{GASP} "Nobody Wants To Work Anymore!"

How true is this narrative, anyway?

This is a relatively complicated and nuanced topic all-in, but I’ll do my best to simplify it if I can.

1. The idea of “nobody wants to work anymore” became popular among an older set of conservative white men (typically) around the time of the first $1,200 COVID payouts, which ironically were checks signed by Donald Trump. The idea is that the big bad government was paying young men to sit on their ass and watch PornHub and play video games.

2. This narrative continued to persist through “The Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting” and all the other terms we invented and wrote breathlessly about for much of the last two years.

3. Anecdotally, virtually everyone who embraces this narrative knows 1–2 recruiters or people who own a staffing company. At social events, they hear that “five people didn’t even show up for their interview last week!” and throw up their hands and say “Ugh, nobody wants to work anymore!”

4. The concept of nobody wanting to work anymore is supposed to be a stand-in for “the soul of America is collapsing” and/or “We will fall behind because of a decline in work ethic.” The ironic part about that concept is that the same guys who constantly say it are the parents and grandparents of the generation who supposedly now doesn’t want to work. So like, couldn’t they have done a better job of instilling work ethic in those kids? Or wait, this is all Biden’s fault, right? But Trump signed the checks? Hmmm.

It gets confusing and doubles back on itself as a storyline. Then we got into some other territory —