Just a second, let me take some time to flip my hand through my hair, OK now I’m ready. For the first five years of my career, I worked 5 1/2 days a week and didn’t take a vacation. But I was young, full of energy and desire. It really wasn’t until my first vacation that I realize I hadn’t had one in five years. I do feel sorry for her because she has been so pampered, but I do not know of anything I could do to help her at this point. She has to do this living thing on her own.
I do have some sympathy for her.
Assuming she is a very recent graduate of schooling (say, she’s 22 and a 2023 college graduate), she and her peers have been told for several years (by adults and by the institutions those adults run, like government and schools) that they don’t really have to work, showing up is not important, they do not have to make trade-offs, that if things get hard someone will step in and fix it for them. And many people younger than her have absorbed those lessons at a much younger and more impressionable point in their development. We (society in general) are going to be paying for the irresponsible responses to Covid for many years to come.
Now, she should have learned the facts of life before 2020, but 3+ years of having no responsibilities or obligations can cause rapid deterioration of knowledge. And in some ways the pandemic idiocy was not new, but accelerated a non-responsibility trend that had been building for many years before 2020. The terms “helicopter parent” (parent coming in to rescue the child) and “snowplow parent” (clearing a smooth path for the child) were coined long before Covid restrictions.
I haven’t listened to her crying but I understand something that might put me in the minority here.
Back when I was her age, things were very different. I grew up in a different world. I was yelled at, I was bullied and beaten up ( not horribly) I was fired at 17 ( justifiably) I was ‘homeless’ – my own choice. I worked in a factory for a couple weeks ( not my thing) and worked hard successfully in restaurants. Employers now are for the most part downright exploitive and there’s no path for advancement in most jobs.
I tried sales. Not my forte. Started a business, struggled, then succeeded. Then became a mildly successful artist – an achievement in itself as far as I’m concerned. (BTW I dropped out of high school and took tons of drugs and drank hard liquor between age 16 – 21)
The pay versus cost of living – to include taxes – are out of proportion. Commuting used to be tolerable now it’s nightmarish and dangerous. I could go on…
She was duped into believing things that aren’t the case. It’s not her fault. It’s not just her parents. All of society lied to her about college, no one told her, or taught her some fundamentals and realities.
Now, on the brink of war and destruction this generation is not going to fare well, and it is ‘our’ collective fault. Dumping on this innocent child ( what she still is, unfortunately) is not what I feel is appropriate. (Not that the post is doing that)
We had it worse for sure, but there was an expanding economy, hope for the future and a vague path to eventual success. Now? Not so much.
I hesitate to go all-out TradCon here without thinking slowly and carefully and making sure I’ve made my case. (And is TradCon even the right word?)
But I hesitate less than I used to.
How ’bout I just say this?
Very few girls whose goal was to marry a guy from the same Abrahamic religion, manage their home, have some babies, homeschool them, and help her husband train them in said Abrahamic religion have ever had these problems.
Pardon me but HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Also true, and it’s often too late because they had a high-school and/or college “ho phase” and then those respectable guys are not interested in them.
And I don’t have sound on this system so I won’t be checking out the video, but, is there any indication that she might be a Hamas supporter? If so, I hope she cries even more.
Going through college and starting my career in the 1970s we did not have an expanding economy. We had stagflation and the feeling we were losing the Cold War or that it might get thermonuclear hot in a short period. A lot of folks had given up on eventual success. (God bless Ronald Reagan for turning things around in the early 1980s.)
My kids entered the workforce in this century, starting in 2006 and ending in 2017. They are all doing well in their careers, largely because they were willing to sacrifice and make choices, but mainly because they worked hard and did not complain. When they worked for bosses that did not appreciate hard workers who did not complain they found new bosses. There is opportunity out there, but not for those that start careers expecting everything to be handed to them.
Not necessarily too late, but . . . it sure is more difficult.
No. Totally apolitical. Back in the 1980s (boy am I dating myself) she would have been pigeonholed as a Valley Girl. For sure.
Yup. Total Valley Girl.
Yes. I remember when it was really, really hard to get a job. I didn’t go to college myself and had no skills. But I was smart and an excellent worker in the right environment. I worked for several years in French Restaurant in Princeton where Einstein lunched regularly ( before I worked there). I was a busboy, and the waitresses adored me as I served them well and efficiently. The owner of the restaurant told my mother and stepfather a couple years after I left I was “the best busboy they ever had”. The restaurant was established in the 1930’s. So I know and understand hard work.
