The part that I think is being missed is the way that service-sector jobs are inherently unstable and place the worker at constant risk of unemployment at any moment in a way that they simply can't control. Before I went to college, I was assistant manager of a Shell station, and had worked at a number of truck stops throughout my late teens and early 20s. These positions are designed to take into account frequent turnover.
First, they involve working in close proximity to the underclass, the lumpenproletariat, whatever you want to call them. Junkies, criminals, and losers. The 10% of society that can't take care of themselves. It means that you have to look over your shoulder to ensure that your coworker doesn't take money out of your register when your back is turned because it's something they would absolutely do. Furthermore, it means that management is going to treat you like a thieving junkie regardless of how well you perform because policy applies to everyone. Let me tell you from experience: it's infuriating to work hard and still be treated like a scumbag.
Second, because so many of your coworkers are trash, the employment model is based on the premise of complete turnover every year or so. The normal response of Corporate to any mishap is going to be to fire everyone, transfer in a handful of workers from the next store over and hire new to fill in the rest. There is no such thing as a "career" in the service sector. There is temp job followed by temp job with the constant, terrifying possibility that Corporate is going to show up, fire you out of the blue, and you're going to lose your apartment or your car. If you're very, very lucky, you might get noticed by someone at Corporate, elevated to a senior position, and maybe get a more permanent position. Even then, you'd better hope that you don't get assigned to the "impossible" store, then get scapegoated for the failure to fix a consistently dysfunctional store that has long-standing problems with crime, bad planning, bad location, or trouble employees.
Even under optimal circumstances, you're spending the rest of your life babysitting a bunch of underclass losers, scolding pregnant 19-year-old single mothers of three for showing up to work high, filling in for habitually late/absent employees, chasing drug dealers off the premises, as you spend a good share of your paycheck paying off those college loans that you racked up because your Boomer high school counsellor told you were necessary to a "decent life." And you're still living the precarious life of suddenly, at any moment, being scapegoated for some downturn by Corporate and winding up back at the bottom making $7.25 mopping floors, cleaning used feminine hygiene products out of the toilet bowl, and a thousand other nasty things I can tell you about from lived experience.
The bulk of the increasing costs of middle-class life today is the cost of avoiding the social and criminal dysfunction of the underclass. People have a reasonable expectation that if they do the right things, they don't have to live among junkies, criminals, and reprobates. That's where the resentment against service work comes from. I worked too hard to lose my job because my coworker stole from my till. Or to lose my job because the manager was passing bad checks and the whole store got fired. Or to have to work a job where a pervert gets to walk into my workspace and expose himself. Or to have to clean genital crabs off the toilet seat of the women's restroom. I shouldn't have to carry a gun at work and risk getting fired because I don't want to die at the hands of an armed robber.
Not dealing with those things anymore was the reason I went to college. Until government takes seriously its obligation to decent people to protect us from the trash, rejecting service work is entirely reasonable, especially for college-educated young men.
As I read the article, it occurred to me that the #1 issue in our society was touched upon only in passing: dysfunction among much more than the bottom 10% of the population. More like the bottom 30%. It's too much to deal with. But we better deal with it or else all our talk about other issues will come to nothing.
What to do about it? Thinking about Hegseth, and the LAFD controversies, the concentrated super zips, Celeste Davis (male exit from female-coded fields), the need for purpose, and hypergamy/marriage, I think an effort to increase the prestige, pay, and "maleness" of traditionally masculine fields would be useful:
- refund the police and emphasize their critical role in keeping our society safe
- refund the firefighters, go back to higher physical and testing standards
- expand forestry management throughout the west, including fire prevention and logging
- higher and gender neutral standards for the military
- emphasis on mining rare earth and other minerals for battery production
Basically end all DEI / gender equality initiatives for fields like police / fire / military that genuinely benefit from strength while removing the breaks on natural resource / energy exploration as much as possible. These geographically dispersed jobs can be prestigious, masculine, rewarding, adventurous, important, and hopefully improve marriage prospects even with increasingly educated women who want to marry up.
