> Someone else wrote, more gently, "While I feel you're spot on with most of your facts you've got gen x all wrong." They added: "My generation leads in workplace dissatisfaction and realized 2 decades ago that there was no more corporate loyalty."<p>this was exactly my thought as I was reading through the article.<p>Every generation has complaints about the next generation, one of the "faults" for my generation (Gen-X) was no workplace loyalty. But my generation watched what loyalty got our parents. If companies want loyalty they need to be loyal.<p>> We're used to hearing 20-somethings complain about the state of corporate America today. But I didn't expect to receive such an outpouring of dismay and disillusionment from seasoned workplace veterans. I'd written the story for young people, as a defense of their decision to rebel against the notion that we owe our employers a debt of gratitude.<p>The author is seriously missing a lot of historical context. the younger generations have moved even further in this regard, but this isn't an age-based phenomenon, it's a reaction to how businesses have acted. Used to someone would work for 40 years for the same company and retire with a pension. Nowadays you're more likely to be fired a year or two before your pension, if you're offered one at all.
Is there anything Americans are not mad about?<p>The rest of the world is not like this. Europeans are not any more mad about their employers than they already were. Asians are not any more mad at their employers than they already were (small exception might be the lying down movement in China, but I’m not sure how widespread that is, and for the most part Chinese dissent appears to have come from a radical retraction in economic prospects rather than being mad at employers).<p>If there is something unique about employers that has changed why isn’t this extreme anger not being reflected elsewhere? Especially now since most of these companies are multinational and many probably employ more people in Europe and Asia and follow similar policies there than they do in the U.S.<p>Americans are mad about everything. They’re mad about their commutes. They’re mad about their jobs. They’re mad about their neighbors. They’re mad about politics. They’re mad about homeless people.<p>I think it’s actually time to consider that there’s something else that’s driving general dissatisfaction in the U.S. (maybe social media?) to try and understand whether this general dissatisfaction actually exists, and if so, which issues are attributable to this and which are issues Americans are mad about in of themselves.
Hypothesis: degradation of human values<p><a href="https://trendguardian.medium.com/why-we-are-dispensable-7a577eba4f3e" rel="nofollow">https://trendguardian.medium.com/why-we-are-dispensable-7a57...</a>
Every generation makes basically the same complaints about the one before and the one after, and presumably has since the invention of complaining (we have written evidence of this going back a bit over two millennia, anyway). The idea that being discontent with your job was a specifically millennial issue was always absurd, and informed largely by the "moaning about other generations" phenomenon.
I'd love to hear from the Boomers and Gen Xers around here if you agree?<p>"Cynical millenial" is a common image and persona, but I'm curious for other perspectives, maybe find some hope beyond my own sense of precarity I get from reading this article. I don't think we're going to have another great resignation, not with all of these tech layoffs...right?<p>At some point something has got to give.