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Post by Merge on Feb 5, 2024 2:04:31 GMT
A one-income household simply with that division of labor isn't possible for most families any more. Let's not forget that the amount of work expected for however-many-hours a person is at their job has also gone through the roof. Stores are chronically understaffed, there's no slack in staffing to keep things running smoothly if someone has to call out. Employees are often required to juggle multiple roles or tasks and be on-call for extra hours whenever needed. Just doing what you're paid for is considered "not being a team player" or even quiet quitting. Agree. Some office and at-home workers today even have tracking devices on their work computers to make sure they’re spending the right amount of time in work related applications. And I could go on at length about how the teaching profession has changed and become much more demanding and stressful in the last few decades. Staffing shortages in the medical field have made those jobs harder as well. And of course we’re all familiar with how in any company, when someone leaves, they don’t necessarily get replaced. Others are just expected to do those jobs in addition to their own. I think we’re at a point where younger workers are realizing that they’re being expected to work much harder than their parents did for even less reward, and they’re not going to be gaslit into believing they’re just lazy or have no purpose. Human beings are not designed to have a on switch at 8 am and an off switch at 5 pm and nothing but work as much as possible in between. Our brains don’t work that way.
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Post by peasapie on Feb 5, 2024 2:38:37 GMT
$2,000/ month take home is just about minimum wage in the state where I live. Even eons ago when I was a young adult, I couldn’t have lived on my own making minimum wage. Without seeing the video, it seems like she is feeling sad, and the issue of not having enough time might be related to that. When you are energized and feeling good, you can do lots of things. When you’re not, the weekend passes and you wonder where it went because you don’t have the money or initiative to do things. And finally, I personally don’t think she represents most of the young people I know right now at all. Some, yes of course. But I know lots of kids graduating from college or police academy or plumbing school, getting jobs and living with others to rent apartments. As far as one’s role in society, heck yeah it’s confusing. 80% of girls in my age cohort in the prehistoric age got married by 30, had kids, and didn’t take a long amount of time finding our purpose. Now young adults have so many choices, and I think that means confusion. Kinda like Barbie!
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Post by dewryce on Feb 5, 2024 3:41:22 GMT
$2,000/ month take home is just about minimum wage in the state where I live. Even eons ago when I was a young adult, I couldn’t have lived on my own making minimum wage. Without seeing the video, it seems like she is feeling sad, and the issue of not having enough time might be related to that. When you are energized and feeling good, you can do lots of things. When you’re not, the weekend passes and you wonder where it went because you don’t have the money or initiative to do things. And finally, I personally don’t think she represents most of the young people I know right now at all. Some, yes of course. But I know lots of kids graduating from college or police academy or plumbing school, getting jobs and living with others to rent apartments. As far as one’s role in society, heck yeah it’s confusing. 80% of girls in my age cohort in the prehistoric age got married by 30, had kids, and didn’t take a long amount of time finding our purpose. Now young adults have so many choices, and I think that means confusion. Kinda like Barbie! This is what I was wondering, just from reading these comments. Yesterday we celebrated my brother’s 40th by going 2-hours each way out of town to meet up with family for dinner and a hockey game. When I woke up I immediately felt sick to my stomach from a medication (actually threw up twice before we walked out the door), had serious sinus pain and congestion, and was in a lot of pain including back pain. Medication only helps me manage the pain, not get rid of it or even lower it all that much. But from the moment I woke up I knew I was still going, we just had to work around my issues. And I was comparing that to a while back where even one of those issues would have been enough to keep me home. And then it occurred to me, duh, I’m barely depressed right now just my basic low-level depression. When I’m not doing as well as I am right now everything feels like a mountain to climb. People looking in might think “just take some medication and get on with it,” and logically that’s what you’d do. But it feels insurmountable. The issue I have with the “if she can do it I can do it” mindset is that, as you said, everyone is different we are not all built of the same stuff and we weren’t all raised with that mindset. And some people are just mentally stronger than others, smarter, have more common sense or more interpersonal skills than others, better education, better role models. The bootstrap mentality assumes everyone even has boots and, to me, lacks empathy and a bit of understanding. I am not saying that the person doesn’t need to learn to adapt, I believe they definitely do. And if they weren’t given those skills growing up at home or in school, then it falls to them to figure it out. I just think that they could use some compassion and understanding as they’re doing it. Maybe even a little help. Definitely not judgement.