Government already subsidizes many middle class incomes - maybe let's do that less with paper-pushing bureaucrats and HR teams to comply with endless regulations, and more with fundamental functions that benefit society.
My observation is that a lot of people will eventually end up in a Panda Express manager type job. Ie a job that is not glamorous but pays the bills. But it's absurd to tell young men to preemptively surrender and not even try to achieve more.
I had three children and my (second) wife had four. They range in age from 39 to 23. Five of them attended college; only two completed it. Three of our children have made their way into professional careers. The rest work low-status jobs -- one's a bartender, one works in logistics, one stocks shelves at Meijer.
As college-educated, white-collar parents, we wanted all of our kids to have college and good white-collar jobs. It took us a while to get over the fact that some of them won't have that. And to your point, it absolutely, positively has affected both their life trajectory and the caliber of people they regularly associate with.
That said, one of our kids managed a Dunkin' Donuts for a few years. It paid about half of what that Panda Express manager made, but it was just enough for him to be independent of us. It wasn't a dream job, not by a long shot. But it was absolutely a meaningful job that gave him real purpose. Scheduling, ordering, people management, customer interaction -- maybe it was just me, but he looked like he stood up a lot taller while he had that job.
This is the wisdom that comes from experience that is more helpful than listening to (us) online millennials or listening to the successful Boomer tell you to replicate his successful life path in a different time and place.
There is no contradiction between immigration restriction and not wanting to work at Panda Express. Both come from resentment against being pushed into low social class. Immigration simultaneously raises the living standards of upper income whites and pushes down the living standards of lower income whites. A world in which upper classes do more for themselves would be one in which the classes are closer together socially. So it all makes sense, really.
"These people have not reckoned with the full implications of a hard restrictionist position on immigration."
The more explicitly pro-white crowd has. Some of them have moved to northern Idaho. They see white people filling the jobs currently done by immigrants as a feature, not a bug.
There's 2 classes of people affected here: 1) educated ambitious men who resent having to put on a fast food uniform, and 2) Non-college people who were never considering anything but blue-collar work.
If we restrict the labor pool to non-immigrant Americans, class 1) makes more money while building up their side hustle, while class 2) makes more money for their entire life.
I'm a cosmopolitan and immigrant (to another country, from America) myself. A small amount of immigration connects the world and makes life more interesting. But mass immigration is almost always a bad thing for the native-born.
Yes, some of the context of the debate here is the recent H1b debate where the implication is that companies are importing cheaper labor to suppress tech salaries.
Anyone with a comp sci or other degree is going to be angry if they're told, "Too bad, learn to cook." Also they're more likely to be online than your class 2.
Spiritual Boomerism is such a catching phrase. I am a late-cohort Boomer myself. I got red-pilled (into recognizing that times had greatly changed) when my sons were in High School. They were going out on dates less frequently than I was at that age. That did not make sense to me, because they were school record winning track athletes, and future Marines and Army officers, and I was EL NERDO at that age (maybe still am). We Boomers must understand how much times have changed before we can hope to give timeless advice.
This will probably go down well here, but it'll go over like a lead balloon elsewhere: a lot of college-educated women are going to have to get over themselves and ditch their snobbery, especially the ones with what might be called "professional" degrees.
No slight to nurses or pharmacy techs--those aren't exactly easy degrees to get--but those degrees signal, in terms of mentality and intellectual curiosity, most of the same traits that being the general manager of a fast-food joint does.
(I say this, by the way, as a man with a master's degree; my dating prospects will not be helped if women take this advice.)
Women are especially sensitive to social signals. Men aren’t immune but since we’re more disposable, breaking from the herd is more necessary to make your mark. I have a theory that women will honor what men honor. May seem unrelated but Antoine de Saint Xupery said that love is not looking at each other but looking in the same direction together. Part of the problem is everyone is looking in the wrong direction.
