Author Explains Why So Many Young People Resign From Their Jobs And His Twitter Thread Goes Viral
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About 4.3 million Americans left their jobs in August. “Quits”, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry, especially in retail, food services, and hospitality.
We are living in what labor economist Lawrence Katz calls “a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment.”
Katz says there’s no perfect way of measuring what’s driving it but “what we do see is a lot of people asking about getting remote work, for example, and a lot of people questioning low-wage, high-turnover situations, and employers starting to respond, but pretty slowly relative to the expectations of workers.”
And while the economist thinks we still can’t know if it’s temporary or not, New York Times bestselling author, Kurt Eichenwald, believes it’s been long in the making.
In August, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke the all-time U.S. record
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The Great Resignation is, in fact, great
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In a recent Twitter thread, Eichenwald theorized that younger generations no longer have any faith in the idea of “the American dream” because for so many, it’s become too far out of reach.
The term “American Dream” was coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams in his 1391 book The Epic of America. According to Adams, it’s a promise that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.
But the idea of the American Dream has been around for much longer. You could probably even build a case that it’s inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, which says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But Eichenwald claimed that Americans no longer have the inspiration of working toward a better future for themselves. Because there is none.
And bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald thinks it was long in the making
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So what happens now? While companies are scrambling to keep and attract workers, they are offering retention bonuses, allowing employees to work remotely forever, and providing new benefits to support workers’ personal and professional development.
Some are also saying they’re drawing up policies to help workers recover from burnout, whether it is a sabbatical, closing the business for a week, or shrinking the workweek from five days to four.
“Companies have to bend,” recruiting consultant Abby Kohut, founder, and president of Staffing Symphony, which focuses on the pharmaceutical industry, told CNBC.
Eichenwald’s thread sparked an interesting discussion
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What really really makes me furious is hearing wealthy people calling the poor lazy. I've seen how others are struggling. How can you sit by your pool in your beautiful garden, sip way too expensive booze knowing that you will be on your yacht tomorrow and actually think that others slaving away to make aaaaaall of this possible are lazy? Shame on you.
Yes I agree. Also the rich would never see them selves working at McDonald's or Walmart or any other job in service
While sipping the booze also declare "I don't buy 4$ coffee! I save and invest!"
I hate to have to agree with you, but not doing so would be dishonest to a degree making me physically sick. It's worse enough in europe these days ... but I wouldn't even wanna be better off then I am now in the US! "The american dream is called so because ... you have to be asleep to believe it!" (George Carlin). He was right about this, and I bet he hated being so.
I recently read that an astonishing proportion of CEOs are on anti-depressants. Think of what's really going on: their bodies are telling them their work habits are unnatural, and they are jamming pennies in the fuse boxes to keep going. Survival means the working class isn't driven by anti-depressants (even if they need them too for various reasons -- I don't mean to join in the chorus of idiots who think attack anti-depressant usage).
I think honestly, at least in western countries that have affordable prescriptions (ie so poor can have them too), that some huge amount of us, rich and poor, are on antidepressants. And I'm not knocking them either, in my case I take them permanently to correctly a genetic problem. But I'm more meaning the way life has changed, and this feeling of never being able to attain each countries version of 'the American dream', is driving our population into depression at a high rate. Not to mention the impending damage coming from the global temperature rise that has yet to be dealt with, as we cantbguarantee we can stop it reaching a 2 degree increase (catastrophic), and we are already ensured a 1.something increase as a minimum. Sorry for the tangent lol
I worked in a pharmacy on Vashon Island in the 00’s. Some of the big names of Seattle’s tech giants sent their assistants for their stress-related prescriptions. If one was vindictive, it would have been satisfying. (I am; it was)
hang on .... tell me sofacushionfort. TELL
They call the poor lazy while they sip wine on their boast and planes...playing rounds of golf and going on 4 week vacations to exotic places never worried about whether or not they will have a job to come back to. Gee...guess those poor people that are putting up with all the Karen's and getting spat on by anti-maskers just have it too damn good. (Sarcasm)
Carol, it's frustrating. You ok?
