Much like a lot of Gen X, some of the older Millennials in my life (particularly the white working professionals) are parroting the age old mantra of “I don’t care about passing my skills on to the younger generations or helping those in need, no one ever helped me in my life.”. My response is always “That’s not a good thing!” because I never know what to say. Debate is not my strength.
My working class grandparents were never like this. They lived through the great depression and two wars and never wanted anyone to suffer as much as they did. I miss them and their kindness dearly. It’s only from boomers and younger that I’ve seen this attitude. Capitalism is crushing our instincts as a social species. If we can’t stand on the shoulders of giants… well then we will stop advancing as a species. We will stagnate and go extinct because the challenges we face now need all of us. It goes against everything that is human to be this alienated and antagonistic to one another. Particularly frightening is the hatred and contempt modern society has towards children.
This is not going to end well.
I appreciate all the people here, whether you’re 20 or 60, for not becoming the thing that hurt you. We need people with a soul more than ever.
I see consequences of this in my workplace weirdly enough. There’s been a huge brain drain in recent years that was accelerated through the pandemic, and then again by egregious financial mismanagement by leadership that really fucked us and of course the workers at the bottom all paid for it.
Training materials were last updated like 15 years ago, the systems we use have all undergone massive changes rendering those completely useless. Everyone’s crunched because we have less employees, and the new employees all need to be really baby sat and have things explained to them, because there’s no other way for them to gain the knowledge how to do their jobs other than having one of the few employees who are still here to walk them through these things and take on the role of teacher and full time tutor while still managing their increasing workload.
It fucking sucks ass and of course all the older employees are jaded and bitter about it, but its become this self perpetuating cycle of incompetence, crunch, and catch up because no one wants/has the capacity now to put in the work in up front to get some sort of training materials set up for new workers - but that just means that same work will end up being done in a much more frustrating and crushing way of constantly dealing with simple mistakes.
This was kinda a tangent, but the problem and solution are so obvious - but there’s no collective will to try and improve this for all of us to make our lives simpler, so people end up instead becoming so bitter and resentful of each other rather than the fucks who refuse to address this issue above us. And I get it - its so fucking frustrating dealing with this shit and having it grind you down in the context of a workplace, of course people want to be like “fuck this I’m just hanging around until I’m stable enough to fuck off somewhere better.”
I see this same shit playing out in society with people having the same attitude. I don’t know what to do about it, and I don’t like it. I do my part trying to build solidarity, but fuck me if it ain’t a one way street that ends up feeling like wasted effort most of the time.
Edit: multiple spelling and gramatic errors because me mad