I kind of want to just say thanks. You addressed the elephant or elephants in the room. Men, especially white men, are and have been actively locked out of a lot as a group. Not entirely obviously but the current incentives are to hire them last after you’re dead certain there are no women or minorities that can take the position. This is a generality but it is somewhat real and has been a growing reality since the 70s (Scott Adams talks about it).
The other elephant in the room, is basically men need to have skin in the game. If a young man believes that a course of action will result in an independent life and an at least average looking woman who treats him with some respect, you’d be surprised how hard he would work.
However white men are the one group who cannot have a support structure. At college and large corporate America, there are programs, groups, networks available to every conceivable minority however there basically cannot be any such thing afforded to white men. The demonization has been complete any attempt to have something of this nature is immediate proof of Nazism in the ideas of the culture, so it’s a non starter, regardless of it not actually being supremacist or anything else, just doing what other groups do.
So, this is why you see an explosion of white men involved in a ton of entrepreneurial enterprises, enterprises that don’t need formal networks or institutional approval. They see the writing on the wall.
"If a young man believes that a course of action will result in an independent life and an at least average looking woman who treats him with some respect, you’d be surprised how hard he would work. "
Great observations. One thing that I think is likely to happen - and which has not occurred to a lot of the woke - is touched upon in your last paragraph. Denied a traditional path to economic security by working for larger institutions that now prioritize everyone else, young white men will increasingly have to forge new networks and economic relationships. It's a sort of social Darwinism that will attract a lot of talent and *will* build a parallel and dynamic subculture that will succeed in spite of the barriers hostile political and cultural actors have tried to impose.
The woke left looks at whites (particularly men) as a group with an unfairly disproportionate share of cultural and economic influence on society, but ironically they are just birthing a new version of that phenomenon most likely. I also think the increased non-white male voter share for Trump this last election indicates that the desire for meaning, social respect, and opportunity is a pretty broadly shared sentiment by a lot of young men and is a potent force that the right needs to address. If successful I think it will have massive cultural and political implications - good ones.
There is also the issue of the dual income home and how this dilutes the wages of "low class" jobs. A man running a fryer at Panda express would make a lot more in a society where women stayed home and did not work. Wage suppression is huge in our modern economic environment. Furthermore, if women stayed home the entire hospitality and fast food industry would be destroyed. So, all the "low class" jobs would meet their demise with a fruitful and productive American woman.
I agree that if we had mass emigration in America, then many of the menial jobs would be necessarily be filled in by high school and college students. I think this would have a great impact on younger folks and teach the virtue of working hard from a young age.
Basically, I think there are a lot of assumptions going into this entire article. I found it fascinating and thought that many of the points were true but I would want to drive the conversation to the root rather than the fruit. We have so many silly assumptions that prop up places like Panda Express, and if those assumptions are abandoned, then the way that society views jobs like climbing the ladder at Panda Express will be non-existent.
Well said and the irony is we don’t have to force anyone out of anything, just stop artificially propping things up and let nature take its course. Those women who can and want to do certain jobs, no one is stopping them, there have been women in just about every conceivable job far longer than we realize; there were women congress and parliament before women had the vote! We just stop forcing the situation.
Leaving aside the morality of unhealthy fast food restaurants (Panda Express is not a CAVA or Chipolte), the money made from such a position is not worth it for young men with options, especially if they like to read books and are academically inclined. I recall struggling after college to get a job so I took a job with a car rental agency. They soon offered me a management position, but I declined. Soon I had a job in the Senate which I liked a lot even though it paid a fraction of what the management position would have.
I had a colleague who hated school (no college) but had a strong work ethic and loved cars. He ended up doing well in this business. It comes down to what you like and your strengths.
I'd rather drive for Uber than manage a restaurant for what it's worth though.
