Young People and Job Market Despair
There’s a popular article going around on Twitter and Substack that posits the following:
- Young people are increasingly drawn to lottery/casino-like long shot career paths;
- This is because (1) basic needs in society are now met; and
- (2) AI is coming for many hard-work-gets-you-the-suburbs jobs.
- Squeezed between these, there’s less survival drive and less hard-work drive;
- Therefore, you should be long degeneracy in the short and medium-term.
I think there’s a lot to this. In fact, on balance I think I agree with the upshot to be long degeneracy right now.
I’m less convinced about the mechanism or the intensity of the problem. At least in part.
It seems to me that some of what is going on here is supply-side and observation bias. The existence of sports betting, crypto, Substack, YouTube, and social media has created more avenues to insta-success and more visibility for both insta-success and failure at it.
If we suddenly dropped those platforms into 1995, I have no doubt they would have drawn hordes of young people my age into get-rich-quick mode as well, despite AI not existing and the US being far less along on Maslow’s hierarchy. Those dreams were reserved for Hollywood, professional sports, and rock n’ roll back then. And lots of kids went for it. And then the tech boom happened and a lot of kids went for that.
If we lower the drinking age back to 18, the bars will fill up with teenagers and it will be annoying to try to find a bar not full of teens. Some of that might be plausibly related to the despair of the modern teenager, and we could tell that story. But a lot of it will not be. The supply side matters.
Admittedly, I am not immersed in the culture of the coming-of-age Zoomers right now, and am in fact part of the class that got there just early enough to live in the old world job and career market. So I don’t pretend to have personal experience or expertise here.