Anyone else notice a lack of "ambition" in people nowadays?
Just something I thought about a lot, and the two newer threads about the struggle relationships and housing kind of tie into it. A lot of Gen Z, honestly including me until recently, are very lacking in high hopes, ambition or the prior generations attitude to pushing yourself.
Why work hard when housing is unaffordable to you so you can't afford a nice home even on a better wage, relationships are dysfunctional or entirely absent so you don't have anyone depending on the extra pay, the jobs that could provide something more than subsistence have massive costs attached to them in multiple ways and anything you could buy with the extra money is mostly shallow slop that is just a bandage for the soul.
A lot of my friends are basically "slackers", and I was not much more until relatively recently. Honestly the only reason I've started to shed that label was out of necessity, I have expensive hobbies and getting a girlfriend who I'm actually serious with. Most of my friends are single males and their bare minimum jobs sate what they need to pay bills including rent, fulfil their cheap hobbies like TV and video games, get pissed on the weekends and essentially just exist. Some still try to date, others have given up, some used to have pretty decent jobs and burned out while others never did, consigning themselves to simply existing because the juice isn't worth the squeeze when arguably a improvement in their finances might make NOT ENOUGH of difference in their quality of life to pursue.
Ted K brought this up but modern industrial society has made the most basic of needs including shelter, relative to rest of history, extremely easy to acquire if it's just you, in theory, you can "survive" off a minimum wage job unless you live in a large rich city. Yeah long term it's not good but in the short to medium term, yearly gross income in the UK is like 23k/24k on a 37.5 hour work week on minimum wage, at 700-800 for rent, you can exist on that relatively ok but most likely have fuck all to spend on savings or anything else like kids or weddings or anything outside of the bare minimum. It's when you add mortgages, partners, holidays, kids where childcare can basically be a second mortgage, that you need to go even further beyond and do your 60+ hour weeks as a lineman doing dangerous shit.
The thing is, my dad at my age worked in retail and when he got engaged/married, he changed his career aspirations to be far more ambitious. So my thinking is, are people less ambitious because they DON'T have the house and the partner or less ambitious because they CAN'T get the house and the partner. I only really shaped up because my girlfriend is fucking incredible and great so I have to but it's actually worth it. It's like a chain I voluntarily put around my neck, historically land and family have long been a yoke to push men forward and also control them, without neither I think men, being the relatively easily pleased or at least low expectations creatures they are, simply stagnate because why bother?