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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?'
Housing Prices in most affluent Western countries have combined with the deterioration of the sexual marketplace and decline of employer-employee relations to cause this, though. I'd love it if my lifepath was getting an okay sinecure somewhere here, making 75th percentile wage for my country and buying a free-standing house and get some kids going.
Instead in order to achieve the unfathomable wealth required to buy a free-standing 3bedroom house somewhere within an hour's drive of my CBD I've had to do pretty well in the startup lottery and pick a fairly disreputable industry on top of that. The system no longer facilitates the normal path.
The Western World seems to be following Asia in many important ways.
#1 is sexlessness, apathy, and cratering fertility.
#2 is the meme that there is a narrow path to success, which runs only through approved channels.
They say that, to succeed, you have to get into a top school, get a specific corporate job, etc... And only like 10% of people can do that. By definition, high class jobs are only available to a few.
But riches have never been easier to obtain in the U.S. (can't comment on your specific country). A motivated young person can easily earn $300k annually by age 30. Not as a doctor, not as a lawyer or consultant, nor as a software engineer. But it's quite possible, even trivial. The catch is that you have to work in a disfavored trade such as tire repair, HVAC, or construction. Every year thousands of boomer millionaires retire, selling their incredibly profitable businesses for a pittance. You can buy a business doing $500k in profit for $1.5 million. Don't have a $1.5 million? Seller financing is available.
No one wants to do it because they want a path. They want someone to tell them what to do. They want to take some bullshit test, and then get that sinecure. There was a brief time in a few select countries where that was possible. The post-war boom was a unique time in history. But it's not coming back. Welcome to zero sum world! Unless you are talented, you have to forge your own path now. No one's going to give it to you.
I think you're wildly oversimplifying the 'simply take over a business from a retiring boomer' thing. I used to work for one of those, and whilst it was sold with a fairly reliable source of income (Pre-Apple Store Apple importer who still had a license to do repairs on Apple hardware that the Apple Store refused to due to being a generation or two out of date). The seller refused to actually retire and kept servicing his best clients directly (who were largely also superboomers who'd had him as their 'computer guy' since 1980 and didn't want to get computers from anybody else), plus the actual business model itself was really coasting on inertia after being a good idea 30 years ago. You can't really steal the customers here since they're not price-sensitive, they just want to do their very intermittent tech purchasing from the guy who they got their first handshake from 30 years ago.
A lot of these incredibly profitable small businesses are coasting on servicing fellow boomers and based on the operator's relationship network.
That's why goodwill is considered an intangible asset.
Untangling 'Frank's Automotive has good will' from 'Frank Frankerton who runs Frank's Automotive and has for the last 30 years has good will' is the hard part, though.
Yeah, that's it. If Frank retires and people stop going to Frank's Automotive because they would have gone elsewhere (too expensive, not great quality, takes too long) were it not for the relationship built up with Frank, then the business is not going to survive. If Frank retires and you keep the same level of quality and price and friendly service, it will do okay.
In my experience sometimes it's literally just Frank.
I used to work for one of these small businesses were the owner-operator was prettymuch Mr Krabs for Spongebob. Cartoonishly money grubbing towards customers, most of whom he'd known for decades at this point as their 'Computer Guy'. Towards the end the business was only really viable since he'd put about 2-3x the margin on getting tech for fellow boomers as they'd get from going to an Apple Store direct or the local Walmart equivalent. It wasn't quality, price or friendliness it was literally just 'Frank is my computer guy and he is who I buy computers from' inertia.
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