Fine..I just get pissed when I'm seeing essential workers being treated like crap by the privileged A**holes of this country. I call them out on it and throw their pettiness right back at them. But I can't help think of how many of these workers have no choice but to be in these sh*tty jobs putting up with the Kens and the Karens of the world.
I'm sending you a hug anyway.
Thank you, Caro Caro! Right back at ya!
I work in customer service and discovered having a car was too expensive. I could only afford use, but they constantly needed repairs. We are constantly saying we are going to move out of rough neighborhood, buy it always ends up being next year...Working 40 hours leaves me with no sense of personal fulfillment.
I agree with you. Without hope of a better future the present is not good.
Kai your story is sadly all too common. I don’t understand this humanity that keeps humans down and values wealth over people, animals, and the planet. I hope you find a way to personal fulfilment - have you considered some online qualifications?
You only work 40 hours a week? That's your problem right there, prole. Get back to work and work 2 jobs you pleb. /s
My top number is working 4 jobs at the same time lol. One a full time salary, the rest part time ‘survival money’
Hey Kai, I feel you. I worked customer service and it sucks and the pay is horrible. I might suggest taking classes at a community college. You can go part time, take all your classes online and get help in paying for it. It's cheaper than Universities and, if you get on a good rapport with your professors, they will often recommend you for jobs once you graduate. I struggled for year living paycheck to paycheck. I'm now out of that hole. I've also had friends that started side hobbies that took off and made them more money than their regular jobs...like the accountant I knew that took bulk Legos and combined them into sets for collectors and clients that participated in competitions. She did so well, she hired her son to help and he earned enough to pay for college outright.
He says people are now "...working just for survival...", but he doesn't mean "people", because the vast majority of the world's people work just for survival and have since work was invented... he means "middle-class people are now working just for survival". Anyone who has ever been able to take survival for granted and just work to attain personal goals is incredibly fortunate, and if that was taken as the norm for a while... we didn't appreciate how lucky we were.
The U.S. us the wealthiest, most powerful nation. American citizens shouldn't be struggling when billionaires can afford to have a space race.
Absolutely! The erosion of middle-class lifestyles might be easier to bear if it was done in the interest of equalizing incomes and privileges... but the opposite is happening.
It is powerful only because have been trained to consume stuff they don't need and the resulting budget goes to the military. In practice, it's a modern poor country for most. I'm in the EU right now and I ain't coming back
This comment is hidden. Click here to view.
Elon Musk's space race isn't a vanity project. It's a profitable enterprise with huge growth potential doing what the government used to have to charge taxpayers more to do.
A growth market for who exactly? No ordinary person will *ever* be able to afford his ridiculous space jaunts. As far as I'm concerned anyone who can afford it should get a one-way ticket - just fire them all off the planet and ve done with the whole rotten lot of the,.
A growth market for humanity. Look at what came out of the last great space race across the spectrum of products and services. Everything technology driven we have today was either invented, made better or made possible because of the last space race and the technological knowledge that was held primarily by the government made its way into the civilian world. There's so much more to be learned but you and your ilk would be far happier for knowledge to regress and humanity to remain stagnant as long as you could get your equal $610 share of Jeff Bezos' fortune. Yes, that's all you'd get if he was forced to disperse his fortune equally to all U.S. citizens. Even if you expanded this to the top 5 wealthiest in the U.S. ($800 billion) you'd still only get $2,500 as an equal share. That would surely set you up for life, wouldn't it?
This is idiotic. Bezos can't even pay and treat his employees right. He doesn't deserve the money he has simply because the ppl who bust ass for him to have it are denied fair share of it.
The government still charges taxpayers for this. They hire contractors for space work: Elon Musk is a government contractor.
Historical "working class" people had a much better quality of life than people think. It is propaganda that tells us that "things used to be worse". The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant
I'd like to offer an observation that I find interesting. I come from a poor southeast Asian country. Very big economic inequality, many policies ripping off the poor and middle class alike, welfare almost non-existent, and employers are free to exploit as they please. However, life in my small home town somehow remains far from that extreme. People wake up, spend like 30mins - 1 hour on coffee and breakfast, go to work, go home at lunch time to cook and eat and probably nap, come back to work, get off work at 5pm, pick up the kids, go home to cook and eat dinner or conveniently go to an affordable restaurant, then watch some TV or read a book or meet some friends before retreating to bed. A working class (except the ones in extreme poverty who are still a minority) or lower middle class person or family can live like this. Some have left for the American dream and swiftly came back because even though the dollars are a fortune when sent home, they just couldn't bear the pressure in the US. More and more people are realizing that despite everything, working just for survival is way too miserable compared to the humble life in my hometown. Large cities are a completely different story though.