The part that I think is being missed is the way that service-sector jobs are inherently unstable and place the worker at constant risk of unemployment at any moment in a way that they simply can't control. Before I went to college, I was assistant manager of a Shell station, and had worked at a number of truck stops throughout my late teens and early 20s. These positions are designed to take into account frequent turnover.
First, they involve working in close proximity to the underclass, the lumpenproletariat, whatever you want to call them. Junkies, criminals, and losers. The 10% of society that can't take care of themselves. It means that you have to look over your shoulder to ensure that your coworker doesn't take money out of your register when your back is turned because it's something they would absolutely do. Furthermore, it means that management is going to treat you like a thieving junkie regardless of how well you perform because policy applies to everyone. Let me tell you from experience: it's infuriating to work hard and still be treated like a scumbag.
Second, because so many of your coworkers are trash, the employment model is based on the premise of complete turnover every year or so. The normal response of Corporate to any mishap is going to be to fire everyone, transfer in a handful of workers from the next store over and hire new to fill in the rest. There is no such thing as a "career" in the service sector. There is temp job followed by temp job with the constant, terrifying possibility that Corporate is going to show up, fire you out of the blue, and you're going to lose your apartment or your car. If you're very, very lucky, you might get noticed by someone at Corporate, elevated to a senior position, and maybe get a more permanent position. Even then, you'd better hope that you don't get assigned to the "impossible" store, then get scapegoated for the failure to fix a consistently dysfunctional store that has long-standing problems with crime, bad planning, bad location, or trouble employees.
Even under optimal circumstances, you're spending the rest of your life babysitting a bunch of underclass losers, scolding pregnant 19-year-old single mothers of three for showing up to work high, filling in for habitually late/absent employees, chasing drug dealers off the premises, as you spend a good share of your paycheck paying off those college loans that you racked up because your Boomer high school counsellor told you were necessary to a "decent life." And you're still living the precarious life of suddenly, at any moment, being scapegoated for some downturn by Corporate and winding up back at the bottom making $7.25 mopping floors, cleaning used feminine hygiene products out of the toilet bowl, and a thousand other nasty things I can tell you about from lived experience.
The bulk of the increasing costs of middle-class life today is the cost of avoiding the social and criminal dysfunction of the underclass. People have a reasonable expectation that if they do the right things, they don't have to live among junkies, criminals, and reprobates. That's where the resentment against service work comes from. I worked too hard to lose my job because my coworker stole from my till. Or to lose my job because the manager was passing bad checks and the whole store got fired. Or to have to work a job where a pervert gets to walk into my workspace and expose himself. Or to have to clean genital crabs off the toilet seat of the women's restroom. I shouldn't have to carry a gun at work and risk getting fired because I don't want to die at the hands of an armed robber.
Not dealing with those things anymore was the reason I went to college. Until government takes seriously its obligation to decent people to protect us from the trash, rejecting service work is entirely reasonable, especially for college-educated young men.
As I read the article, it occurred to me that the #1 issue in our society was touched upon only in passing: dysfunction among much more than the bottom 10% of the population. More like the bottom 30%. It's too much to deal with. But we better deal with it or else all our talk about other issues will come to nothing.
What to do about it? Thinking about Hegseth, and the LAFD controversies, the concentrated super zips, Celeste Davis (male exit from female-coded fields), the need for purpose, and hypergamy/marriage, I think an effort to increase the prestige, pay, and "maleness" of traditionally masculine fields would be useful:
- refund the police and emphasize their critical role in keeping our society safe
- refund the firefighters, go back to higher physical and testing standards
- expand forestry management throughout the west, including fire prevention and logging
- higher and gender neutral standards for the military
- emphasis on mining rare earth and other minerals for battery production
Basically end all DEI / gender equality initiatives for fields like police / fire / military that genuinely benefit from strength while removing the breaks on natural resource / energy exploration as much as possible. These geographically dispersed jobs can be prestigious, masculine, rewarding, adventurous, important, and hopefully improve marriage prospects even with increasingly educated women who want to marry up.
