JC's story reminds me a bit of my late grandfather. GF was a hustler, social, progressive, and had a heavy Texarkana accent. He grew up in the Dustbowl era and didn't have money or enough to eat. Then WW2 came around and it was a hard fought and interesting time for him. He was his CO's bookie and his company's loanshark. Post-WW2 was a bit difficult but there was continuity and security of remaining a professional soldier as an NCO. Rarely spent money on themselves, but moderately generous with friends and family. Never financially-insecure and had triple retirements. I have their pristine Telefunken radio console they had in Germany which held several Johnny Cash albums (vinyl). They're not in VG shape, but they're playable. In closing, one thing I think JC and GF shared is they smiled a bit smugly, defiantly, and warmly, something the world can never fade or take away and something that emanates from within.
“I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Just seconding this as it was one of the most compelling biographical books I’ve ever read. I binged it during a holiday shopping trip to the mall 20-ish years ago. Couldn’t put it down, just followed along with the group as they went from store to store with my face in a book.
Prior to reading this, my only insight into Cash’s upbringing had been the recording from Folsom Prison in which the warden does a cringe-inducing introduction of Ray Cash, Johnny’s father.
As you mentioned Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, it is hands down the best live album I have ever listened to. Why? Because the recording captures Cash, the audience, and everyone else there in such a way that you can feel what a truly extraordinary set of circumstances that took place that day and Cash's personality is right there in the recording. Highly, highly recommended, even if you are not into his music in general it is a historical document and I wish I had come across even a single live recording that comes even close.
If you want some sort of "definitive" edition, I hold the Legacy Edition [1] in very high regard as it to the best of my knowledge contains the two concerts in their entirety.
> The Man in Black grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, in a community of poor farmers working government land.
Similar. I grew up in Arkansas for 6 years of my childhood working on a turkey farm until I was 11~. Hard work ,7 days a week for 6 years working with turkeys and cattle. Something is lost today by most kids being removed from hard work, I think. Defiantly brings a different perspective going from that to working in the largest tech companies
I don't think there's any evidence to indicate that the generations who worked through childhood are any better on average.
There are folks who turned that into habits that unlocked productivity and happiness in life. There are others who just got exploited.
To me, what's important is building the intuition for the connection between practice and achievement, which is a subtly different thing. It's not hard work for as a thing that's morally admirable. It's a means to an end.
I would add to that a sense of collective responsibility, tempered with self-assertiveness.
I think these things are the bright side of valuing "hard work", but without the dark sides of exploitation and workaholism.
I disagree to a point. We see millenials/Gen-Z expecting promotions and large salaries for little to no work history and at most normal productivity. There is definitely a connection missed between effort and reward.
We also see CEOs getting paid a ridiculous amount of money. They get incredible bonuses even when their companies underperform. The golden parachute is real. It's easier to blame the kids, but they see many examples from the top. Not to mention how their children - the nepokids - are being rewarded by their proximity to power and a network they had no hand in building.
That's simply because the labor market in some industries allowed for this to be commonplace as many millennials hit mid-career in the 2010s. People expect what's empirically common for them. There's nothing right or wrong about that.
If the current economy persists, people will have to adopt new expectations, eventually. Many people already have, as they experience a much tougher time finding new jobs.
> millenials/Gen-Z expecting promotions and large salaries for little to no work history
Any time I see this I always wonder "what does the speaker consider a large salary?". Do you mean a living wage where one doesn't have to live with three other people in a rat/roach infested slumlord apartment?
If they’re sometimes getting those things, maybe they should expect them.
I think, to some extent, there’s been a broadening of the set of people clued in that the connection between hard work and money isn’t just weak, but often nonexistent.
You don’t get real money doing farm work 7 days a week, after all. Real work, but not real money.
That's because inflation, a generally increasing cost of living, and generational knowledge around how exploitative modern capitalism can be.
The whole "kids should work harder and enjoy it" take is entirely Western. Kids are working very hard in other parts of the world, for pennies, no health care, and have next to zero economic mobility. Kids should be willing to work for their own benefit, to enrich their own life, but that is not what we see in practice. Kids work to survive.
Can you show that this behavior did not exist in previous generations? I saw plenty of that with gen-x working its way through the lower rungs of the workforce.
