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Notes -
What Happened to Society's Life Script
In the fifties, the American dream was, for the vast majority of people, pretty obvious. You find a job with the main employer of the town, whether that was a coal mine or a factory or a railyard or whatever the case may be. You marry, if not literally the girl next door, then something close; maybe a high school sweetheart. If you were a woman you were then expected to stay home and be a housewife, and except for a few very highly-female coded jobs, that's just what you did. If you were a man you might have been required to serve in the army beforehand, but few people went to college; only if you were wealthy and/or very, very smart. It mostly wasn't your decision either way, about any of it. 'Should I go into the military, or skilled labor, or go to college?' wasn't a question very many people had to ask; usually what you did next after finishing high school was readily apparent, often literally by having only a single option or a very small set thereof. If you did have the opportunity to go to college- most people didn't- both the university and your parents had much more say in what you did there. And I think we should note- the vast majority of people here could find respect as a worker bee. This is important because the vast majority of people have to be worker bees to have a functioning society.
Today, that is not the case. Everyone who wants to can go to university, or near enough. Many people stay in university long past the point at which it does any good, in point of fact. The military is 100% volunteer, and few people live with access to a single major employer. Young people can't find spouses, and these days don't seem to be able to blunder into relationships either. Every individual can, with certain reasonable limits, do what he wishes, and nobody with institutional power seems keen to say no, that's stupid, do this instead.
And it seems that we have lost something, there. Occasionally conservative pundits will start talking about the success sequence- finish high school, work full time, get married, and then have children. There's some other obvious things that go along with it, like 'don't do drugs'. But the gist of the success sequence is, well, a (somewhat vague)life script. And realistically the success sequence is the sort of thing our culture should be putting more effort into promoting; it isn't the default message despite every idea therein being a good one.
I think the youth agree with me, here. Jordan Peterson's popularity, notoriously, came from offering boomer dad advice. Recently there's been discussion of positive male role models to replace Andrew Tate; Andrew Tate's pitch isn't much different from tons of other redpill influencers. What's different is he's selling 'you, too, can be like me, just do x, y, z'. Obviously he's a lying grifter, but his fanbase are mostly teens. What replacement for his (dumb)life script are these positive male role models offering? The pro-social version of Andrew Tate isn't the male feminist activist. It's Mike Rowe.
Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees. In a functioning society there are few girlbosses because there simply are not very many bosses- the average person will always make the median income, live a not particularly impressive lifestyle, and live in flyover. To put it more pithily, average people will always be average. And being average isn't, well, a flashy and appealing thing. In the past, lack of options meant people became average worker bees. Today, people have the option not to do that; they may not be Indian chiefs and fighter pilots and surgeons and other high status jobs instead, but they're being something, and usually that something is below average, gig workers and basement dwellers. It has to be said, therefore- most people can't figure it out on their own. For every unrecognized genius there's a dozen schizos. Boring middle-aged advice serves a useful purpose; to throw out the social pressure to follow it was a mistake. The question becomes, then, 'how do we bring it back?'
My great uncle Carl fought in Korea, came back (leaving his brother my grandfather behind in a PoW camp, but that's neither here nor there), and started working as a bricklayer for his first years back. For the first decade he was back until he married my Aunt Irma, working as a union bricklayer, he never showed up on Mondays. My grandfather came back from the camp, married my grandmother almost immediately, and had my mother (maybe a little less than) nine months later, and got a job at a factory. My mother attended Parochial school, and walking to school with my grandmother would see Uncle Carl stumbling home drunk in the morning from the Hungarian Club, and ask my grandmother what was wrong with Uncle Carl, my grandmother would tell her that Uncle Carl and his friends were up late drinking "juice" and playing polka.
One day, he used to love to tell this story, his foreman called him in to talk to him. Laid out the time cards, no show Monday, no show Monday, no show Monday...Carl if you weren't such a good worker you'd be out on your ass. YOU NEED TO SHOW UP ON MONDAY EVERY NOW AND THEN, JUST TO SEE WHAT IT'S LIKE! IT'S JUST LIKE TUESDAY!
