There’s an air of “we’ve got to work together” in newspapers about the current economic climate. There’s a documented sort of disbelief that the economy is in fact grinding it’s gears due to lazy work avoiders with anxiety, but at the same time not offering enough jobs that pay well. Amidst this, every Tom, Dick and Harry journalist is trying their hand at generation sociology; trying to typify and stereotype the young teams our future workforce is going to be held up by. If it’s not the brainless Gen Z, it’s the emotional Millennials. Although not mentioned by generation label, the largest group to exist are making themselves well known in pressure groups right now: the entitled boomers, suddenly coming out of the woodwork because their retirement isn’t quite as a rosy as they would like, and their buy-to-let margins aren’t keeping up with the price of yachts and cruises. The working age population are being hounded for being too sick, to lazy, or buying too much avocado on toast. If we’re not “quiet quitting”, we’re “working to rule”. Despite the premise of either of these things being about people who are actually at work but refuse to kill themselves over it; the whole shebang is demonised.
The problem, in my humble opinion, is that many of us simply can’t be bothered. I know, terrible isn’t it. The world needs us to pull up our bootstraps and work together and we are all sitting back drinking herbal tea in our loungewear. But we are Frankenstein’s little monsters. We are the product of child protection and the age-old idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. The late 90’s was also the start of literacy and numeracy strategy; education has only become stricter and more results focused since then. And it is precisely this education, that has got a good chunk of the under 40’s looking at their entire existence in a completely different way.
We learned about your wars, your famine, your disease. We learned about your heroes and your sacrifices. And we watched as all of it led to rich people getting richer and ordinary people getting poorer. You’ve got a whole generation of young people who matured right on the button of the financial crash and, because of Netflix and the internet, many of them have a fair idea of why it happened. We watch the world burn and flood and pollute whilst huge multi-billion dollar companies continue to spew out things we don’t need, for profit. Whether it’s Black Rock, or Nestle, people with an ounce of intelligence about them, are starting to realise that they are no match for the mega-verses who control the “free market”. 43,000 people contributed in agreement to a post on Reddit during the lockdown about the improved air and water quality that seemed to nicely coincide with a worldwide factory shut-down.
The world is out of our hands. It’s all we can do to reduce ourselves down. And many intelligent people are.
The thing is, we’re not even being quiet about it. We’re telling you nice and bluntly what we’re doing, you’re just not listening. We told you we wanted a work-life balance and you started giving us “staff shout outs” and free donuts and let us work from home, I don’t think you’ve understood. Hundreds of thousands of Instagram accounts share content around minimalist culture, from van living to upcycling. We aren’t working our butts off to retire someday. We are working just enough to live for today. And unfortunately for the economy, that means people as a homogenic unit, want to work less and produce less, so that they can live more. That means productivity per person in any current quantifiable sense, will continue to go down. I can hear the uproar already, against the groan of the unsustainably large public services cog as it tries to turn without collapsing. But, and this might be an unpopular opinion, I’m not sure I care. Society as we know it, crumbling because of the short-sighted greed of people who lived before me, really is not my problem. And I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that.
I think it’s because I’ve not managed to have children. I’ve spent my entire professional life in sub-standard accommodation, my mum died because no ambulance turned up for 45 minutes (despite there being an A&E a 15 minute green light route from her house), and it took a court 3 months to ban me from driving but over two years to convict my rapist. My give-a-shit metre is woefully low. But I’m not wallowing. I’ve learned how to grow my own food, I can sail a boat, drive haulage vehicles and manage the needs of 30 or so crotchfruit whilst also teaching them how to translate Roman Numerals. I have a fair understanding of plumbing and carpentry and I’m getting my electrician qualification soon. I’m not too shabby with a gun, either. If we are on the brink of social collapse, I’ll survive. The people still fighting for a piece of the pie seem to mostly be parents.
It’s taken thirty years, but people are now starting to wake up to the idea that someone needs to bring up the children. Long ago are the days where children brought themselves up; that would be completely at odds with the child protection policies. I’m not saying we should go back to seeing children as free labour or voiceless and expendable, but in the absence of giving children the experiences we used to, they aren’t going to magically learn it themselves. And unfortunately, the greed of those in power has capitalised on both parents being out at work so much that our economy now relies upon it. Schools are failing, even if it doesn’t look that way on paper. The skills needed to actually nurture a child according to all the research we have invested in, is shown by the soaring cost of childcare (although the papers like to focus on the increase in energy bills). With wages stagnant and part time work sparsely available, social workers, teachers and parents are now quite rightly asking, “what gives?”
There is a plus side to all this. We will probably stay working in some capacity until we are at death’s door. If the government had any sort of ability to look at things over periods longer than 4 years, they’d see the productivity per person across a lifetime would be a better margin to pay attention to, or maybe they should start taking care work into their productivity calculations.
Personally, I am becoming desensitized to the paper mill and I’m leaving my pension to do its own thing (auto-enroll became common-place in my early twenties). Due to a dead mum, I managed to pay off my mortgage on that little ex-council house I bought far in the north, and the well-below-market rent I’m charging for it, get’s reinvested in the groundwork or the plumbing, depending on what needs doing and when. I earn more than enough to get by in my public services role and I’m quite content sitting in my old college jumper and pair of leggings, spending the Christmas holidays, staring at the rooftops out of the mouldy window of my one bed rental, sipping fruity teas and googling different recipes for a kilo of parsnips. I appreciate I am in a fruitful position, but I’m still only mid thirty, the future is still Dante’s Inferno. And if it all goes tits up? Well, you can buy a 3D printer and the plans for a suicide pod on DreamMarket for about 15k. Cheaper than a nursing home and a lot more humane.
FaerieFalls 