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used2scrap
Drama Llama
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Posts: 6,037
Jan 29, 2016 3:02:55 GMT
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Post by used2scrap on Feb 5, 2024 8:39:57 GMT
Idk I don’t want to comment on the generational differences because I don’t feel impartial about my kids and their struggles to adult in he new real world lol. On the other hand my retired sister who is 51 and brings in more money then anyone else in our circle has her young child in $ after school care because the 7 ish hours a day her child is in school isn’t enough time for her to run errands, have me time, and live. Not sure how she’d fair having to work 40 hours. So I’m not sure this is strictly a gen z thing, as much as the media/boomers would like us to believe. 🤷♀️
Idk I was a stay at home mom for 23 years and counting snd jobines ever thought I actually worked. There’s clearly a re shuffling of priorities trying to happen and corporate/society lash back….
I’m interested where it’ll all land; life and self care and working to live, vs work is life. 🤷♀️
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Post by jeremysgirl on Feb 5, 2024 10:53:29 GMT
Let's not forget that the amount of work expected for however-many-hours a person is at their job has also gone through the roof. Stores are chronically understaffed, there's no slack in staffing to keep things running smoothly if someone has to call out. Employees are often required to juggle multiple roles or tasks and be on-call for extra hours whenever needed. Just doing what you're paid for is considered "not being a team player" or even quiet quitting. Agree. Some office and at-home workers today even have tracking devices on their work computers to make sure they’re spending the right amount of time in work related applications. And I could go on at length about how the teaching profession has changed and become much more demanding and stressful in the last few decades. Staffing shortages in the medical field have made those jobs harder as well. And of course we’re all familiar with how in any company, when someone leaves, they don’t necessarily get replaced. Others are just expected to do those jobs in addition to their own. I think we’re at a point where younger workers are realizing that they’re being expected to work much harder than their parents did for even less reward, and they’re not going to be gaslit into believing they’re just lazy or have no purpose. Human beings are not designed to have a on switch at 8 am and an off switch at 5 pm and nothing but work as much as possible in between. Our brains don’t work that way. The data support this idea. In her book, Attention Span, Dr. Gloria Mark states that knowledge worker in the 60s spent about 31% of their time at their desks working, 34% of their time in face to face meetings and the rest of their time was unaccounted for. Today's knowledge workers spend over 90% of their day engaged with their computers. Dr. Mark has been studying attention since the 1990s.
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Post by jeremysgirl on Feb 5, 2024 11:17:54 GMT
$2,000/ month take home is just about minimum wage in the state where I live. Even eons ago when I was a young adult, I couldn’t have lived on my own making minimum wage. Without seeing the video, it seems like she is feeling sad, and the issue of not having enough time might be related to that. When you are energized and feeling good, you can do lots of things. When you’re not, the weekend passes and you wonder where it went because you don’t have the money or initiative to do things. And finally, I personally don’t think she represents most of the young people I know right now at all. Some, yes of course. But I know lots of kids graduating from college or police academy or plumbing school, getting jobs and living with others to rent apartments. As far as one’s role in society, heck yeah it’s confusing. 80% of girls in my age cohort in the prehistoric age got married by 30, had kids, and didn’t take a long amount of time finding our purpose. Now young adults have so many choices, and I think that means confusion. Kinda like Barbie! This is what I was wondering, just from reading these comments. Yesterday we celebrated my brother’s 40th by going 2-hours each way out of town to meet up with family for dinner and a hockey game. When I woke up I immediately felt sick to my stomach from a medication (actually threw up twice before we walked out the door), had serious sinus pain and congestion, and was in a lot of pain including back pain. Medication only helps me manage the pain, not get rid of it or even lower it all that much. But from the moment I woke up I knew I was still going, we just had to work around my issues. And I was comparing that to a while back where even one of those issues would have been enough to keep me home. And then it occurred to me, duh, I’m barely depressed right now just my basic low-level depression. When I’m not doing as well as I am