Gen X got hit by all this as well, but not nearly as badly as Gen Z. In the 90's, when Gen X was entering the workforce, governments were preferentially hiring minorities and women. I have a friend who wanted to be a cop, but he couldn't get admitted because they weren't hiring white men at the time. He eventually ended up in other aspects of enforcement, but not what he wanted. I can think of many people in my generation that have similar stories.
But it's definitely worse today.
The lack of economic opportunity is another parallel for Gen X. In the early 90's, corporate america was in downsizing and cost cutting mode. There was a period of time where university graduates had a hard time finding jobs after university. The term Gen X comes from a novel written by Douglas Copeland called Gen X. I know lots of people in my generation who didn't find their first 'career' job until their mid 30's.
The life solution that many took was to work very hard once you finally got your foot in the door. When those people finally got the jobs they wanted, they tended to do very well because they were motivated. That's one tool for Gen Z, which I can appreciate is hard to accept because work culture is more cynical towards the employer.
Another trend with Gen X was to go out on their own and start businesses. Gen X was a historically entrepreneurial generation. I think Gen Z will follow that route as well.
I think being mobile and going to where you are treated best is a good idea. However, I would modify that advice to be go to where you are going to do best. Moving to Thailand to live off $1,500 a month isn't necessarily better than moving to a better place within America. Most people want to live in a small number of expensive cities. Fewer people are willing to grow roots in secondary cities or rural areas. While salaries might be lower in those areas, disposal income can end up being higher.
I'd define it more as doing what's best for you (like Rule Zero). For most people, that's probably financial, but for many it's something else and non-financial.
I hope that we see the creation of more parallel systems and alternative institutions. Crypto is one success story, but more are needed. The Hippies tried to 'drop out' in the 60's, but it was largely a larp and a failure because there was nowhere else for them to land, other than traditional society. I think the free flow of information and easy travel is now a game changer though. Guys like Aaron Clarey and Rian have shown that you can 'drop out' of traditional society and be successful.
Makes sense. I was flat out told in the military they were promoting women ahead of me to meet command quotas. On Twitter I'm being fed with a ton of people with stories like yours.
At first my PO2 told me during the merit boards. Then we brough in a consultancy contractor to film a commercial meant to hire more women and minorities. My combat officer wanted me to do a log of the filming because I was ‘a minority and well spoken’ along with my other PO2 (every department has 2) who was an east Indian woman that was hated across the fleet.
After I left, they used MeToo to gut the top levels of command. Admiral Norman was a high profile case. Another admiral was removed from service because he got drunk and mooned a woman… in 1996 at ROTC. There are only 10 - 15% women in the forces so they pushed whichever ones they could. They eventually made our top general a woman who is on record for abandoning her post in Afghanistan while under fire. She embarrassed us in front of the Americans.
Normally, embarrassing the service is a chargeable offense, but she was instead promoted.
I’m not sure about what you mean for the breaking down stuff, I just know it was open and obvious and I get stories back everytime I talk to friends who are still in.
Trudeau and his cabinet were really zealots with this stuff, so it’s a more extreme exzample
This was a really good read. RP awareness has drifted so far from where we were 10 years ago; it’s become almost commercialized, watered down, misrepresented, and misguided. My hope is that the 20-30 year old guys can stumble into the wisdom of what you just wrote, and iterate until something stabilizes on top of the foundation that you and others built.
My plan is moving companies. Searching for small companies. Try to be in charge of hiring, Create unwelcoming conditions. Like a rusty gym without many machines (for legs). All implicit. And never fight DEI for to long. I retreat. Its just a job not my hill to die on. There are multiple niches for competency as contractor and freelancer.
But its successful but stressfull. I am there for the money.
"We aren’t hardwired for that, we are hardwired for female deification, not vilification."
I would just point out slut-shaming is still a complaint feminists make, so we definitely used to criticize women a lot more. (Ironically I'm actually pretty chill with loose women, it's the HR Karens I resent.) This is software not hardware, and software can be rebooted. It's not that easy, but it can be done.
Still, overall a powerful piece. Networking is definitely the first step.
Point of order. Point of order. I just talked to my grandpaw. He liked Jacob Stone's article a lot, except it missed the beginning of the cultural trend by a couple of decades. G'paw said the feminization of culture was lingering in the background in the 1970s, when the most progressive of American cultural institutions were already undergoing reeducation.
Of course G'paw was talking about his own experience. He is in his 80s now, so he was trained in the zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies, breaking in to the journalism business just as it was becoming an attractive outlet. His mentors were reporters from the 30s and 40s, war correspondents and press room denizens of Front Page and His Girl Friday. Young women were catching on in newspapering and while they were hampered to some extent, they became adept at newsroom and cultural politics. Bra burning and forceful female behavior became newsworthy, like black civil rights and other societal changes.
