Go to main Forum page »
I’m old and perhaps out of touch, I admit it, but it still upsets me when I hear talk of little opportunity, no money to be made, unfairness, inequality even. What’s new? I say there are always opportunities, just look for them even if it occasionally means lower self-esteem. Never give up.
During the years working, like a lot of people, I was subjected to the affects of nepotism, playing favorites, back stabbing and all the baggage that goes with corporate life. I took it and worked around it although embarrassed at times. Never give up.
Counting while in high school, I worked, often two jobs, for 56 years. As long as I can remember I earned money, not much for many of those years, but something. My first real job after high school was at $1.49 an hour. Literally the lowest paid job in a company of 15,000 employees.
Long before that there were money making schemes. I collected deposit soda bottles-often from trash cans in the local park. Each was worth two cents and occasionally a nickel.
I collected the evening garbage in our apartment building, shoveled coal cleaned out the furnace and hauled the ashes for about a $1.00 a week.
Since we lived in an apartment there was no lawn work, but the fall brought leaf raking in the neighborhood and winter snow shoveling.
We shined shoes and sold greeting cards door to door. We also made and sold potholders. The neighborhood kids put on plays and carnivals in the buildings small yard. We lured parents to pay a dime to participate. The highlight was throwing a wet sponge at their child.
I tried my hand at raising tropical fish and selling them.
I worked in a pet shop after school and Saturday for $5.00 a week. Later I worked in the city library running a mimeograph and shelving books at $0.75 and hour rising to $1.10 after two years. I also worked part-time at the base library while in the army.
I may be wrong, but I don’t sense that level of initiative in todays youth, or even in their parents in some cases. It seems there is more complaining about what is done to them as opposed to a can do attitude.
Opportunity sure looks different from the 1950s, but it’s still there. Heck, before I turned off the advertising on my blog, I was making $1.05 a month.
I still pick up every penny I see on the ground. It’s an old person thing who remembers that what we complain about these days, we wish we had back then. I can talk to my new car for Pete’s sake.
Some of this resonates, but I always keep in mind that in science, computing, engineering and many other fields there is just a lot more information to cram in the same number of years of education.
It’s hard not to read it as a “those pesky kids” rant. I think at least the developed world has changed. I’m sure there are kids in poor neighbourhoods hustling both legally and illegally for every $ they can make.
But in a world where parents are more nervous of predators and H&S, food standards, permitting etc it seems to me there are reduced opportunities to legally make a little money. And those that are are increasingly likely to be doing it online whether its selling family & friends junk on eBay or doing online streaming or coaching with gaming (I’ve a friend who is big into motorsport took some lessons from a 17 year old to improve his performance on his home sim rig).
And the biggest variable is incentivisation – either parents provide cushion that makes what can earn at a minimum wage job irrelevant or youngsters despair at ever denting the looming student debt or buying even a modest home with what they can retain from earnings.
Re the Cape Cod example -I’d ask how many real blue collar families are around with the cost of living there. (I’d expect a lot of the housing stock is in the hands of wealthy families ) – where’s the incentive for the privileged offspring to work the retail/service jobs? Other than more far sighted parents kicking kids out to experience a bit of real world grit.
It is an old guys rant…. or maybe it is a trip down memory lane. Either one I’m glad you brought it up. Before retiring this last month I was thinking of working for fifty years and what my first jobs were and how much or how little I earned. The most important thing was not this income, but the work ethic I learned. I’m sorry to say the of our eight grandchildren, none of them are experiencing it. They all have parents who believe education is more important than life lessons and learning to take directions from someone other than parents
I can still smell that mimeograph ink! My first job paid $1.10 an hour and I had to walk nearly a mile to school. I remember those five cent glass bottles! Times were different back then. I was never a high earner but I’m able to make ends meet with a comfortable cushion now. I worked hard but I consider myself to be very lucky.
My niece is a young school teacher by day and a TikTok influencer during her every other waking minute. Her primary tool is her cell phone. With a half million followers, I’m sure her side gig makes her a lot of money. On the surface, it looks like her life is a big party, but that monkey is constantly on her back! I wouldn’t want to switch places with today’s young people. They have stresses that we old folks will never understand.
Life was not easy but it seemed more simple in the good old days. I’m hopeful that we humans are resilient and will learn to adapt to our challenges in the future. Many people will succeed and many will fail. And life goes on!
Thanks for the memories!
Definitely an old guy’s rant.