right now everything feels like a mountain to climb. People looking in might think “just take some medication and get on with it,” and logically that’s what you’d do. But it feels insurmountable. The issue I have with the “if she can do it I can do it” mindset is that, as you said, everyone is different we are not all built of the same stuff and we weren’t all raised with that mindset. And some people are just mentally stronger than others, smarter, have more common sense or more interpersonal skills than others, better education, better role models. The bootstrap mentality assumes everyone even has boots and, to me, lacks empathy and a bit of understanding. I am not saying that the person doesn’t need to learn to adapt, I believe they definitely do. And if they weren’t given those skills growing up at home or in school, then it falls to them to figure it out. I just think that they could use some compassion and understanding as they’re doing it. Maybe even a little help. Definitely not judgement. First, I want to say that the bootstrap mentality is not mine in the sense that "if she can do it, anyone can." I don't believe that at all. I've seen for myself differently abled people. There was a broad spectrum of ability between my dad, my brother, me, Chloe, and Esther, even though we all have the same illness. What I want to see, though, is people taking responsibility for learming how to live the best possible life they can, even if that looks different than the norm. When I make this comment I think a lot about my dad. He resorted to physical and emotional abuse of his children as his coping mechanism. That's not ok. We have to draw lines somewhere on what is acceptable and what is not despite an increase in our level of understanding. Do I have compassion for him and his struggles? I do. Do I understand why he behaved as he did? I do. Those are the two reasons I have any relationship with him at all. My brother was a very similar situation. Esther was even a different situation as her bipolar was even compounded by autism. She may have lived with me forever, but I never stopped trying to help her live her best life and adapt in so much as she was able. Chloe has a "never say die" attitude that serves her well most of the time, but sometimes she doesn't cut herself any slack and then she did the big thing and turned to alcoholism to cope. That's not healthy. So she needs more balance too, to be gentler with herself, more self-care. So I see it from a variety of angles. But what I'm trying to say is that if we seek to get away from the 40 hour a week work model, there's got to be some middle ground. We've got to have some kind of "norm" or average we can agree on. The 40 hour work week is so ingrained in our society, we need some kind of data that shows what the majority of us need. If we keep saying everyone is an exception to the majority, it simply doesn't exist. We have no place to even mine for data to back up our advocacy. I believe it's like politics, most of us fall somewhere in the middle, but the more extreme position we take and we try to frame, the further attitudes move away from doing anything and then we are left with the status quo and a lot of infighting (the pitting of generations against each other). That was the point I was trying to make above. There's got to be some balance.
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iluvpink
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 4,310
Location: Michigan
Jul 13, 2014 12:40:31 GMT
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Post by iluvpink on Feb 5, 2024 12:51:56 GMT
I just want to pop in and say that some people need a lot more decompression time than others after a day at work, and it eats into or takes over what might be "me" time for another person. People who are neurodivergent in one way or another may simply need to sit and stare at the wall or do something very mindless for some amount of time after work before they can even get around to household tasks/exercising/socializing/etc. My oldest calls it dissociating, though it's not exactly that. She needs it and I need it even to function. It's not optional. I'm not sure this younger generation feels any less a sense of purpose than my generation did. They are perhaps more aware that most of us are running on a hamster wheel to make someone else rich, while we will live and die on the wheel. I think anyone who thinks about it would find that frustrating. Yes, that's me. Now granted there were a LOT of years while raising my dd that I didn't get that. And honestly, while it wasn't the only reason, I was MISERABLE for years. Now that my dd is grown (but not yet launched due to physical/mental health reasons) I have a lot more downtime and I'm so much happier. I do work full time, but it's hybrid. Being hybrid and saving 4-6 hours a week of commute and not having a busy social life is really a big thing in my happiness these days. In any case yes, not everyone can work full time and/or parent/volunteer etc and sustain that while being mentally healthy.
