I think it boils down to the whole "we learn by doing" thing that's at the heart of a lot of play. And especially for kids, imitating what you see the adults in your life do all the time holds some mystique and new-ness that makes boring tasks seem like exciting activities. To us, filing taxes and loading the washing machine are repetitive tasks we do out of necessity, but to kids, it's a "grown-up thing" to be able to do.
A good point on the luck aspect, and you reminded me of the fact that people who already have money have "better luck" in the respect that they have more opportunities to try new things.
It's like one of those carnival games where you throw darts at balloons. Middle-class kids might get one or two darts while wealthy kids get 10. And the poor kids are the ones working at the carnival.
Something like 20% of businesses fail in their first year, and 80% are gone by year 5. If you can afford to start 5 different businesses, your odds of one surviving long enough to get bought up by Google or something are much better than somebody who put their life savings into their company.
Yeah, and there's the old saying, "It's not what you know, but who you know." Even ignoring the nepotism that that can obviously be applied to, there's something major to be said about social networking and finding a good job (whether that's a new job or a promotion within a company or even changing fields entirely).
When I was in college over a decade ago, our school had a program set up with GDC (the Game Devlopers' Convention) to send 3rd year students and put them up in a hotel for the duration of the convention so that they could meet industry professionals and see what was new in the industry. And right from the first day, our professors expressed how important going to the convention and getting to know the people in your major were because they could potentially lead to you getting your next job, whether your first year out of school or decades later. And that was years before the current climate of the job sector had really taken off. Some of those guys had been making games since the 80s or 90s.
Make a good impression on someone, and they might call you about a new job opening before it's publicly posted.
In the current climate, internal promotions are a rarity. They say that you should be changing companies roughly every 3 years to ensure you're getting paid what you're worth, as pay raises don't keep up with experience. New responsibilities come quickly while promotions and pay raises come slowly. The number of times I've heard somebody say that they left a job for an immediate 10-30% (or even 50%!) pay raise and reduced responsibilities for even the same job has gotten to the point where I just expect it now.
Like everything else, it varies, but company loyalty is long dead.
Yep, worked for a small business as a teen. My experience was that the boss was decent at giving us raises every year, but got pissed when people gave us tips, never had enough people on hand to account for kids going on vacation or getting sick, and, as my buddy would say, “he’s the first person to tell you that there’s more than one way to skin a cat - but his way is the right way.” Dude couldn’t understand why kids on their summer vacation wouldn’t want to work 45 hours a week.
The 401k replaced the pension. It used to be that a company would pay for your retirement, now you pay for your own by being forced to pay into the stock market, and it doesn’t go nearly as far as the pensions used to. People are working well into their 60s or older, because 401k’s often don’t pay out enough to live on. It’s another way that companies have figured out to avoid having to pay their employees while pumping up the value of the stock market at the same time.
In my experience, small businesses can be even worse, because they’re run by the kind of middle management that everybody hates in a big company. Except now they’re the boss and have final say over everything that happens in the company.
You’re falling for that propaganda too, a little bit; as are we all. We don’t need to be productive every moment of the day - hell, studies have shown that humans are only really productive about 4 hours out of the day. If you work a 9-5 style job, 4 hours of every day is spent doing things other than being productive. So don’t feel guilty for doing things just because they make you happy. Play video games, make Warhammer models, do silly little drawings that only you will ever see, whatever makes you happy, simply because that’s what life is about: doing things that make us happy. Time spent doing that is never time wasted, and screw the people that tried to convince entire generations that we only have worth as a person if we’re being “productive.”
I just saw the other month that only like 46% of Millennials own a house, compared to the 65% average of other generations. And of those who don’t, 52% of them aren’t saving for a down payment, often because of how shitty wages and even finding a job are. On top of that, only 20% of houses are currently affordable for the average American worker, down from 60% in 2016. And people wonder why we have no faith in the system.
Gen Z saw what happened to Gen X and to us Millennials, and don’t expect it to get any better for them either.