Depends on the definition, but only the very oldest have hit 40, many in their 30s and some still in their 20s. It's too broad to be of use here, those entering the workforce in 2006 were in a different world from those doing so in 2020.
It sounds like what you're saying is that younger generations have more confidence and self-respect than previous generations.
If it was previously common for children to be exploited and lose their childhoods, then I can certainly see how that led the older generations to be such seemingly spineless adults with no self esteem. Abuse does that to people.
Fortunately, it sounds like they (well...most of them...) recognized the damage done by their upbringing and sought to raise their own children better than their parents raised them. Breaking out of the cycle of abuse is a hard thing to do; good on them.
To be fair, there's a lot of room between having to work to eat and learning what hard work is.
A childhood of workin outside, whether that's working with animals or working in the soil, teaches entirely different lessons than living in video games or social media and eating food that magically shows up on grocery store shelves.
I obviously don't know you or your children and am picking on video games and social media only in a general example of many children's common experiences today.
Can it be argued that work is miserable for everyone, including children? Current trends doesn't only seek to abolish child worker, it aims to free it from everyone.
Of course, whether it'd actually be better for everyone or it'd actually be stable is another can of worm entirely.
I think humans are hard wired to work or to at least produce something to find value and I personally think relieving everyone from forced work would produce a lot of aimless and suicidal beings. Not every is going to appreciate the freedom and start producing pottery. I'm wholly aware that I am influenced by a Puritan work ethic
I think it's less about "work" and more about reason for being. Work is sort of the easiest, lowest friction way to find that.
Post-scarcity and post-work society takes a formal effort for people to find purpose. It requires that we really try to find things that are valuable and that we enjoy.
But I do not believe we will live, as a society, to see the end of scarcity or jobs. We'll kill ourselves way before we get to that point.
> Not every is going to appreciate the freedom and start producing pottery.
You're right - some may "do nothing", but the kind of people that would "do nothing" if nobody were forced to work to live are the kind of people, by and large, that do just enough to get by.
Even if we instituted a generous UBI, people would still have to work to live because landlords/real estate speculator aren't going to let all of those money slosh around freely - they want theirs too.
My mom grew up in Appalachia, in the same time as Johnny Cash, dirt farmers in a "holler". No indoor electric, plumbing, or phone. Wood stove cooking and heat. A spring house for water. Baths every Saturday night. Their livelihood was completely dependant on growing food and lumber. I find it unimaginable. Technically I know how it worked, but it's completely alien. In one generation.
My father had a similar childhood. Grew up in a 3 bedroom cabin that his father built, shared a bedroom with his 3 brothers, and spent a lot of his childhood running around the woods with a rifle and trapping animals to sell furs. Despite having a very successful career, he refers to this time in his life as 'when we were wealthy'.
Same, my grandfather grew up the same way. Horses were their way of life, and the house was located in a spot where electricity and other utilities would never make it, and paving a road was unfeasible. The house was essentially abandoned once the kids were raised and the parents wanted to nice
Yup, 7 days a week with my grandfather. I'm 44 now, he's 96 and still going strong but without the farm since he got too old to run it and simply retired.
But yeah, 7 days a week I'd tend to the turkeys, cattle, dig potatoes, pick tomatoes (we grew a lot of vegetables) , cut hay, rake hay, fluff hay, etc. Being 7 years old on a tractor cutting hay all day was extremely fun. We'd also make the square bales of hay and being 7 or 8, I wasn't strong enough to lift them, so I'd drive the truck with a trailer and my grandfather would be behind loading the square bales. We'd do this for hours in the heat (I had the easy part), he had pure raw strength. We had almost 200 acres of land.
Thanks, sounds different and would certainly instill a certain work ethic.
I'm similar age and have been in paid employment since the age of 13, a lot of different things through farming, manufacturing, retail and catering before I started in tech.
I was always grateful for the work ethic but also important was the experience of being the most lowly employee being made to do the grunt work. I think that gave me the confidence to get on with the job without complaint or too much assistance, I feel that especially helped me progress early on in my tech career.
Still, I'm not sure how I'd feel about my own kids working so young. And in all honesty, don't really think those opportunities would be there for them now anyway.
> And in all honesty, don't really think those opportunities would be there for them now anyway.