You’ll understand after you grow up 🤓
Thank you, Winston. Ageist remarks, even if not meant to hurt, further marginalize and stigmatize older people, and feed into a negative stereotype.
Added: the above was meant as a compliment to Winston Smith for recognizing the inappropriate comments from Gary Klotz. I don’t think anyone agrees that ageist comments should be allowed to flourish, even in jest. I should have directed my remarks to Mr. Klotz.
Growing up is vastly overrated. I advise against it.
I’m still working on it!
There is a better alternative?
It’s much more difficult for kids to get jobs now than when my parents and I were kids. The youth employment service has fewer listings. There weren’t complex onboarding procedures like now. There’s less local retail. This is real and a serious problem. My kids both found a retail job and their friends cooked up schemes, such as illegally selling home baked cookies at school, but the kids who weren’t working in their family’s business or helping their family with whatever side hustle they had going on had problems finding jobs. Definitely easier when I was a kid.
Opportunities are probably greater today. If you want to become an eBay reseller, or a YouTube star, you can just make a plan and try to make it work. Yes, there is a lot of competition, but people who are good can be successful.
I lost count some time ago of how many times you have voiced your negative views about folks in generations younger than yours.
Personally, I think you give too much significance to the complaints voiced on social media websites. I have no doubt that if online social media sites had existed when we were young there would also have been numerous sites frequented by people our age who felt that life wasn’t fair.
I hope you are right, but I’m not sure. It’s not just social media, it’s what I hear and observe.
Before we moved into a condo we lived in a nice neighborhood with families and many children. Never did they come around looking to shovel snow or rake leaves. Girl Scouts came selling, but these days only with a parent with them. I can understand the reluctance to let children sell door to door … sadly.
What I do see is children consumed with sports, year round often seven days a week. My grandchildren or their parents sell lots of things, but related to sports activities. I don’t think that is the same as earning money you need.
Don’t be in one of our local Starbucks around 2:30. The places are inundated with junior and high school children with money to spend.
During the summer on Cape Cod they have to import students from Europe to fill jobs in stores and restaurants. Last summer it was mostly Eastern Europe. I often ask where the local teenagers are.
In any case I don’t see the same attitudes about working, making money, just doing what is necessary to get where you want to go.
As I said, in the larger scope of things, I hope I am wrong.
There is a lot of fear these days for the safety of children. As an elementary student, I was allowed to walk the one city block to school….Nowadays, you see zero elementary school students walking by themselves to school. Parents drive them if they are too close to ride a bus, or even walk them to school every morning and afternoon. This fear extends into the teenage years making kids less independent as they reach adulthood.
The same is true for many middle schools and high schools. There was a middle school a couple of blocks from where we lived from 2019-2023 and and I would often see cars start to line up to pick up their children an hour before classes got out.
Sadly true. Our towns don’t even do Halloween like we did.
Dick, you identify an interesting point, Youth sports have been transformed into mini-professional leagues. The commitment can be considerable, leaving little room for anything other than school. It was moving in that direction when my kids were involved. It has gotten more intense. I love sports and think they can have a lot of v value, but I worry that youth sports have been over-organized. Kids are still kids however, and still enjoy pickup ball – I see it with my grandkids, and nieces and nephews. They love being outside playing. And they aren’t responsible for a changing environment, that’s my generation’s responsibility.
That’s my old-guy, overly generalized, rant for the day. Despite what I wrote, I think my kids, their friend, and their children are amazing people, smarter than I ever was or will be, more worldly, and good neighbors and citizens. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I have faith in the them.
Based on my experience as a grandparent and a former professor who retired 5 years ago, I think there is a wide gap these days between the children of the working class and kids with more affluent parents.
My last 18 years were spent at a small private Catholic affiliated college in the Bronx where there was a combination of first generation college students whose parents had modest incomes and more affluent students. At least half of my students were working 20 or more hours a week and a few were working full time. Needless to say, they had a difficult time keeping up with their coursework and quite a few had attendance problems. I don’t think anyone on HD would question the work ethic of these students.
Totally agree with you. On top of that it all costs parents thousands of dollars a year. Parents are trapped not wanting to deny their child the chance.
I don’t agree with the broad brush description of today’s youth. Opportunities are there, but they are different from the jobs you (or I) had.
My first paying job was as a lifeguard. Full time work, including weekends (Mondays off), for a salary of $40 a week.
As I said opportunities are different.
If I were young, I’d start a business helping old curmudgeons like me set up the new smartphone, iPad and in my case at the moment a car. I’d be glad to pay a local teenager a few bucks to avoid hours of aggregation.
