“I Just Don’t Care Anymore”: Why Young People Are Opting Out

Ever since the covid pandemic, things feel different.

Not different in a way like ‘wow, the world has changed heaps due to technology’ (even though it has), but different in the sense of a general malaise.

A feeling that nobody cares about the value of their work anymore.

A feeling that no matter how hard you try, you keep going backwards.

A feeling that if you can’t actually improve your life through hard work, why should you bother?

Sure, you could ‘try harder at work and get a promotion’, but should you?

Most rational people in Australia, who have really thought about this question recently, have probably concluded ‘no’.

And is it really such a surprise?

The Australian taxation system is completely broken.

Let’s say you’re a consultant for one of the big consultancies, earning $130k.

Right now you might go under the radar, working a couple of days a week from home where you do nothing but pretend to be busy, then you go into the office the other 3 days, find a corner to hide in, and pretend to produce powerpoint slides for your client - the government - who pretends to care.

Does anyone read the slides?

Do the slides themselves have any actual value?

Or is this all just a game?

Just one big fugazi which everyone partaking in has accepted the worthlessness of?

Your boss asks for the slides, you use AI to produce the slides, the client doesn’t read the slides, then they go off and implement the decision they were always going to implement anyway.

So why were the slides produced?

I’ll tell you why:

Because some executive schmuck wanted to ‘cover their ass’.

‘Well, if we didn’t have the slides, who would I have to blame if this project doesn’t go according to plan?’

Most decisions in corporate Australia don’t get made through the content of the information, they get made by high level executives over boozy lunches and strippers, well before that information is produced.

Everyone gets a nice little laugh by handing off the ‘work’ to their analyst to ‘perform’, knowing they better come up with the answer they already persuaded them to produce in their one on one beforehand.

And when I say the word ‘perform’, I really do mean that literally.

It’s a performance.

There is an old quote from the Soviet-era:

‘They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work’.

And I think that perfectly sums up where we stand at this moment in time.

Most people are doing useless tasks, for useless people, for a useless currency.

And that last part really is key - the currency is useless.

Sure, if you’re the consultant in this story you could push for a 3% inflation adjusted pay rise, or even - wait for it - a 10% pay rise (wow!) but why should you?

37% of each extra dollar of your effort will go to the government.

Are you happy with the government? Do you think they deserve to reach into your pockets and steal this money?

Income tax was originally introduced to fund World War I.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, it became a permanent tax thereafter.

So, you could push for that pay rise, or you could do nothing…

Because that money’s not going to help you buy a house, which are now ‘impossibly unaffordable’ in the major Australian capital cities.

And if it’s not going to buy you a house it’s not going to improve your social status either.

And if it’s not going to improve your position in the status hierarchy, why should you care?

Women you may be pursuing won’t care, your bank account won’t care (inflation will make sure of that), and your friends won’t care (they’re probably in the same situation as you).

If the government is going to just take your hard earned cash, and piss it up against the wall by running what is effectively a ‘jobs for the boys’ program via the NDIS, and a Ponzi scheme via the property market, why shouldn’t you just get in on some of that instead?

If the government has mandated it is pursuing a policy of ‘sustainable house price growth’, why not just spend all day at your corporate slopshop looking at dogboxes on Domain, trying to find the worst quality one you possibly can at the cheapest possible price, then spend all day contacting CBA to try get the biggest possible loan you can, to buy the biggest piece of shit on the market?

Why not do that?

After all, the government said property only goes up right?

And they’re serious about doing their best to keep that promise:

They’re using your own money to ensure that property prices only go up, through demand-side policies like first home buyer grants, negative gearing, and infinite immigration.

And whilst all this is happening, you see the stupidest people you knew growing up miraculously - seemingly against all odds - buy a house.

‘How? How did they possibly manage that?’ You think to yourself.

Well, turns out they didn’t - their parents just gifted them $300k for a deposit because they were also in on the Ponzi growing up.

And so why would you care about what corporate slopshop ABC’s mission is, when the mission itself is slop to you?

It’s slop because no one believes in it.

Perhaps more accurately: no one has a reason to believe in it - they can’t tangibly link their effort to the reward they will get from believing.

People can now only afford houses if they were born into the right family, or are an extraordinary outlier talent.

When you create this type of environment, guess what ends up happening?

Employers pretend the vision matters and employees pretend to care.

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”, as Shakespeare eloquently put it.

When you speak to young people these days, most of them say the same thing, using different words:

“Why should I care about my job when I’ll never be able to afford a house?”

And most old people treat this as a trivial thing.

“Well, I had to work hard for a house in my day, too”.

No, you do not understand.

You’re not listening.

You see, you had the hope of one day being able to afford a house through hard work.

This generation has none - they have lost hope.

And instead of even acknowledging that reality - taking a good objective look at what it would be like to be them these days - you dismiss it.

The loss of hope ruins nations.

If no one believes that playing long-term games (employment) has any actual value, they will stop playing the game.

It might look like they’re playing, but they are only pretending to play - and there’s a huge difference.

You won’t see this in any direct statistics, but you will see it everywhere when you simply talk to people going about their everyday lives:

Can’t find a rental, job market is crap and in flux all the time, house prices are completely out of reach, you go to a suburb you haven’t been before and don’t see any Australians…

And so you question:

‘WTF is the point of all this?’

Am I working so that Matt Comyn can afford a 17th investment property by the beach?

Or so that Albo - who has worked in the public sector his entire life - can steal more of my money and allocate it to his posse?

Much of this is due to the financialisation of the entire economy, due to the fiat monetary system.

The reason why paramedics and nurses get paid so poorly relative to the value they provide to society has nothing to do with the value of their output anymore, and everything to do with the fact that it’s hard to package up their work into a token and sell it to a bunch of random financial institutions you’ve never heard of with billions of dollars of funds under management.

And unfortunately, because of that, the ‘market’ (whatever that even means these days), doesn’t attribute enough fiat tokens to it.

Instead, those closest to the source of the fiat token spigot - bankers, real estate agents, financial institutions of all kinds - get all the money, regardless of the actual value they provide to society (this is known as The Cantillon effect).

Going forward, I do wonder how many of these white collar jobs will actually disappear.

If we think about a job as the sum of perceived value + actual value, we could say that the percentage of perceived value jobs has been trending up, and actual value trending down.

If everyone’s just doing work that has perceived value rather than actual value, what is there to actually automate away?

Whenever I walk into the city these days, all I can think - literally every time - is

‘WTF are all these people doing for work?’

Nothing useful, that’s for sure.

They might wear a crisp pair of chinos, a pair of RM Williams boots and a checkered shirt, but if you asked them their actual job over a beer it would sound more like another language than a real job.

And so maybe those with high perceived value will be safe from the AI revolution, by virtue of how useless they already are?

Maybe the best possible strategy to prepare for the AI revolution is to find the most useless job possible in society, where you don’t actually do any real work?

How can you automate that which has no actual value anyway?

No one really understands what they do anymore.

No one really believes in it.

And no one really cares - because the currency is utterly worthless.

And so they opt out - the only rational move left in an irrational world.