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Post by Merge on Feb 5, 2024 13:37:55 GMT
I just want to pop in and say that some people need a lot more decompression time than others after a day at work, and it eats into or takes over what might be "me" time for another person. People who are neurodivergent in one way or another may simply need to sit and stare at the wall or do something very mindless for some amount of time after work before they can even get around to household tasks/exercising/socializing/etc. My oldest calls it dissociating, though it's not exactly that. She needs it and I need it even to function. It's not optional. I'm not sure this younger generation feels any less a sense of purpose than my generation did. They are perhaps more aware that most of us are running on a hamster wheel to make someone else rich, while we will live and die on the wheel. I think anyone who thinks about it would find that frustrating. Yes, that's me. Now granted there were a LOT of years while raising my dd that I didn't get that. And honestly, while it wasn't the only reason, I was MISERABLE for years. Now that my dd is grown (but not yet launched due to physical/mental health reasons) I have a lot more downtime and I'm so much happier. I do work full time, but it's hybrid. Being hybrid and saving 4-6 hours a week of commute and not having a busy social life is really a big thing in my happiness these days. In any case yes, not everyone can work full time and/or parent/volunteer etc and sustain that while being mentally healthy., do the Same, same, same. I am just recently beginning to realize how miserable I was during the years that I was teaching full time and raising my kids. I was not the mother I wanted to be during that time - I had nothing left to give at the end of the day. A social life? Forget about it. I needed the whole weekend just to regroup. DH got frustrated with me because he wanted to go out and see people, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I think what I want to recognize here is that for some people, it's not even a matter of illness or anything to adapt to. When your brain is wired such that, even on a good day in an ideal situation, being "on" and with other people is a huge challenge, the only adaptation you can really make is to make sure you get the necessary down time so you can do it all again the next day. Another adaptation is to do a less than stellar job at your job - pass out those worksheets, put on an educational video, or whatever works in your job - but that only works every so often because you need to keep your job. So you forgo social life and maybe exercise, do the best you can for your kids and house, and move on. It's possible but it's miserable. How many hours is reasonable? I have no idea. I do think retail and restaurants need to go back to set schedules instead of expecting everyone to be available at all times but also OK with having hours cut at any time. No one can live that way. I think we need more corporate jobs where you work when there is work to do, which may be 50 hours this week but only 30 next week. I think if we're going to keep lengthening the teaching and learning day, we need more adults in the building so people can have reasonable breaks for planning and just taking a breath without any duty.
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Post by iamkristinl16 on Feb 5, 2024 15:58:15 GMT
I think there are a lot of factors potentially at play here, but overall I think that a lot of people have very high (probably unrealistic) expectations of what life is like for most people. Social media would have you believe that everyone else is living in perfectly curated and updated homes, has perfect appearance and clothing, goes on several vacations a year, can go out to eat or do other activities whenever they want and so on. That just isn't the case for most of us. I know that I struggle with feeling inadequate based on what others are doing (IRL as well as social media) at times, and I think younger people have it even worse because that is all they know. There could also be different definitions of "me time." We tend to be pretty good at wasting time these days. So there could also be a situation where this person thinks they don't have time but in reality they have more than they think. Also, "me time" isn't just about going out or going on vacation. I would be curious to know what everyone's idea of "me time" is.
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Post by Merge on Feb 5, 2024 17:07:42 GMT
I think there are a lot of factors potentially at play here, but overall I think that a lot of people have very high (probably unrealistic) expectations of what life is like for most people. Social media would have you believe that everyone else is living in perfectly curated and updated homes, has perfect appearance and clothing, goes on several vacations a year, can go out to eat or do other activities whenever they want and so on. That just isn't the case for most of us. I know that I struggle with feeling inadequate based on what others are doing (IRL as well as social media) at times, and I think younger people have it even worse because that is all they know. There could also be different definitions of "me time." We tend to be pretty good at wasting time these days. So there could also be a situation where this person thinks they don't have time but in reality they have more than they think. Also, "me time" isn't just about going out or going on vacation. I would be curious to know what everyone's idea of "me time" is. For me, “me” time is something that fills my cup, so to speak. So just decompressing is not me time. It’s what I need to do to even be able get to me time.