Modern governments actively endure that working before 18 is like chilf exploitation or something which is ridiculous as you learn much more by doing than by watching videos or reading books
I'm quite astonished to see people promoting intense child labour. No government in the world completely prohibits light child labour (in the household/farm, and from usually around 14 also light work outside as long as it doesn't affect school hours). Anything beyond this can and will affect them negatively as established by pretty much all research out there. You seem to have luckily made it through that, but many kids never recover from intense childhood labour.
> All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,
> All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.
That's not quite true. The EU, US, UK, Japan all have legal minimum ages for employment ranging from 13-15.
I don't think the laws have changed that much from when I was young.
There's more focus on remaining in education sure (which is generally
a good idea but often poorly implemented) but I think there's wider societal explanations as to why you see far fewer kids working outside school hours than you once did.
> Something is lost today by most kids being removed from hard work, I think.
I'm not sure I agree.
The work was hard and you didn't get anywhere.
You worked the farm, the mill, the mine, etc. just like your father did and his father did. You didn't get rich. You didn't even get comfortable. You were still poor, and your children were going to remain poor.
The window where labor unions made mill, mine, and factory jobs something livable was quite short--1960 to 1980, roughly.
Yeah, shitty, excruciating work was a good way to beat you kid over the head with "go find ANYTHING else to do as a career." Worked for my dad. Worked for Joe Namath's dad. etc.
Not sure I count that as anything "being lost" though.
However, those quite a bit better places only employ a small fraction of the number of people of yore and require quite a bit more education thanks to automation.
For example: the Natrona Heights steel mill now employs roughly 100 people on a shift vs when it employed somewhere between 5000-10000 on a shift. Automation killed a ton of employment. Those are the kind of jobs I am talking about.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to bring all those jobs back. They were terrible jobs.
However, claiming that working those kinds of jobs somehow makes people better is quite suspect, at best.
Ok, OP's argument was about workplace conditions, not low employment numbers, and they claimed that conditions stopped being good around 1980 with no evidence to back it up. We are at less than 4% unemployment so it's a very good thing we don't need 100x more workers to do things the way we did them 100 years ago.
I will say, I'm a 100% knowledge worker, and work from a laptop, but hard labor is good for you (within reason). We have all sorts of illnesses and obesity in modern society because our bodies were built for stamina that we no longer make use of.
If nothing else, it should humble you and make you appreciate how lucky 'you' are now to have found and be good at one of few remaining white-collar jobs that pay well. That list of high paying jobs is shrinking rapidly, and it's pretty reasonable to think that in 20 years, software engineers are going to be the miners/mill-workers of the previous generation.
What was lost was hard work ethic and the perspective of how good life is now, respect for others, and we've gained some arrogance from never having to suffer.
I had an odd life, I lived in the projects as a child until I was sent to my grandfathers farm for 6~ years, and after that, back to the violent city I had originally lived in. I was at a huge disadvantage compared to my peers but from the hard word I was subjected to in those 6 years (work ethic it taught me), pure luck of getting into computer science (thanks to John Carmack via doom/quake), and meeting the right people, I was able to work much harder than those around me and rise up quickly through the worlds biggest tech companies, make a ton of money to the point where I was able to retire at 40 (though I didn't and still work).
To answer your question, in my view, that's what was lost -- a connection to brutal hard work that keeps the world moving forward.
This is my sense as well. Growing up in a restaurant, I could see the cash being counted each evening. You scrub the toilets, make smalltalk, get orders, cook the food, serve it, clean the tables. At the end of the evening you have more cash in the till than at the start. Results are very obvious.
Most people who get a desk job will not see this, in fact they will barely ever meet an end consumer (person who eventually pays VAT for example), and the money will have passed through a huge number of hands before getting into their account each month. Doing a slightly better or worse job makes no difference.
Worked my way through college on semester breaks on farms in Oregon and Germany.
I can totally relate.
The camaraderie of showing up at the shop with the other hands on a frigid morning, working until sunset, sometimes longer.
Watching crops grow.
Harvesting.
It also helps that I grew up in the last great generation of feral children.
We were outdoors all the time. Rain or shine.
I get depressed if I'm not outdoors enough to this day.
Outdoor living (as well as hard work) seems lost on so many people today.
