In March 2021, an online journal, 20 Something FINANCE (https://20somethingfinance.com/millennials-hate-jobs/), reported that while Americans hate their jobs in general, millennials, in particular, hate their jobs far more than the average American employee. They display little to no job loyalty. Job hoppers are what they are, meaning they go from one job to another due to discontent with pay, job specifications or due to boredom. The article suggested that while it is normal, initially, to move around in the job market, looking for that perfect niche, especially after graduating from college, something deeper might be going on with this hoping trend.
In other words, millennials may want to look a little deeper, internally, to uncover the source of their employment angst. It’s not a problem, of course, with jobs, working and earning. The word is, according to 20 Something FINANCE, the problem lies within these job market newcomers.
Afterall, working and earning is entrenched in our collective consciousness. Anyone not an avid champion of job culture, of workplace-engagement, anyone who is not loyal to her employer, not a true believer in stable work or devoted to a professional career (a.k.a. a high-end stable job, requiring, most often, a college degree) qualifies for a few sessions of occupational therapy.
Therapy, along with bonuses, promotions, teleworking, lavish weekend employee retreats, is a solution proposed by workplace consultants and business researchers to arrest the rising tide of disengagement. The efficacy of these implemented proposals is provided by Gallup who estimates that the U.S. economy suffered a loss of 350B in productivity in 2019 due to disengagement, a very conservative estimate since HBR estimated a loss of 450B in the same year.
This frenzied drive to rescue the bottom line and sustain America’s most cherished, albeit unsustainable, institutions is fueled by a chronic resistance to the New Earth Narrative that, we all know, will uproot the old one. It is a resistance to the new story of planetary life, one prefaced by a compulsory, comprehensive, inescapable, leave no stone unturned, shift in consciousness. This is the shift that allows us to transcend the limits placed on our imagination, limits on what is possible, by the old narrative. This is the shift that allows the New Earth to emerge from a consciousness that has returned to unity and relationship with All that Is (A Course of Love).
Naturally this is all non-sensical to those of us who have a vested interest in ridding the old narrative of life support and restoring it to its previous, unquestionable, glory and authority; and this restoration is of utmost importance to the revered bottom line that requires these job-hoping millennials to get in order.
But those are bygone days. Gone are the days when we ignored the relationship between jobs in factories in Iowa that produce weapons of mass destruction and the suffering caused by the use of those weapons within and beyond our imaginary borders. We can no longer ignore the disastrous impact that the daily commute, the cars, the roads, with their incessant maintenance, has on the environment. We’re contemplating the consequences of how we have valued working and earning above creating and serving the planet and the life that it supports.
We’ve turned our gaze towards an age-old belief that places some humans, their agenda and their needs at the top of the hierarchy; the majority of humans, non-humans and the planet occupy the penultimate units in the hierarchy, existing only to work and serve those who occupy the gorged units at the top. The old tired bottom line has been allowed to consume forty to fifty years of our lives without a reciprocal enrichment of them, our communities or the communities of non-humans. We’re awakening to the predatory nature of not only the American workplace, but all rapacious institutions that were born of the old narrative.
I am not suggesting that all millennials are seeking to replace working and earning with creating and gifting. What I am implying is that millennials are job-hopping because they do sense the coming of this inevitable shift in how we live life on this planet. A few of them will settle down, eventually, in job positions in their field, the majority in alternate fields because no jobs exist in the fields of their degrees, the ones that plunged them into student debt. Most will accept a reasonable salary or hourly wage and retire in forty or fifty years.
Finally, what I will venture cautiously to predict is that the majority of them will join the swelling ranks of the disengaged. Millennials are not going to infuse any new blood into the American workplace. For those business owners and leaders, workplace consultants and researchers, who believe they will, may, themselves, benefit from a little therapy.
May 24, 2021
Video – David Greaber is the author of Bullshit Jobs, a book that I bought in order to read and review. What arrived was the German edition. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate the English edition, and after some time I simply forgot about the whole idea. But here is a video where Graeber defines 5 types of bullshit jobs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o
Articles
Speaking of millennials, this article talks of the disparities between the wealth of White-American and African American millennials. This type of inequity, based on a race, is nothing new and is characteristic of all aspects of the old narrative. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/24/999892633/the-growing-racial-divide-in-millennial-wealth
An article on the $1.57 trillion outstanding student loan debt. Of course, the pandemic didn’t help, causing 114 million people to lose their jobs. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/08/older-millennials-with-student-debt-say-their-loans-werent-worth-it.html