I agree that a simple life is healthier for humans than the high-pressure "rat race", but there's a reason it's becoming harder to find... the capitalist system is against it. People who live simple, independent, balance lives neither generate profit, nor spend enough to generate profit for others. I've heard of corporations going to the developing world with the stated intent of getting people off the farm, where they're their own masters, and making them into factory wage slaves, because they can't be having with people not being not being part of the corporate hierarchy.
What really really makes me furious is hearing wealthy people calling the poor lazy. I've seen how others are struggling. How can you sit by your pool in your beautiful garden, sip way too expensive booze knowing that you will be on your yacht tomorrow and actually think that others slaving away to make aaaaaall of this possible are lazy? Shame on you.
Yes I agree. Also the rich would never see them selves working at McDonald's or Walmart or any other job in service
While sipping the booze also declare "I don't buy 4$ coffee! I save and invest!"
I hate to have to agree with you, but not doing so would be dishonest to a degree making me physically sick. It's worse enough in europe these days ... but I wouldn't even wanna be better off then I am now in the US! "The american dream is called so because ... you have to be asleep to believe it!" (George Carlin). He was right about this, and I bet he hated being so.
I recently read that an astonishing proportion of CEOs are on anti-depressants. Think of what's really going on: their bodies are telling them their work habits are unnatural, and they are jamming pennies in the fuse boxes to keep going. Survival means the working class isn't driven by anti-depressants (even if they need them too for various reasons -- I don't mean to join in the chorus of idiots who think attack anti-depressant usage).
I think honestly, at least in western countries that have affordable prescriptions (ie so poor can have them too), that some huge amount of us, rich and poor, are on antidepressants. And I'm not knocking them either, in my case I take them permanently to correctly a genetic problem. But I'm more meaning the way life has changed, and this feeling of never being able to attain each countries version of 'the American dream', is driving our population into depression at a high rate. Not to mention the impending damage coming from the global temperature rise that has yet to be dealt with, as we cantbguarantee we can stop it reaching a 2 degree increase (catastrophic), and we are already ensured a 1.something increase as a minimum. Sorry for the tangent lol
I worked in a pharmacy on Vashon Island in the 00’s. Some of the big names of Seattle’s tech giants sent their assistants for their stress-related prescriptions. If one was vindictive, it would have been satisfying. (I am; it was)
hang on .... tell me sofacushionfort. TELL
They call the poor lazy while they sip wine on their boast and planes...playing rounds of golf and going on 4 week vacations to exotic places never worried about whether or not they will have a job to come back to. Gee...guess those poor people that are putting up with all the Karen's and getting spat on by anti-maskers just have it too damn good. (Sarcasm)
Carol, it's frustrating. You ok?
Fine..I just get pissed when I'm seeing essential workers being treated like crap by the privileged A**holes of this country. I call them out on it and throw their pettiness right back at them. But I can't help think of how many of these workers have no choice but to be in these sh*tty jobs putting up with the Kens and the Karens of the world.
I'm sending you a hug anyway.
Thank you, Caro Caro! Right back at ya!
I work in customer service and discovered having a car was too expensive. I could only afford use, but they constantly needed repairs. We are constantly saying we are going to move out of rough neighborhood, buy it always ends up being next year...Working 40 hours leaves me with no sense of personal fulfillment.
I agree with you. Without hope of a better future the present is not good.
Kai your story is sadly all too common. I don’t understand this humanity that keeps humans down and values wealth over people, animals, and the planet. I hope you find a way to personal fulfilment - have you considered some online qualifications?
