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I’ve often wondered if our current culture is so regimented that kids don’t take risks at all as they fear that messing up is going to alter their life trajectory too much to be safe. They hear parents and older siblings talk about, or worse live out the consequences of one bad decision made in the moment. Maybe sex and you either get the girl pregnant or get accused of rape afterwards — there goes the hope of being comfortably middle class in adulthood. Or drinking. A car accident, saying the wrong things, maybe partying and possibly not doing well enough on your grades to get into the right school. It’s almost, just looking at the trends like kids have a sense that being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
To me this sounds a bit backwards. Much of the working class has it better than ever and their skills are increasingly in demand and paid better and better.
It's the lower rung of office workers (and some service workers) that have precarious situations and are struggling to keep up.
If you're actually ready to work in the industry, construction or in a trade things are really good. Farming seems like a pretty raw deal though, I agree.
Most farmers today have a ton of assets. Even if liquid cash isn't always easily available. Simply owning enough land to make the irrigation, crop storage, and harvesters worth it is a multi million dollar endeavor. In bad years they have to leverage those assets with the bank for loans. In good years they pay back those loans, or expand the land/equipment they own.
If we are talking about "farmers" as in farmhands, the people that just work at a farm. Then yeah they have a raw deal. Its difficult physical labor for minimal wages.
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Growing up in an upper-middle class family, childhood was basically presented as a straight line passing through a set of exams and good schools to a good degree at a good university and then finally to a magical world where I would ‘meet interesting people’ and be able to do worthwhile things. My parents weren’t strict or particularly regimented but they clearly, genuinely believed that significant slip-up at any step along that path would doom me to mediocrity or poverty. Looking at how some of the other children I knew ended up, they weren’t wrong.
This was a while back. I can’t imagine how much stress my zoomber counterparts are under.
I have this sense as an adult. But the only way to find out if it’s true is to try, and what if you turn out to be right?
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