The article Good and Bad Jobs of the Future is surprisingly fatalistic, even for Scott Adams. The idea that the future will become steadily more meaningless, fruitless and desperate due to its population of ne’er-do-well adults is kind of depressing. It reminds me of the movie Office Space, where the main character blithely informs the company’s “efficiency experts” that his current job structure and resulting benefits package only motivated him to work just hard enough to not get fired. This idea definitely ties in to the article The Next 20 Years, where the author discusses how older generations tend to view their younger contemporaries as generally lazier and increasingly more morally repugnant than themselves. It seems that the Adams piece was written by some baby boomer who viewed the next generation (Xers) as the downfall of society.
A popular topic of conversation among my peers that pertains to this idea is the Army’s new crop of basic trainees. When we were leaving our units, we began to see a disturbing trend in the new privates we were receiving. Many of them were physically unacceptable (in terms of body composition and overall fitness) and, simply put, just did not act like Soldiers. When I was a platoon leader, the new privates I got were usually in better shape than my other Soldiers (who typically get “soft” after a few years on line) and were ramrod-straight in their address to me. They would shoot up to their feet at the position of attention whenever I walked by. It took a while for me to get them to relax and actually talk to me without looking terrified. Nowadays you get privates that can’t run (at all!) and talk to their Commanders like they’re their best friend. &nbs ...