You only work 40 hours a week? That's your problem right there, prole. Get back to work and work 2 jobs you pleb. /s
My top number is working 4 jobs at the same time lol. One a full time salary, the rest part time ‘survival money’
Hey Kai, I feel you. I worked customer service and it sucks and the pay is horrible. I might suggest taking classes at a community college. You can go part time, take all your classes online and get help in paying for it. It's cheaper than Universities and, if you get on a good rapport with your professors, they will often recommend you for jobs once you graduate. I struggled for year living paycheck to paycheck. I'm now out of that hole. I've also had friends that started side hobbies that took off and made them more money than their regular jobs...like the accountant I knew that took bulk Legos and combined them into sets for collectors and clients that participated in competitions. She did so well, she hired her son to help and he earned enough to pay for college outright.
He says people are now "...working just for survival...", but he doesn't mean "people", because the vast majority of the world's people work just for survival and have since work was invented... he means "middle-class people are now working just for survival". Anyone who has ever been able to take survival for granted and just work to attain personal goals is incredibly fortunate, and if that was taken as the norm for a while... we didn't appreciate how lucky we were.
The U.S. us the wealthiest, most powerful nation. American citizens shouldn't be struggling when billionaires can afford to have a space race.
Absolutely! The erosion of middle-class lifestyles might be easier to bear if it was done in the interest of equalizing incomes and privileges... but the opposite is happening.
It is powerful only because have been trained to consume stuff they don't need and the resulting budget goes to the military. In practice, it's a modern poor country for most. I'm in the EU right now and I ain't coming back
This comment is hidden. Click here to view.
Elon Musk's space race isn't a vanity project. It's a profitable enterprise with huge growth potential doing what the government used to have to charge taxpayers more to do.
A growth market for who exactly? No ordinary person will *ever* be able to afford his ridiculous space jaunts. As far as I'm concerned anyone who can afford it should get a one-way ticket - just fire them all off the planet and ve done with the whole rotten lot of the,.
A growth market for humanity. Look at what came out of the last great space race across the spectrum of products and services. Everything technology driven we have today was either invented, made better or made possible because of the last space race and the technological knowledge that was held primarily by the government made its way into the civilian world. There's so much more to be learned but you and your ilk would be far happier for knowledge to regress and humanity to remain stagnant as long as you could get your equal $610 share of Jeff Bezos' fortune. Yes, that's all you'd get if he was forced to disperse his fortune equally to all U.S. citizens. Even if you expanded this to the top 5 wealthiest in the U.S. ($800 billion) you'd still only get $2,500 as an equal share. That would surely set you up for life, wouldn't it?
This is idiotic. Bezos can't even pay and treat his employees right. He doesn't deserve the money he has simply because the ppl who bust ass for him to have it are denied fair share of it.
The government still charges taxpayers for this. They hire contractors for space work: Elon Musk is a government contractor.
Historical "working class" people had a much better quality of life than people think. It is propaganda that tells us that "things used to be worse". The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant
I'd like to offer an observation that I find interesting. I come from a poor southeast Asian country. Very big economic inequality, many policies ripping off the poor and middle class alike, welfare almost non-existent, and employers are free to exploit as they please. However, life in my small home town somehow remains far from that extreme. People wake up, spend like 30mins - 1 hour on coffee and breakfast, go to work, go home at lunch time to cook and eat and probably nap, come back to work, get off work at 5pm, pick up the kids, go home to cook and eat dinner or conveniently go to an affordable restaurant, then watch some TV or read a book or meet some friends before retreating to bed. A working class (except the ones in extreme poverty who are still a minority) or lower middle class person or family can live like this. Some have left for the American dream and swiftly came back because even though the dollars are a fortune when sent home, they just couldn't bear the pressure in the US. More and more people are realizing that despite everything, working just for survival is way too miserable compared to the humble life in my hometown. Large cities are a completely different story though.
I agree that a simple life is healthier for humans than the high-pressure "rat race", but there's a reason it's becoming harder to find... the capitalist system is against it. People who live simple, independent, balance lives neither generate profit, nor spend enough to generate profit for others. I've heard of corporations going to the developing world with the stated intent of getting people off the farm, where they're their own masters, and making them into factory wage slaves, because they can't be having with people not being not being part of the corporate hierarchy.