TL;DR – There's evidence that we're experiencing a collective social and economic enlightenment but the current state of corporate capitalism is incompatible with the direction we're heading.
Since we're all living within the system itself, capitalism can't afford to acknowledge that things are changing and people have a new appreciation for their self worth. After being disrupted and distracted, we're starting to circle back to the 99% solidarity and that's really not a good thing for the system itself. It will bend over backwards to divide that solidarity, redirect it away from capitalism (or at least concessions to the population), or reframe it. (as we've seen with the many nonsense articles lately)
It's kind of like you're not going to hear from cable television that the number of people watching television continues to drop. Announcing it would only give the movement momentum and destroy ad value, so they'll continue on as though it's still the good ol' days of TV watching.
We seem to be spurred on toward a social/economic enlightenment (in the US) by a few things:
- A minimum wage far below cost of living.
- Cost of housing rising out of control and beyond reach.
- Cost of rent/living rising out of control and beyond reach.
- A little over a decade since the 2008 recession told us all to tighten our belts, but the profits at the top bloomed as an unintended result and those “belts” never un-tightened for everyone else.
- A pandemic that revealed the US government is not actually designed to help you, and it also really doesn't have the interest.
- A now transparent “grind culture” movement embraced by corporations to squeeze quarterly growth out of the underpaid enthusiastic masses.
- Our collective experience with remote working revealing that for many jobs forcing people back to the office was more about maintaining a system of hierarchy and power than it was the productivity of the work itself.
At least here in this subreddit, we're starting to read headlines of “no one wants to work any more” as a red flag meaning “for the amount we're willing to pay them.” There's a true systemic shift away from the ideals that will generate quarterly growth to appease the investors, and towards individuals just wanting to be able to live a life in peace (by at least being paid enough) without being ground to dust in the meantime. Having progressively squeezed everything out of the population, even the smallest pay raise affects the bottom line.
And there's the social aspect of it, too. The massive civil rights shift has begun threatening the traditional hierarchy of social dynamics in our country as well. But the core element that ties both movements together is that every individual person has value – more value than they've been afforded. That shift unfortunately doesn't mesh well with our social and economic structures.
Sorry for the rant, but I figured you guys would get it and I wanted to say it out loud. We're in the middle of something big and special and we're being told it doesn't exist and it's a bad thing. Keep on keeping on. You're not lazy and you're not crazy.