Gramps was trained up in the grand old tradition of cops and robbers reporting. He loved the action, untainted as it was by counterculture and criminology. Top-flight cops and inventive crooks were fascinating.
And there was still plenty of room for the stories in the papers of the day. But just as he was hitting his stride on the staff of one of the biggest papers on the West Coast, that paper decided it had to reinvent itself as a new, progressive voice in order to obtain a proper place in the newspaper world. Suddenly, Gramps began having trouble getting display for what had once been banner-headline crime stories. Two other reporters, both in or near middle age, experienced the same problem. The trend of the new century -- Defund the Cops and promote the crooks -- was being born. Gramps was a slow learner; the executive editor of the paper took him aside and tried to inform him that top-shelf, socially costly organized and aggressive crime stories were no longer welcome. The Mob was a figment; so were career criminals, politically connected ethnic minority felons and most other interesting crooks.
Gramps got squeezed into spaces on the back pages, back with the truss ads and legal notices. The writing was on the wall, not on the front page. With a family to feed he tried to pull in his horns, hide from the Grim Reaper who was clearing the staff of Silent Generation writers whose work was considered old-fashioned, racist or worse. Finally, he executed an exit strategy and, with his wife, went freelance. Luckily, her planet was just rising. Together, they fashioned a joint career that proved vastly more rewarding and profitable than any of the other newsroom denizens who were old and in the way. Today, the scar that was left by being shoved aside by the new and enlightened generation still itches from time to time. But he is far more happy; the only thing he regrets was his timing. He left before the paper began thinning the newsroom ranks with "buy-outs." Had he held on five more years, he could have taken a golden handshake in six figures.
What he does have to salve the scars is a regular monthly profit-sharing check that he qualified for just before leaving the paper. So every first-day-of-the-month, he pockets $800.43. It buys less than it used to but it is symbolic of Gramp's good luck and great timing.
Oh, and the other two old-fashioned reporters whose careers began to shut down in about 1980. Well, both of them tried to hang too long...and both of them died of stress-related heart attacks before the buy-out era began.
The trends that Jacob Savage describes are tied to the institutions vulnerable to lagging social trends. As long as you try to stay within the velvet coffin of a powerful institution, you will have to either change or become road-kill, as Gram is fond of saying. And as I look at them now, they beat the game...but only by leaving the institution behind and seeking their own way. No guarantee that they made it big, but staying in the institution's grasp was guarantee that sooner or later they would have gotten run over.
Gen X got hit by all this as well, but not nearly as badly as Gen Z. In the 90's, when Gen X was entering the workforce, governments were preferentially hiring minorities and women. I have a friend who wanted to be a cop, but he couldn't get admitted because they weren't hiring white men at the time. He eventually ended up in other aspects of enforcement, but not what he wanted. I can think of many people in my generation that have similar stories.
But it's definitely worse today.
The lack of economic opportunity is another parallel for Gen X. In the early 90's, corporate america was in downsizing and cost cutting mode. There was a period of time where university graduates had a hard time finding jobs after university. The term Gen X comes from a novel written by Douglas Copeland called Gen X. I know lots of people in my generation who didn't find their first 'career' job until their mid 30's.
The life solution that many took was to work very hard once you finally got your foot in the door. When those people finally got the jobs they wanted, they tended to do very well because they were motivated. That's one tool for Gen Z, which I can appreciate is hard to accept because work culture is more cynical towards the employer.
Another trend with Gen X was to go out on their own and start businesses. Gen X was a historically entrepreneurial generation. I think Gen Z will follow that route as well.
I think being mobile and going to where you are treated best is a good idea. However, I would modify that advice to be go to where you are going to do best. Moving to Thailand to live off $1,500 a month isn't necessarily better than moving to a better place within America. Most people want to live in a small number of expensive cities. Fewer people are willing to grow roots in secondary cities or rural areas. While salaries might be lower in those areas, disposal income can end up being higher.
I assumed the ‘treated best’ meant from a tax position
I'd define it more as doing what's best for you (like Rule Zero). For most people, that's probably financial, but for many it's something else and non-financial.
I hope that we see the creation of more parallel systems and alternative institutions. Crypto is one success story, but more are needed. The Hippies tried to 'drop out' in the 60's, but it was largely a larp and a failure because there was nowhere else for them to land, other than traditional society. I think the free flow of information and easy travel is now a game changer though. Guys like Aaron Clarey and Rian have shown that you can 'drop out' of traditional society and be successful.
Makes sense. I was flat out told in the military they were promoting women ahead of me to meet command quotas. On Twitter I'm being fed with a ton of people with stories like yours.
At first my PO2 told me during the merit boards. Then we brough in a consultancy contractor to film a commercial meant to hire more women and minorities. My combat officer wanted me to do a log of the filming because I was ‘a minority and well spoken’ along with my other PO2 (every department has 2) who was an east Indian woman that was hated across the fleet.
