OK, so say this year, every teen starts doing this 120 work/study week in the US. In 6 years, everyone coming out of school at 25 now has this suicidal, self-destructive work ethic. What will we find? I'll tell you. We'll find that the job market is still fucked.

You might be young, but you bit into the old man propaganda. It's been decades since feasible career opportunities outnumbered the applicants. The market is flooded with overqualified candidates desperate for work and taking jobs with minimal growth opportunity. No, don't tell me working the register at McDonald's is an opportunity. The ratio of minimum wage entry level jobs is vastly disproportionate to the "growth" available in management. 40 burger flippers to 1 manager, over the time of their tenure, means the ladder is not stable for the majority of people. It's not a ladder at all, the manager climbed a body pile.

Go to any place claiming teens don't want to work anymore. They're still in business, right? Because they have a workforce? Who's working? A wide range of adults. Surely, they're not taking a paycut to charitably keep McDonald's in business. So then why are middle aged adults working entry jobs? I said it before: the job market is fucked. Asking why there's fewer teens is the wrong question. Instead, ask why there's apparently enough later adults ready to work these jobs. They're not getting paid any better to do it.

So why is it fucked? Because America wasn't super naturally great in the 1950s, it just had explosive industrial success because it was the only industrialized nation that wasn't bombed in WWII. It filled the global void of production. Within 20 years, the other countries rebuilt their industries and retook their global market share. Germany, England, USSR, Japan - it's no coincidence that the industrial giants were the ones with the production power to cause world-scale destruction in the first place. Sounds fine, that should just slow the US growth, not stop or reverse it. But the world didn't stop there. Less-industrialized nations picked up production. The industrial giants outsourced to the cheap labor and looser regulations. China, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, etc. Look at the latest ramp-up of import tariffs. Americans are paying more and more to the US government to import foreign steel and it STILL is cheaper than anything domestic.

"Nobody wants to work anymore" Bullshit. Nobody ever wanted to work. We work because we have to. If we didn't have to, we'd find more exciting puzzles to solve for fun, not be a corporate slave boosting earnings for C-level executives.

Good lordy loo that's sad