'The benefits for hard work for the last two generations have evaporated': Reddit's honest reckoning with the economy
A post on Reddit’s r/jobs has talked about a deal that held for decades: put in the hours, afford a life. The post then expounded on how this unwritten rule seems to have broken down. Wages have stagnated while the cost of existing has risen sharply. The US$50 (S$64) that bought a certain standard of living in 2000 requires close to US$100 today.
A modern paycheck that barely covers rent and groceries is not a failure of ambition, but a failure of the system that was supposed to make ambition worthwhile.
“They aren’t lazy — they’re just looking at a modern paycheck and realising it barely covers rent and groceries, let alone a future,” the original poster wrote. “It’s hard to be motivated when the reward for hard work has been cut in half.”
What Reddit said
The thread extended the argument beyond Generation Z almost immediately.
“It doesn’t help that even mid-career employees like me can’t find work or face layoffs,” one netizen wrote in reply. “The benefits of hard work for the last two generations have evaporated.”
Another commenter made a point that the “younger generation doesn’t want to work” narrative ignores: “The secret is that older people don’t want to work either. Hell, the older they get, I’d argue the more they don’t want to work. They’ve seen the [expletive], and they’re not exactly thrilled with keeping on with the grind.”
One commenter talked about purchasing power as a variable that gets obscured in official inflation reporting: “Forget the reports telling you ‘inflation is only x%’ — when you go to buy something and realise the price has doubled, you start to question the narrative. Work hard and make as much money as possible is outdated advice and people are starting to realise it.”
The “younger generation doesn’t want to work” narrative has been a convenient excuse that the labour market is trying to use to avoid solving much more structural causes. When wages have not kept pace with growth for decades, when housing costs have outpaced income growth in most major cities, and when the entry-level jobs offer neither stability nor a path upward, reduced motivation is not a character flaw.
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The fact that, as seen in the comments, the sentiment cuts across generations suggests the problem is something so much more than a younger generation “who doesn’t want to work”. It has been visible to anyone who has been paying attention for long enough; it’s just that no one tried to resolve it until the problem became too big to ignore.
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