After I left, they used MeToo to gut the top levels of command. Admiral Norman was a high profile case. Another admiral was removed from service because he got drunk and mooned a woman… in 1996 at ROTC. There are only 10 - 15% women in the forces so they pushed whichever ones they could. They eventually made our top general a woman who is on record for abandoning her post in Afghanistan while under fire. She embarrassed us in front of the Americans.
Normally, embarrassing the service is a chargeable offense, but she was instead promoted.
I’m not sure about what you mean for the breaking down stuff, I just know it was open and obvious and I get stories back everytime I talk to friends who are still in.
Trudeau and his cabinet were really zealots with this stuff, so it’s a more extreme exzample
This was a really good read. RP awareness has drifted so far from where we were 10 years ago; it’s become almost commercialized, watered down, misrepresented, and misguided. My hope is that the 20-30 year old guys can stumble into the wisdom of what you just wrote, and iterate until something stabilizes on top of the foundation that you and others built.
My plan is moving companies. Searching for small companies. Try to be in charge of hiring, Create unwelcoming conditions. Like a rusty gym without many machines (for legs). All implicit. And never fight DEI for to long. I retreat. Its just a job not my hill to die on. There are multiple niches for competency as contractor and freelancer.
But its successful but stressfull. I am there for the money.
"We aren’t hardwired for that, we are hardwired for female deification, not vilification."
I would just point out slut-shaming is still a complaint feminists make, so we definitely used to criticize women a lot more. (Ironically I'm actually pretty chill with loose women, it's the HR Karens I resent.) This is software not hardware, and software can be rebooted. It's not that easy, but it can be done.
Still, overall a powerful piece. Networking is definitely the first step.
Point of order. Point of order. I just talked to my grandpaw. He liked Jacob Stone's article a lot, except it missed the beginning of the cultural trend by a couple of decades. G'paw said the feminization of culture was lingering in the background in the 1970s, when the most progressive of American cultural institutions were already undergoing reeducation.
Of course G'paw was talking about his own experience. He is in his 80s now, so he was trained in the zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies, breaking in to the journalism business just as it was becoming an attractive outlet. His mentors were reporters from the 30s and 40s, war correspondents and press room denizens of Front Page and His Girl Friday. Young women were catching on in newspapering and while they were hampered to some extent, they became adept at newsroom and cultural politics. Bra burning and forceful female behavior became newsworthy, like black civil rights and other societal changes.
Gramps was trained up in the grand old tradition of cops and robbers reporting. He loved the action, untainted as it was by counterculture and criminology. Top-flight cops and inventive crooks were fascinating.
And there was still plenty of room for the stories in the papers of the day. But just as he was hitting his stride on the staff of one of the biggest papers on the West Coast, that paper decided it had to reinvent itself as a new, progressive voice in order to obtain a proper place in the newspaper world. Suddenly, Gramps began having trouble getting display for what had once been banner-headline crime stories. Two other reporters, both in or near middle age, experienced the same problem. The trend of the new century -- Defund the Cops and promote the crooks -- was being born. Gramps was a slow learner; the executive editor of the paper took him aside and tried to inform him that top-shelf, socially costly organized and aggressive crime stories were no longer welcome. The Mob was a figment; so were career criminals, politically connected ethnic minority felons and most other interesting crooks.
Gramps got squeezed into spaces on the back pages, back with the truss ads and legal notices. The writing was on the wall, not on the front page. With a family to feed he tried to pull in his horns, hide from the Grim Reaper who was clearing the staff of Silent Generation writers whose work was considered old-fashioned, racist or worse. Finally, he executed an exit strategy and, with his wife, went freelance. Luckily, her planet was just rising. Together, they fashioned a joint career that proved vastly more rewarding and profitable than any of the other newsroom denizens who were old and in the way. Today, the scar that was left by being shoved aside by the new and enlightened generation still itches from time to time. But he is far more happy; the only thing he regrets was his timing. He left before the paper began thinning the newsroom ranks with "buy-outs." Had he held on five more years, he could have taken a golden handshake in six figures.
What he does have to salve the scars is a regular monthly profit-sharing check that he qualified for just before leaving the paper. So every first-day-of-the-month, he pockets $800.43. It buys less than it used to but it is symbolic of Gramp's good luck and great timing.
Oh, and the other two old-fashioned reporters whose careers began to shut down in about 1980. Well, both of them tried to hang too long...and both of them died of stress-related heart attacks before the buy-out era began.
The trends that Jacob Savage describes are tied to the institutions vulnerable to lagging social trends. As long as you try to stay within the velvet coffin of a powerful institution, you will have to either change or become road-kill, as Gram is fond of saying. And as I look at them now, they beat the game...but only by leaving the institution behind and seeking their own way. No guarantee that they made it big, but staying in the institution's grasp was guarantee that sooner or later they would have gotten run over.