My parents infected me with the same disease -- an intense conviction in the nobility and virtue of individual hard work -- and it led me to a terrible place, the physical sciences, where I received a harsh lesson in the nature of capitalism. It's not about creating value, it's about capturing value. In a low-leverage situation, when everyone works hard you are simply paid less. Surplus is captured through ownership and ownership is concentrated at the top. In low-leverage jobs, this system transforms hard work from a noble individual value to a collective curse.
The explosive growth of the software industry over the last few decades has led to an abnormal situation where regular employees have enough leverage to capture a substantial fraction of their surplus. Most people are not so lucky. For most people, the system looks more like:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
and having experienced work environments that were low leverage through no fault of the employees, I understand this, I respect this, and I did not forget it when I left for software, where we have it much easier not because we work harder but because we are in a growth industry.
I too found it easy to climb. I too enjoy the "free" money from real estate investments and a stock portfolio. But I know where it comes from. I do not pound my throne and launch spittle as I demand for those beneath me to work harder for my benefit.
"It works on my machine" - apt comparison for the software crowd.
I grew up in a restaurant, but my main lesson from it was that I didn't want to be forced to do that kind of work. People have praised me for my work ethic, but I'm not sure it came from doing anything at the restaurant, it came from NOT wanting to do anything at the restaurant.
About two weeks in to my first job, as a dishwasher, I told myself that I didn't want to do this for the next forty years. I stayed in restaurants another ~five years and was known as a hard worker, but that desire is what drove me to college and to a career.
I was raised in middle-class suburbia, in the North East U.S. My family wasn't wealthy, but wasn't hurting either. I did well in school, but didn't have to try very hard to maintain grades in Advanced Placement classes. Outside of school, I worked easy lawn-care gigs with my neighbor and we made decent cash with 20-30 hours of work per week.
It afforded me a life of coasting, leisure, and throwing away my downtime.
I am nearing 30 years old and just realizing that I'd consider my behavior to be bad habits I need to kick. I want to work harder, and I have to teach myself what that means.
I would hope that there is some optimal balance. A lot of my childhood was spent doing manual labor for money. A lot of that was wasted opportunity to learn more and get experience that would have benefited me financially later on.
Take a deep breath. The US endowment for the arts wrote this article to preserve the history of a person who impacted the arts in the US. No one is worshipping him. He had known problems, took criticism for it and it is a known fact by those who enjoy his music.
No one is here to dismiss the damage he caused to the condor population. I do question why you wanted to bring this up though. While it is interesting and important, I don't know if it's commentary relevant for this thread specifically. Wishing you well these holidays
Vulnerable. Not begging, vulnerable. This is prime blaming the victim. People who have an innate drive to make music or art are vulnerable to be exploited, but place the blame where it belongs: on those who would exploit them.
Most humans enjoy music and art. We want it to exist. It makes life better. We shouldn't be looking down on those who want to supply it.
> People who have an innate drive to make music or art are vulnerable to be exploited, but place the blame where it belongs: on those who would exploit them.
I don’t understand this.
Why are only people who make music or art special in this regard?
If I am someone who enjoys Software Engineering, am I also ripe to be exploited? If not, please explain.
>Most humans enjoy music and art. We want it to exist. It makes life better. We shouldn't be looking down on those who want to supply it.
Of course I agree with all your desires. I'm just saying how capitalism works in reality. You can pass moral judgements all you want, but capitalism doesn't care how many people want something. In capitalism, it's all about profit over time.
A “yes, and” pivot: you’re going to be exploited, you should be begging for a union.
I’ve been musing on what an open source (users/creators) union would look like. The best of us write software in this “no matter what” category. How could we collectively support them while they support us and we support each other?
JC's story reminds me a bit of my late grandfather. GF was a hustler, social, progressive, and had a heavy Texarkana accent. He grew up in the Dustbowl era and didn't have money or enough to eat. Then WW2 came around and it was a hard fought and interesting time for him. He was his CO's bookie and his company's loanshark. Post-WW2 was a bit difficult but there was continuity and security of remaining a professional soldier as an NCO. Rarely spent money on themselves, but moderately generous with friends and family. Never financially-insecure and had triple retirements. I have their pristine Telefunken radio console they had in Germany which held several Johnny Cash albums (vinyl). They're not in VG shape, but they're playable. In closing, one thing I think JC and GF shared is they smiled a bit smugly, defiantly, and warmly, something the world can never fade or take away and something that emanates from within.