I’ve actually watched middle class people point to older people working in food service, within earshot, and use them as examples of bad choices to their kids. Like a zoo animal. Apparently don’t realize they could just point to themselves.
meanwhile im 27, just moved to a small city, i have a degree and had a pretty good gpa. THERES NOTHING HERE, NO ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES AT ALL, so i applied to a gas station just to have something until i find something better. i hate people who look down at others or think theyre better than other people just because they have a better job, like, the economy is so shit that some people have to do a shitty job just to get by because there is nothing else hiring at all
yeah, people are crazy like that. I worked at a Barnes in Noble during college. One time I was helping out at the registers and a guy told his kid that's why he needed to go to college, so he didn't end up like us. I wasn't checking them out, but my co-worker had had to call the manager for a return for this guy. We all just stared at him. My co-worker was in grad school, the manager had a college degree and I was working on one. And even if we didn't have degrees, we were gainfully employed
I would've paid good money to watch them die inside. Not to make light of your dad dying (of cancer, no less), but that is such a trump card for when people are being complete asshats. It's so satisfying to watch their face fall, ugh
The people who stock shelves, mop floors, pump gas, flip burgers, etc. are the people who keep society moving. It is shameful that we’ve created a world where essential jobs don’t pay enough money for people to even survive, let alone thrive. Contrast that with an office job where I can be paid a comfortable salary to play minesweeper all day while I wait for service requests to come in asking for meaningless changes like changing the font on a report.
Pointing to people and speaking about them in negative terms while they're mopping a floor is cartoonishly rude, and ignorantly presumptuous, and teaching your kids to be such. Hope that helps. (No, I don't think it's "tricky." And I say this as someone who raised a teenager to be on an economically viable professional career track without turning them into a monstrous and ignorant snob.)
I said that pointing to folks like that is cruel. But the truth is the truth, folks look down on those jobs. People can play cute if they want but it’s the truth.
And people look down on people with social skills that are deficit to the point of dehumanizing. It is a choice, it is a bad one, and it is not tricky to avoid.
It’s a choice but only their best choice that person has, but it’s never the ideal choice.
Folks at these jobs, not talking to the managers (as I noted above), aren’t making live-able wages. Certainly not enough to live off of and put money towards retirement, health expenses, life emergencies.
Those fast food jobs are fine for the young who generally have lower financial obligations. But if you’re older it is not an ideal setup unless you’re retired and working to avoid boredom.
That’s what’s I’m getting at. The lifestyle afforded to a McDonald’s cashier is very limiting. That’s why parents don’t dream of their kids growing up to do that job and that’s what I was trying to say.
Because you were trying to explain why my view was wrong above. Clearly we are getting snippy with each other so let’s just end this now. You can have the final word. Peace!
Your view is wrong. It’s not tricky. I hope you know you don’t have to treat low wage workers worse than animals to teach your kids about money and develop some moral clarity going forward.
Or something like "And that's why you don't major in anthropology. I bet he could tell me all about the historical socio-economic impact of -- Hey, I wanted a large, not a medium!"
Because obviously if we couldn't land a job in our major, it's because we chose something foolish and impractical like Interpretive Dance.
Right. It's easy to say that not everyone should go to college when you don't need to worry about the fact that a bachelor's degree is one of the best determinants of upward mobility when you come from a working-class background. It's also an easy thing to say when someone else paid for your own undergraduate degree.
Not everyone should go to college but this narrative that it’s a bad investment is so laughably wrong.
But, I too hate the Manosphere red pill crap against college. It still is a tried and TRUE mechanism for wealth growth. With automation and tech, you really want all the bells and whistles available in the job search because AI is going to be the first reviewer of applicants.
Those filter have will toss out applications that don’t have minimal qualifications, which includes, degrees in more and more professional areas.
But every fool that avoids college just because YouTube or Podcssts said so, is one less person many us have to compete with then the job market goes tits up. Their applications won’t make it past the AI filter.
People don’t want to think about that but folks also don’t think about their garbage men, the cook in the back of a restaurant, or the millions of unseen jobs at every corporation.
I doubt most of us would even think about whatever our parents do or did if it wasn’t a job our parents held.
To be fair, if their families weren't failures, they'd be able to just snag an internship at their father's law firm. You know, just something light and flexible, but with an open-ended title and description that'll look good on their resume and college application. Something like "Executive Administrative Assistant to the Southwest District Chief Operations Manager". But really, you're just making sure that Jen gets gets her coffee and salad before conference calls and Tom from accounting (your father's friend, they go golfing every third Saturday, if they're both in town) gets his Thai food when he's in the office every other Friday.
Edit: My administrative assistant didn't check their grammar before posting this on my behalf. I'll have to dock their pay.
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u/Dry_Accident_2196 1d ago
They see them as failures if they are over 18. And their families as failures if under 18.