In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.
Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
[1] Office of National Statistics via BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/p...
I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.
Just thinking about every point in my life where I ended up in "who cares?" was due to concerns outside of my control/power. When I feel I have some agency, power, and/or recognition it just naturally follows that I will care (in varying degree but I will care somehow); even if not for the larger organisation I will care about my immediate peers/team.
If I'm not paid enough, or I don't have agency, or I don't feel heard and my point is proven later (multiple times), or a superior is an asshole, so on and so forth, I naturally end up in "who cares?" after some beating.
Of course, it's all personal experience/anecdotal evidence, but in general I don't think most people just turned the "who cares?" mode on and wage stagnation followed, it seems to be much rather the opposite, you take away safety, money, agency, and any other aspect that might make a job more fulfilling and the only natural progression is people disengaging from the activity.
The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit.
But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am not joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back in my driveway? Phone.
While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone.
He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or something else not for normal garbage) during the dump. My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even look at where it was headed.
(And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life, decades of them, and yes it's worse.)
Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was 40. The other 20.
40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20 year old? Staring at phone literally every second, monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a dozen times to do basic jobs.
I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries of horror from people who have been told "if your phone is in your hand at work, you're fired".
I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted to something, how normal "I don't like work" unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix is missing!"
I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some such.
The throughline I think is that there's no consequence for being bad at one's job. Not to say I'm perfect - I am pretty sure I've been a mediocre employee before, but I've also never been sacked.
That is: I don't hold strangers to my standards or expect them to feel the same way about their work that I do about mine.
I've never been sacked for poor performance, but I have been included in mass layoffs and restructurings throughout my career, which always makes one wonder if they were secretly not meeting some metric.
However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course it's an economy still in the throws of massive transformation.
Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess it could for the few unaddicted.
Some of these issues are also safety issues. Being distracted is certainly obvious in a car, and massive fines and even criminal charges are now the result. But there are subtle things one must do in many jobs, just generically paying attention, which results in a save vs unsafe outcome. Boredom at work used to be filled with paying attention to ... work.
The garbage truck example I mentioned? I can think of a dozen safety issues. Safety for the employee, safety for someone walking by. Any accident could result in criminal charges for negligence, surely, but workplace safety rules are an issue too.
Soon, eventually, workplace safety rules will likely mandate "No phone at work, period"... at least for many professions. At least, that's how I see some of this resolving.
As for the garbage man... can you blame him? What reason does he have to maintain the appearance of vigilance? Their routes are long, getting longer with cuts, they're largely understaffed, and they deal with both the contempt of the public and their refuse.
Conditions are actively getting worse for some; the UK's second largest city has proposed cutting wages by up to £8,000 p/a due to a bureaucratic nightmare of their own making [1].
It is a thankless job with no opportunity for progression which most people would rather put out of mind completely. Frankly, they deserve better.
As a non phone user, when I go out into the world, I feel like I'm on that movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where I'm surrounded by these weird non-humans everywhere, and nobody thinks any of their behavior is odd but me.
Yea, showing transforming economies to established economies isn't really a great comparison at all. You have two huge things happening at once. A massive transfer of wealth from those 'rich' economies building new factories to use the cheap labor. This drops wages in the rich economies by shipping the jobs out. In the meantime the people in the rich economies have to move to service style jobs away from manufacturing.
In a few decades the same will happen with China as it converts to a service economy.
What activities make life worthwhile?