Government already subsidizes many middle class incomes - maybe let's do that less with paper-pushing bureaucrats and HR teams to comply with endless regulations, and more with fundamental functions that benefit society.
My observation is that a lot of people will eventually end up in a Panda Express manager type job. Ie a job that is not glamorous but pays the bills. But it's absurd to tell young men to preemptively surrender and not even try to achieve more.
Maybe tell them to write blogs about it.
I had three children and my (second) wife had four. They range in age from 39 to 23. Five of them attended college; only two completed it. Three of our children have made their way into professional careers. The rest work low-status jobs -- one's a bartender, one works in logistics, one stocks shelves at Meijer.
As college-educated, white-collar parents, we wanted all of our kids to have college and good white-collar jobs. It took us a while to get over the fact that some of them won't have that. And to your point, it absolutely, positively has affected both their life trajectory and the caliber of people they regularly associate with.
That said, one of our kids managed a Dunkin' Donuts for a few years. It paid about half of what that Panda Express manager made, but it was just enough for him to be independent of us. It wasn't a dream job, not by a long shot. But it was absolutely a meaningful job that gave him real purpose. Scheduling, ordering, people management, customer interaction -- maybe it was just me, but he looked like he stood up a lot taller while he had that job.
This is the wisdom that comes from experience that is more helpful than listening to (us) online millennials or listening to the successful Boomer tell you to replicate his successful life path in a different time and place.
There is no contradiction between immigration restriction and not wanting to work at Panda Express. Both come from resentment against being pushed into low social class. Immigration simultaneously raises the living standards of upper income whites and pushes down the living standards of lower income whites. A world in which upper classes do more for themselves would be one in which the classes are closer together socially. So it all makes sense, really.
"These people have not reckoned with the full implications of a hard restrictionist position on immigration."
The more explicitly pro-white crowd has. Some of them have moved to northern Idaho. They see white people filling the jobs currently done by immigrants as a feature, not a bug.
There's 2 classes of people affected here: 1) educated ambitious men who resent having to put on a fast food uniform, and 2) Non-college people who were never considering anything but blue-collar work.
If we restrict the labor pool to non-immigrant Americans, class 1) makes more money while building up their side hustle, while class 2) makes more money for their entire life.
I'm a cosmopolitan and immigrant (to another country, from America) myself. A small amount of immigration connects the world and makes life more interesting. But mass immigration is almost always a bad thing for the native-born.
Yes, some of the context of the debate here is the recent H1b debate where the implication is that companies are importing cheaper labor to suppress tech salaries.
Anyone with a comp sci or other degree is going to be angry if they're told, "Too bad, learn to cook." Also they're more likely to be online than your class 2.
Excellent stuff, Aaron. Good explanation of the situation. Thank you for this!
Spiritual Boomerism is such a catching phrase. I am a late-cohort Boomer myself. I got red-pilled (into recognizing that times had greatly changed) when my sons were in High School. They were going out on dates less frequently than I was at that age. That did not make sense to me, because they were school record winning track athletes, and future Marines and Army officers, and I was EL NERDO at that age (maybe still am). We Boomers must understand how much times have changed before we can hope to give timeless advice.
This will probably go down well here, but it'll go over like a lead balloon elsewhere: a lot of college-educated women are going to have to get over themselves and ditch their snobbery, especially the ones with what might be called "professional" degrees.
No slight to nurses or pharmacy techs--those aren't exactly easy degrees to get--but those degrees signal, in terms of mentality and intellectual curiosity, most of the same traits that being the general manager of a fast-food joint does.
(I say this, by the way, as a man with a master's degree; my dating prospects will not be helped if women take this advice.)
Women are especially sensitive to social signals. Men aren’t immune but since we’re more disposable, breaking from the herd is more necessary to make your mark. I have a theory that women will honor what men honor. May seem unrelated but Antoine de Saint Xupery said that love is not looking at each other but looking in the same direction together. Part of the problem is everyone is looking in the wrong direction.