Then, after some years of drinking so much over the weekend that he never made it to work on Monday, he married Irma. After that he straightened out, and lived a successful (if ultimately, for unrelated reasons, tragic) life, always jovial at family functions, a normal enough Republican. Maybe today we'd say he had PTSD from the war stories he used to tell about Korea, or had substance abuse issues from the alcohol, or any number of other diagnosable issues. But the thing I'm questioning is whether the life script today has room for "spent a decade fucking around at work while drinking too much on the weekends" before getting back on track. I don't know that it has that same flexibility. I think it would be tougher to pull off today. I think today the proper life path is more on rails, and if derailed is tougher to get back on, with deep ditches to either side. People need more flexibility, they are complicated.
I think this is a very valuable truth to highlight. Boomer's (and analyses of their life paths) tend to forget how easy it was to fuck around and NOT find out. I had an uncle who ended up in his 50s and 60s doing a very pleated khaki finance job who spent his 20s and 30s doing his best Jack Kerouac - bumming around the Western US, taking odd jobs to get from town to town, drinking, and drugging. He never had a rock bottom or come-to-Jesus moment, he literally just decided at about 35 "eh, better get on the straight and narrow" and more or less walked into a management job (insert something here about white male privilege if you like, but I think it's still a red herring). The point is a hop-on-hop-off respectable life was possible.
Now, you have kids who start out at 22 with $100k in worthless degree debt. You can't work at the grain elevator and scrape together a few hundred bucks to get closer to California when the service on your debt alone is $1,500 a month. The PMC has made hiring and firing such a bureaucratic nightmare that the interview-to-fully-onboarded process is benchmarked at 4 - 5 months. I think this is so that PMC HR types can then brag about themselves reducing it to three months when thirty years ago that timeline was probably three days.
All of this is to say that I don't think "The Path" is much different than it was. To @FarNearEverywhere's point, it's definitely more narrow because of PMC rent seeking and vampiric "I don't do the work but I help enable the work" grifting. More than that, however, we've setup these weird fundamental barriers to overcome that used to not exist. That's the real tragedy. It's important to remember that GDP and GDP per capita is still higher than its ever been (in a decade over decade sense, annual fluctuations notwithstanding) but the overall fluidity and flexibility of the system is greatly atrophied. There's a reason Andreesen-Horowitz (this is a mega VC firm that is the epitome of PMC not-actually-working-but-actuall-fucking-rich careerists) has a whole thrust for "American Dynamism." We've become the mass monster powerlifter who can still move a ton of weight, but takes 15 minutes to get out of the shower.
There does seem to have been this golden moment for middle-class kids in the 60s/70s where they could indeed tune in, turn on, and drop out, wander the country from town to town getting work because there were plenty of manual labour jobs available and the cost of living wasn't too high, and they could indulge in the free love, drugs, and no responsibility scene. If they managed not to screw themselves up beyond repair, then when they wanted to finally settle down, their education level meant they could get a white collar job and work their way up and have the permanent, pensionable, retire with a gold watch life.
Like the Roger Miller song King of the Road, where two hours of menial work will mean enough to rent a room:
Enough work that you could get something, even a relatively decent job, just by turning up and being halfway presentable. Cost of living low enough that your earnings would cover the basics. The smaller cities and towns not yet hollowed out by the decline of manufacturing industry. A college degree still not a commonplace so it was worth something when you finished your wanderjahr to get you back on the ladder. And of course the combination of the infinite possibilities of youth with the wide-open spaces of the USA where you can travel as far as you like and still expect to find something new at the end of it.
That is why people still want to immigrate to the USA, because of that golden aura of possibility.