There’s a lifeguard shortage now. Why?
Michael – for me, that was 50+ years ago. To your point, I’ve seen local pools advertising for lifeguards and heard that there is a shortage of people who apply for those jobs. Times have changed and so have the job requirements.
I take my grandkids to various pools, mostly during the summer. I see much more in the way of regulation and routine than what I remember needing to follow. I understand that qualifications are different now. When I started, I needed to have passed the YMCA lifesaving course. That’s all I needed. After a while, I also obtained my Water Safety Instructor certification. I spoke to a beach lifeguard recently (I only worked at pools) who told me that they also had to pass physical tests and demonstrate open water lifesaving capabilities that I never encountered.
And then there is my 103 year old mother in law who was 8-20 years old during the depression living in rural Maine. Then there really was no opportunity.
My mother, who was born in 1922 in rural Iowa, was the only girl in a family with 6 children. Her work ethic was developed by doing cooking, gardening, cleaning and other chores. She saw education as her opportunity and worked her way through college, which is where she met my father, another first generation college student. Each generation is faced with different challenges and opportunities.
Sounds exactly like my parents! Both from rural Iowa locations, both first generation college graduates, both with fiscal lessons from the depression era.
A mimeograph? Holy molly you are old. I bet you remember when V8 juice was V2 juice.
Truth is, I remember mimeograph machines too.
I believe there is honor and opportunity in all work. How many of us flipped burgers in our teens? I just saw a sign at a McDonald’s in Florida advertising for managers, 97k per year; Opportunity.
You and I will have to agree to disagree about todays youth, as I don’t believe they are much different than other generations.
Your V8 joke made me think of local college sports. I remember when there was a Pac 8 in college sports, then a Pac 10, a Pac 12, and now it’s down to…two? (Not that it’s called the “Pac 2,” though.)
How about the 18 teams making up the Big 10? Ridiculous isn’t it?
My alma mater (USC) is in its first year in the Big “10,” and we had a lot of trouble adjusting to it. Decades of being Pac 8/10/12 people—that’s who we are/were. We also had fun for years going to the USC football game in the Bay Area, alternating between Stanford and Cal, both within driving distance for us. Now they don’t play each other anymore. Sad. We’re not like to hop a plane to see games at Rutgers or Maryland or Purdue, nothing against any of those places.
Or the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) with schools now in California and Texas. My opinion: The NCAA should be eliminated, all sponsor money contracts cancelled, and college sports should revert to the intramural arrangements of yesteryear.
Yes, those students at Berkeley enjoy a nice stroll along the Atlantic when they need a break…😂
Really? Just cancel March Madness and college football and the Frozen Four because… why?
Mike – As I said, it’s my opinion. I believe it’s gotten to the point where athletics have become more important than academics. Some kids now choose a school based on their NIL contract and then change the next year for more $$$. Again, my opinion – we need to get the money out of collegiate sports the same way we need to get the money out of political campaigns.
Not having grown up in the US I’ve always found college football and basketball somewhere between ridiculous and sad. Universities should not be running farm teams for professional sports. Only in America….
In other countries — England being a prominent example — the professional soccer clubs themselves run development academies. Kids are signed up as young as eight years old and prohibited from playing grassroots footy. They attend regular classes in the morning and train up to three hours every afternoon. And almost all are released by the club at some point because they’re not going to be good enough, leaving them adrift at 16. Are you sure the US system is really all that bad?
Kids who are in pro academies is a tiny proportion of those actively playing soccer and if they get cut at 16 then it’s just the reality of elite sport biting. If their parents have focused them on being anything other than a one trick pony there is ample opportunity for them to change direction with a lot of transferable lifeskills (they’ll possibly have been away from home, used to a strict schedule, understand what coaching is, well positioned for roles in physical ed, physio, sports science etc.)
I find the pay to play nature of a lot of US junior sport a lot more problematic. What’s the going rate for a kid to join a long snapper camp? Pretty essential to have a shot at perhaps the most specialist role in College Football/NFL.
In America you simply get cut later. How many “student” athletes in football and basketball actually get a meaningful education?
A valid question at least in some colleges.
Good article, Dick. I can relate to the many different small jobs you undertook having walked down the same road myself. Many people say there is no opportunity to make it in today’s world. It’s an excuse, used by people who don’t want to pay the price, or just want to go on in their rut in life.
Thomas Edison once said “opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”
Good luck with your new car. At least you talk to it. I have a friend who says she fights with hers.