The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
No wonder people become cynical.
The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.
I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.
I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.
(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)