I think these attitudes are common in young men and at the core of a lot of discontent: “I am too good to work a normal job.” A lot of young men are entitled. They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed aristocrats.

I recall seeing a clip of an interview with a young man. He was an immigrant in Canada from India, on visa to study. He was asked what he wanted to do when he finished. He said, to paraphrase, “Nothing. Working a job is for suckers. I want to be like Andrew Tate. I want to be rich.”

Another video I saw was of a UPS driver. Late 20s perhaps. He was lamenting that he was cooler when he was a former criminal and now he was doing lame “civilian” work. 

And these are people who belong in “menial” jobs. That is their skill level. Yet they expect to be the boss and the executive, immediately. They want a high status position without having to do what is required to attain high status. They feel, for some unknown reason, that they are special, or that they are destined to be special.

This is why get rich quick schemes are so popular. It’s why lottery tickets are popular. It’s also why hard jobs and skilled trades often lack workers - and especially Gen Z workers who won’t stick around long enough to acquire skills and experience. 

People talk a lot about “essential workers” and “men who build the roads” and “hard, dirty jobs,” but then we see people demean these jobs. We also see the glorification of careers like “social media influencer” that actually are entirely unnecessary - and probably bad for society in some cases. 

And we have always seen young men flock to ideologies and movements that reflect their status anxiety. Revolutionary movements - to topple people higher in the status hierarchy. Communes, to exit or rebuild status hierarchies. Crime - the 16-25 year old “age-crime curve” - where criminal behavior is seen as status-enhancing in some subcultures in ways that real jobs are not. 

Anyway, here is a profile of one of the men who built America:

Friedrich Weyerhäuser was from a family of 11 people in Germany. He had to quit school at age 12 after his father died and work on his family’s farm so they could all live. They immigrated to Pennsylvania. He worked for two years doing menial labor in a bewery. Then he worked as a machinist. Then he worked as a laborer building the railroad. Then he worked in a sawmill.

He got a management position at the sawmill. And when the sawmill went under he used his savings - because this was someone who did nothing but work and pinch pennies as one did - to purchase it. After that he leveraged one business after another to become a timber magnate and the 11th most wealthy person in American history.

Weyerhäuser was one of our own genuine American aristocracy and he worked menial, hard jobs without stop until he got his break.

If we are in the “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” cycle, certainly “I don’t want to work” occurs somewhere between “good times create weak men” and “weak men create hard times.” I hope you don’t all think that these are the “hard times!” We are in the “good times” peak and young men who think they are too good to get their hands dirty are definitely a part of the “weak men” cohort.

Hard times force men to live and work like Weyerhäuser did. And most men didn’t get the kind of outcome he did. Many suffered and died. Yet they scrambled for those jobs nonetheless. They didn’t do it because society gave them all kinds of benefits and perks for it. They did it because they would starve without those jobs and be cast by the wayside. No one was going to help them except for themselves.