But I never believed all the Cold War nuclear alarmism – as this generation can claim climate change fears are suppressing them.
My two daughters also work hard and went to college, don’t complain and are doing well enough. My eldest graduated with a degree in International Studies but couldn’t use that degree for any job and went to Korea to teach English. Came back, worked in a supermarket in Portland OR for several years, excelled but couldn’t advance. Now works in Albuquerque NM as a tour planner – again doing well but her fellow employees are incompetent and she’s doing most of the managing while the real manager is absent and unloading his work on my daughter. This is everywhere. She’s not making what she deserves objectively speaking. There is a very obvious imbalance in pay scales. She’s learning the business though and should be able to break out on her own at some point.
But it’s simply not fair what’s happening to young people.
I contend it’s much worse now in the employee appreciation department and it’s no longer any meritocracy, and advancement opportunities within most companies are nonexistent.
Just another kid that hasn’t learned how to appreciate and anticipate the consequences of her decisions. I don’t think she’s considered all of her options.
What caused it? I don’t know. Speculation is pointless. There are people out there who never do seem to get it.
She and her video are a product of our digital age. Everybody has to be a star. Everybody has to put all of their personal thoughts in the public domain. No doubt all of us have thought stupid things. I still think stupid things. I just don’t put them out there for everybody to see and to comment on. I save them for all of you guys here on Ricochet 😁😁.
Spot on, Seawriter. But it is worrisome that we are turning the world over to her and her compatriots.
I give her credit for getting up and commuting to work in person. She won’t be the first young graduate to complain about the realities of work, and won’t be the last. It’s just that in the past, she complained to her friends and we didn’t have to see or hear her.
I’m somewhere in between ‘grow up’ and ‘that poor girl’.
Some people discover reality over time, some have it conveyed by mentors.
She just got mugged, and like a good Youth of Today she is posting her cri de coeur because, as Socrates teaches, the un-uploaded life is not worth living.
The question is what she does after the slightly endearing angstagram we just saw.
I imagine she’ll go to work, find ways to date, raise her aim while lowering her expectations and achieve the adulthood she fell a little short of.
Credit where credit is due: she got the job, she’s doing the job, she wants to date and presumably marry. She’s just discouraged. And dramatic.
She probably needs a hug. I wonder if there will be one in her comments section.
Move, or get a new job. If the current job is providing particularly valuable experience, get all you can and then capitalize on it.
How they thought it would be:
Rise at one’s desired hour, smoothie, hour of personal grooming, stride with bright confidence to clean mass-transit station. Whisked to work while listening to podcast about Important Issues in the World solved by two smart sassy gals
Arrive at work, get latte, type some stuff
Meetings to talk about the thing
Mid-morning yoga
Some more typing, ugh
Lunch at the cafeteria, which is free and sustainably grown
Meeting to discuss the presentation about the thing that they might roll out in 2026
Smoothies with the design team to pick out fonts
Me time on the roof deck
Some emails, ugh
Pick up dinner from cafeteria, free
Home to apartment, wine!
Netflix kick-ass girlboss shows
Scrolling Insta
Sleep
How it is:
Wake harried and jangled, navy shower, grab overpriced breakfast at Pret on way to the subway, no time to have it heated, eat cold
Dude in subway cooking meth
Hard look from boss because you’re late
Grindingly unsatisfying rote entry-level stupid work that has no impact on any important issues at all but serves to elevate the public profile of a carpet dealership because that’s the new client
Salad at desk for lunch, no chicken because it’s a $4.00 add-on
Meeting about outsourcing animation for web ads to Vietnam
Realization at 3:12 Wednesday afternoon that the office manager’s “Hang in there ’til Friday” poster of a cat stuck on a branch is not meant ironically
Post-work drink with co-worker because you’re lonely, $9 Bud Light which you choose because it seems like a good social statement
Different dude in subway cooking meth
Home for dinner, ethnic microwaved Trader Joe, but at least you know it’s something your parents would probably never eat
Half-watch Netflix while half-watching phone
Attempt to sleep while sirens go off here and there
It’sAGundam has reviewed “workday” TikToks from employees of tech companies and referred to the jobs as “adult daycare.”
Yep, and Elon Musk got rid of 80% of the employees – mostly women – at Twitter who did nothing useful.
Or Connecticut
She gets to vote. Is her name Julia?
Did anyone catch her comment, towards the end, “And I am also getting my period”?
Yes. It never occurs to these types that we don’t need or want to know every detail of their lives.
Tried that once. Lousy date . . .