I just need to vent. I was walking downtown a few hours ago and as I was passing a bus stop I heard this older guy (probably in his 60’s, grayish white hair in a ponytail) talking to a woman. The snippets I caught were along the lines of, “I started working when I was 9! That’s the problem, no one wants to do any work anymore! There are all these jobs out there but no one wants to work!”
I know this is just preaching to the choir, but my brain started screaming. To start with, does he really think that 9 year olds should be required/allowed to work? Does he really think he, when he was 9, CHOSE to work of his own free will, un-influenced by anyone? Then, how many mental flips do you need to do to look at everyone living below the poverty line, versus what jobs are available, and assume that all those people have the exact same problem and not that the jobs pay crap wages?
More than that, though, if this is really his worldview, what was he doing hanging out in the middle of the day? Like, no judgement in general, I’d flexed my hours to have time to hang out, but how is this guy going to talk about how he was working before he hit double digits and everyone is lazy, but he’s just hanging out downtown in the middle of the day, subjecting some woman at the bus stop to his life philosophy? What, everyone else should work until they die, but he’s too good for that?
It was absolutely infuriating. I needed to get that out.