I grew up in a blue collar family. This guy's father is the norm, not the exception. My grandfather was a lineman for the electric company. He worked around the clock in all kinds of bad weather and had friends who'd been electrocuted.
My father-in-law worked on an end loader while suffering through hemorrhoids and hernias. My brother-in-law has a crushed disc and works as an auto mechanic, oftentimes requiring him to lift things over his head when working in the pit. When he gets home at night he has one chair that he can sit in to relieve his pain.
This isn't macho cult bullshit, trust me they can't wait until they can retire. They're simply working men who'd go to the ends of the earth to provide for their families.
I can't speak for the rest of the world but this is the culture of a blue collar family in the American Midwest.
I am so glad I create software for a living. 40-50 hours work per week on average, more during a crunch, all in a climate-controlled environment. You can eat and drink any time you feel like it. You have flexible work schedules. And if your neck gets sore you're paid well enough you can go get a message and have it worked out.
For me, it was my grandfather. He saved as much as he could, set up (whole) life insurance accounts for his grandkids, invested in stock to pass on. He was a traveling salesman in California, selling frozen foods when Birdseye just came out with the concept.
He gave mew a few shares of stock, I sold them for cash a few months later when I wanted to do something I just _had_ to do at the time. He also gifted me with a Bicentennial Coin set, still in plastic. It got spent, probably within the year.
He last gave me the life insurance policy, saying that when he set it up, it would require no payments. It had changed to needing annual dues, so he suggested I cash it in.
I kept it. Years later, after he had passed, my wife and I were trying to get our financial act together, and lo and behold - A whole life insurance policy has a cash value. We borrowed against it and paid of the worst of the debt I owed when we met. We paid it back.
It became the starting piece of our financial planning. We had life insurance, then we built up 6 months of living expenses.
We bought our first piece of investment property to provide for our own retirement (I seriously don't expect there to be much of the Social Security I have been contributing to - matches your complaint about pensions, I think). We borrowed again and made the down payment.
Now we have an extra $1000 cash flowing from the property, we are paying off the policy loan and looking for the next piece of property.
I wish granddad were here now - I think he would be proud. I still miss the hell out of him.
Fairly similar story here. My granddad was in textile, had a fair sized factory in Arnhem, NL. After the war it was all gutted, within months and the help of lots of loyal employees that had survived somehow they re-built the factory and re-opened it. In the 60's with the Asian countries gaining momentum in textile and ailing health he quit the game sold off all his holdings and died a very few years later, leaving my grandmother well enough off to retire from. She never did much with the money, (sure didn't spend it :) ), lived to be 91 and left the remainder to her 8 children. By that time it was worth next to nothing.
Just like you I wished my grandparents were still around, and I'd hope they would be proud too. That is still to a large extend my moral compass even today.
That's one way to look at it. Another way is to ask yourself whether we could've been much farther ahead, as a civilization and a species, in terms of quality of life, human rights, technology and science, and so on, in 2013 given what we had accomplished already in say 1913, or even 13. I think the answer is a solid yes, we could've been 100 times ahead of where we are now. I wouldn't congratulate ourselves just because we have some professions where people don't suffer injuries at work, that's a pretty low bar we should've crossed ages ago. (I realize this is a tangent and I'm not really arguing against your main point...)
In the years between now and 1913, Europe has risen from literally centuries of war, China has lifted more people out of poverty than I can fathom, the USA has made great strides towards equality and we have made the first steps towards being a spacefairing civilisation. Medical technology has advanced a hundredfold, or even a thousandfold.
We still have quite a way to go, but we should not kid ourselves into thinking we have not come a long way already lest we begin to slip back again.
...for now. The bar to entry will be lowered as development tools increase in sophistication, programming languages become more abstract, learning resources become easier to grasp, and children are taught programming at a younger age. In the future we will likely see the market become saturated with programmers. This is not bad for society. However, competition will be significantly higher for less pay. I'm willing to bet that if you're in your 30s (maybe even 40s) you will likely see this play out before retirement.
This has been drummed up over and over, and frankly the trends aren't promising. We aren't graduating any more STEM grads than we were in 1985, despite increased college attendance on the whole [1]. I don't know how to interpret this, other than there aren't very many engineers on the margin.
This isn't macho cult bullshit, trust me they can't wait until they can retire. They're simply working men who'd go to the ends of the earth to provide for their families.
I can't speak for the rest of the world but this is the culture of a blue collar family in the American Midwest.
I am so glad I create software for a living. 40-50 hours work per week on average, more during a crunch, all in a climate-controlled environment. You can eat and drink any time you feel like it. You have flexible work schedules. And if your neck gets sore you're paid well enough you can go get a message and have it worked out.
We've got it made.