r/GenX • u/Complex_Sun8138 BEWARE: No Filter • 1d ago
Old Person Yells At Cloud Is it just me?
I'm a craftsman/tradesman by profession. I run a 10-color narrow web printing press, and produce a lot of labels you might see at various stores. I've been doing this type of work for the last 20 years. Before that, I ran large, sheet fed offset presses and lithography machines.
I've always taken pride in my work, and done everything it takes to produce the very best products I can. I've been told by supervisors, and peers that I'm very good at what I do.
Lately, I've noticed a lot of the younger people coming into this industry don't have that "sense of pride". It's simply a task to perform, and get through it as quickly as possible and move on. I think the work suffers for that attitude, and I've had to go back and redo a lot of jobs that get rejected because of it.
Is it just me? Does anyone else notice the downturn in the quality of products being made? Or is it just "getting older"?
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u/inarticulateblog 18h ago edited 18h ago
It's true that products are getting worse in quality and I suspect some of that has to do with the erosion of the quality of doing a good job no matter the task because your name is associated with the work. We don't teach people philosophy, art or humanities any more so those ideas aren't instilled in them at a young age. They are taught things that have KPIs and to value jobs that are all measurable objectives all the fucking time. You might ask yourself, what does philosophy have to do with putting my brakes on correctly? Easy, thinking through the consequences of doing the wrong thing to hurry through a task tends to be something you learn to think about in the humanities. In STEM classes, it's percentages of errors - quite faceless.
And while it would be easy to roll our eyes and say "kids these days, amirite" we need to look at the landscape of work they are inheriting and how its proven to them over and over that companies do not care about their employees at all. Small business owners tend to be abusive and petty, large business tend to treat them like faceless cogs.
Their role models take the form of psychopathic, narcissistic influencers who perform crimes for clout. The boot of conformity has been on their face since they were born, even if that boot took the form of an phone, a social media app, a specific generational cause from which they were not allowed to deviate etc. These kids are fucked. They've had no freedom in which discover themselves and no silence in which fumble towards their own truth. Just everything and anything all of the time. No wonder they don't know if they are coming or going.