This was real but it wasn't some magic thing that just happened to happen, a thousand harsh winters in Northern Europe created the conditions for it. The floor was so high because you could always fall back on family, or if you'd truly burned your ass with them, the church
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One thing to consider about that song is that the great growth of the welfare and regulatory state has pretty made that marginally-legitimate hobo lifestyle impossible. Regulations will make providing that room profitably illegal at the equivalent of 50 cents a night today, and other regulations and taxes made employing someone for the equivalent of 50 cents for two hours work also illegal.
Man, every single part of that sounds crazy today. Imagine running a flophouse where you rent out rooms to random drifters for 50 cents a night? Or the other side, being a drifter who just wanders around knowing he can pick up manual labor anywhere, and just a few hours of work to get paid instantly in cash? Or a business owner who's like "man I've got so much work to do, and no one to do it... that's ok, i'll just pay the next drifter who comes by to sweep the floors."
I know it must have been a super hard life, with no luxuries or safety net, but I do envy that level of freedom.
From "Book Review: On The Road" by Scott Alexander:
Ha, I guess that does sorta line up! Still a bit different to work for a few weeks rather than a few hours, though. But yeah, definitely a different era for job hunting... and they were able to make enough money from those few weeks of basic work to pay for another cross-country trip!
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This probably exposes you to more risk (of the drifter stealing stuff or smashing things up) than the potential benefits. I can't see why you'd want to do this at any point of this historical development of the USA outsid maybe the civil war period where things really were that tight that such risks had to be taken.
At the very least get your low value add labour from an agency that does some vetting.
Now that you say that, I'm rethinking the meaning. It might have just been charity. Like, in the great depression there were a whole lot of broke guys, down on their luck, wandering around. I could see a hotel owner taking pity on them and saying "look, I won't give you money, but if you do a little honest work to help me out and prove you're a decent guy, I'll let you sleep here for free."
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The wildest thing in all of literature to me is the perfectly normal trope up to about WWI of "Paying a street kid to do a random task for me."
The rate at which this went out of fashion differs wildly between countries. As recently as 10 years ago, my dad had some renovations done at the grandmother's flat in downtown St Petersburg which left him with a bunch of rotten window frames in the [upper floor] place. His solution was a quick trip downstairs to get "the alcoholics" at the bar across the street to carry them down ("alcoholics", in Russia, are a socioethnic group much like "drifters" or "gypsies"). My understanding is that three dudes did it for the equivalent of something like $10 each.
Perhaps relatedly, in the late 2000s, Germany (where I was living then) had a very prolific online marketplace for carpooling - if you were going from city A to city B, you would just put up an ad saying when and how many people you'd take for how much, and people could contact you via the website. It was vastly cheaper and more convenient than the train system (and the cheap intercity bus network was not as developed as it is now; I figure this contributed to the website's demise), and the cross-section through German society I encountered on those is a story for another time, but one thing that is memorable is that once I casually mentioned that I was taking such a ride to some very typical Middle American internet friends I had made on the phpBBs, whose response was one of concern bordering on panic ("you'll be robbed and left for dead in a ditch somewhere and nobody will know"). It took a lot of convincing them that everyone does those things over in Europe and bad things generally don't happen (and I might have mildly offended them by repeating the standard Euro talking point that it's not like the carpool people will have guns). I still think that societal trust in the US would be in a better place if they didn't have mass media with non-stop dastardly-crimes-in-your-area programming.
In the US you can pick up a few Hispanic guys at the home depot parking lot for something like this.
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I love that song, but I think when he says 8x12 room he means a section of a freight boxcar, which the train's engineer will let him sleep in if he does some sweeping up.
No, it's an 8x12 four-bit room, thus the same one "for let, 50 cents".
I kinda always assumed those were also metaphors for boxcars, but I appear to be wrong
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What Nybbler says. A very basic room in a flophouse, but he can still earn enough in two hours of menial labour to afford a room and bed for the night. You're probably not going to do that nowadays.
Unless you're in San Francisco, and some confident startup thinks it can charge you for a night in a bunkbed (I wonder if they're still in existence, this story was from 2019).
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