I kind of want to just say thanks. You addressed the elephant or elephants in the room. Men, especially white men, are and have been actively locked out of a lot as a group. Not entirely obviously but the current incentives are to hire them last after you’re dead certain there are no women or minorities that can take the position. This is a generality but it is somewhat real and has been a growing reality since the 70s (Scott Adams talks about it).
The other elephant in the room, is basically men need to have skin in the game. If a young man believes that a course of action will result in an independent life and an at least average looking woman who treats him with some respect, you’d be surprised how hard he would work.
However white men are the one group who cannot have a support structure. At college and large corporate America, there are programs, groups, networks available to every conceivable minority however there basically cannot be any such thing afforded to white men. The demonization has been complete any attempt to have something of this nature is immediate proof of Nazism in the ideas of the culture, so it’s a non starter, regardless of it not actually being supremacist or anything else, just doing what other groups do.
So, this is why you see an explosion of white men involved in a ton of entrepreneurial enterprises, enterprises that don’t need formal networks or institutional approval. They see the writing on the wall.
"If a young man believes that a course of action will result in an independent life and an at least average looking woman who treats him with some respect, you’d be surprised how hard he would work. "
This sure rings true!!
Great observations. One thing that I think is likely to happen - and which has not occurred to a lot of the woke - is touched upon in your last paragraph. Denied a traditional path to economic security by working for larger institutions that now prioritize everyone else, young white men will increasingly have to forge new networks and economic relationships. It's a sort of social Darwinism that will attract a lot of talent and *will* build a parallel and dynamic subculture that will succeed in spite of the barriers hostile political and cultural actors have tried to impose.
The woke left looks at whites (particularly men) as a group with an unfairly disproportionate share of cultural and economic influence on society, but ironically they are just birthing a new version of that phenomenon most likely. I also think the increased non-white male voter share for Trump this last election indicates that the desire for meaning, social respect, and opportunity is a pretty broadly shared sentiment by a lot of young men and is a potent force that the right needs to address. If successful I think it will have massive cultural and political implications - good ones.
There is also the issue of the dual income home and how this dilutes the wages of "low class" jobs. A man running a fryer at Panda express would make a lot more in a society where women stayed home and did not work. Wage suppression is huge in our modern economic environment. Furthermore, if women stayed home the entire hospitality and fast food industry would be destroyed. So, all the "low class" jobs would meet their demise with a fruitful and productive American woman.
I agree that if we had mass emigration in America, then many of the menial jobs would be necessarily be filled in by high school and college students. I think this would have a great impact on younger folks and teach the virtue of working hard from a young age.
Basically, I think there are a lot of assumptions going into this entire article. I found it fascinating and thought that many of the points were true but I would want to drive the conversation to the root rather than the fruit. We have so many silly assumptions that prop up places like Panda Express, and if those assumptions are abandoned, then the way that society views jobs like climbing the ladder at Panda Express will be non-existent.
Well said and the irony is we don’t have to force anyone out of anything, just stop artificially propping things up and let nature take its course. Those women who can and want to do certain jobs, no one is stopping them, there have been women in just about every conceivable job far longer than we realize; there were women congress and parliament before women had the vote! We just stop forcing the situation.
Leaving aside the morality of unhealthy fast food restaurants (Panda Express is not a CAVA or Chipolte), the money made from such a position is not worth it for young men with options, especially if they like to read books and are academically inclined. I recall struggling after college to get a job so I took a job with a car rental agency. They soon offered me a management position, but I declined. Soon I had a job in the Senate which I liked a lot even though it paid a fraction of what the management position would have.
I had a colleague who hated school (no college) but had a strong work ethic and loved cars. He ended up doing well in this business. It comes down to what you like and your strengths.
I'd rather drive for Uber than manage a restaurant for what it's worth though.
Excellent commentary--will reference in this week's Roundtable episode.