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Post by Gem Girl on Feb 5, 2024 20:42:49 GMT
The bootstrap mentality assumes everyone even has boots and, to me, lacks empathy and a bit of understanding. I am not saying that the person doesn’t need to learn to adapt, I believe they definitely do. And if they weren’t given those skills growing up at home or in school, then it falls to them to figure it out. I just think that they could use some compassion and understanding as they’re doing it. Maybe even a little help. Definitely not judgement. You are wise and kind. Thank you for that.
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pantsonfire
Drama Llama
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Take a step back, evaluate what is important, and enjoy your life with those who you love.
Posts: 5,065
Jun 19, 2022 16:48:04 GMT
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Post by pantsonfire on Feb 5, 2024 22:47:05 GMT
Have a short moment to check in here. 2 things I want to say...
There is no work-life balance any more. Gone are the days of clocking out at say 5pm and having the rest of the day to yourself. Now it is work-life integration.
So many jobs require their employees to be connected on apps and through email and social media. They can always be contacted. It's the norm, while not okay in any way. It is just how it is.
So while older generations may have had ample time in their day away from work, younger aren't afford that many times.
I mean look at the amount of work teachers now a days have on their plate. They have no free time because they are constantly working past contractual hours because if they don't they and their students are behind.
Second, we can not truly get a glimpse of her life, struggles, up bringing, opportunities, etc from a short TT video.
It is not okay for anyone to judge her or compare her to them because they had a harder time and figured it out. Or worked and raised kids.
Every single person is on their own path and has their own curves, hills and valleys. While we share common struggles - working to make corporations rich while we struggle, there is a lot behind the scenes we don't know about.
I truly feel for young adults. Life just sucks right now for so many.
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Post by Gem Girl on Feb 5, 2024 23:44:40 GMT
I truly feel for young adults. Life just sucks right now for so many. I agree; I've often shaken my head and told DH that I have no idea how young people get a start in life anymore.
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Post by scrapcat on Feb 6, 2024 16:37:04 GMT
As a 40-something, I am so thankful I did not have a platform to go onto in my 20s with what I thought about things back then. I certainly did not understand my privilege then either.
I think a lot of it is growing pains...all generations deal with different external factors, whether its economic, political, wars, etc.
But this generation has to deal with social media more, if they choose. And the algorithm that continues to show you everything you look at, so if you doom scroll, you're going to get more of that. If you are only looking at influencers with their imaginary worlds, you get that.
As a manager of 20/30 somethings, step-parent and being around younger ppl, I do think there is a bit of reality bites when they find out what working/living is really like. In my circles, many of these kids came from affluent or higher middle class backgrounds...they participated in all kinds of (expensive) sports and activities, went to Disney World regularly, and on vacations, had beach houses, and their wants/needs were centered by their parents. The parents broke their backs giving these kids the life they wished they had growing up, I guess? I just don't know if it translates to preparing for life's ups/downs.
What they didn't see is their parents did not start out in that place. I hear a lot of conversations from the parents in their 50s/60s entering retirement of how their kids expect to maintain the same lifestyle as they have and that seems to be part of the struggle.
I am interested in how we were headed in one direction due to the pandemic, and now corporate world seems to be back-pedaling on all of those "different ways to work" movement. I feel like it's been years of hearing how the 5 days/40 hour workweek is outdated, yet doesn't seem to truly be changing any time soon.
There was an interesting case in PA I think where a small town reduced their opening hours to only 4 days a week and in turn it helped cut costs for keeping the municipal services up and running and reduced sick call-outs because workers had more balance. They adopted it permanently after a trial of year or two.
I think it takes a long time to figure out purpose...when we talk to our young adults, we always try to express that we are still figuring out what we want to do when we grow up, in a way trying to demonstrate that things don't have to be all figured out by a certain point.
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