This may not belong here, so please remove if not allowed. It was inspired by another post. Also, sorry for the length.
Of course no one wants to work. And that's why I love this sub. It's honest about that fact. Since not every member of society knows how (or is able) to perform every task we take for granted in our society, we work to earn money to pay someone else to do them for us. I promise I'm making a point here.
My dad is one of those people who says “nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK”. He's in his mid-60s, has worked pretty much all his life, including several years of military service, and was able to retire early. He now owns and operates a small home renovation business, which he uses as his own personal tax shelter at every opportunity, writing off non-business expenses if there's any half-assed way at all he can connect them to his business. I'm sure it will catch up to him someday, but that's another story for another time.
He lives in a small rural town, where most of the high schoolers and young adults are already busy either helping with the family farm, other family business, or doing everything they can to escape and/or find work in something other than manual labor. And they're not looking to hang around, helping some old codger fix up other people's homes. So naturally, he struggles to find what he considers “good help”. He has somehow warped this in his mind to mean that pretty much everyone 30 and under just doesn't want to work at all, since those in his immediate vicinity aren't interested in working for him.
When I started college 20 years ago, he told me it would “guarantee a good paying job/career”, and my parents were unable to support me financially. So I was busting my hump, working and going to school, and still needing to take out student loans, just to survive and graduate. Employers were not interested in me because I did not have any “relevant experience” (specifically in the form of unpaid internships). I did not have the time to waste to work a job for which I was not being paid. This pretty much ruled out any career in my chosen field in my immediate area, and the only company remotely interested in me outside of my area did not provide relocation assistance. I was essentially broke, and stuck in a rut.
He just couldn't understand why I wasn't getting a better job, and insisted I just “wasn't working hard enough” to find one. He began suggesting as far back as when I was still in HS that the military would benefit me like it did him, but I resisted because I was completely uninterested. We fought about it as if the military was a real-life plate of green eggs and ham and I was Sam-I-Am. I did eventually join out of desperation, and served one enlistment before truly (by his definition) deciding it wasn't for me. He still thinks six years wasn't long enough to form an opinion.
I moved back home and found a job utilizing skills I learned in the service, as the old man had said would happen, but he was less than pleased with the pay I earned from it. To get that job, I filled out countless applications (most of which went unanswered), was invited to interview with a fraction of the companies to which I applied, and finally, one wanted to hire me. Yet, somehow, my employer not paying more was not the employer's fault, but mine for “not finding something better”.
He's been against any push to increase the minimum wage for as long as I can remember, he still constantly complains about inflation and foreign outsourcing, and is a rather staunch supporter of the Orange One. His failure to see that I'm not the only person's child who isn't “doing better for themself” because of corporate and political indifference and/or greed, and that the decline of American motivation to work is directly tied to it should surprise me, but it doesn't.
Honestly, I scares me. People his age are still in prominent corporate and political positions, but there are young up-and-comers pushing their way in who recognize that the world now is not what it was when the older generations “were our age”, and that what they and their parents did to the country are what's making life so difficult for their descendants. They wanted to “make the world better” for their kids, but ended up only looking out for their own interests while doing so. While I don't wish for his death, I do hope for the death of the harmful and toxic ideologies to which he subscribes.