printThe following is from my new, WND column, “Pleasure Me, Now!”:
“Our society revolves around the pleasure principle. Unless something is pleasurable, it excites suspicion and is deemed unworthy of pursuit. This is one reason so many American youngsters entering the job market are dumb, difficult and will be, ultimately, dispensable. They’ve been taught, by parents and pedagogues — falsely — that learning and work must be jolly fun all the time. If your field of endeavor is no fun, quit it.
Anyone who has studied seriously, or worked to master a craft, knows that nothing worth learning or mastering is easy or enjoyable, at first — unless you’re a genius, a natural, or both. Most of us are not. For proof of the fact of mediocrity, look no further than the normal distribution, the Bell Curve.
With mastery, however, comes enjoyment. And mastery generally means hard work.
‘The value of hard work is overrated. Laziness is the mother of invention’: these were riffs offered up against my case by one of the bloggers at BarelyABlog.com. The writer, a physicist, makes my point for me: He happens to be a relative of Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics!
No, not everyone can ‘work smart.’ Whereas graft is within each person’s reach; genius is not.
The pleasure principle is at play in the realm of both personal and public finances. Saving for the future is not fun. It means postponing pleasure for the sake of solvency or other more ambitious future gains.
Tellingly, a survey by the ‘National Foundation for Credit Counseling’ has revealed that … ’26 percent of adults in the U.S. admit that they’re spending more than they did a year ago. And 40 percent of consumers are still battling unpaid credit card debt month to month.'” …
Read the complete column, “Pleasure Me, Now!”, on WND.COM.
UPDATE I (April 22): In the Comments section, Annette makes important points. Running my own tiny enterprise, as I do, I agree with her. When us oldies die-out, the American workforce is close to toast! However, home-schooled kids give me hope. I’m working with one such gentleman (a kid, really) whose work ethic, method of problem solving, and cognitive skills match mine. As my husband would put it, “A normal person.” But the “mature” “professionals” who came before him, all with fancy offices downtown, gave new meaning to the concept of outsourcing.
Let me parrot, once again, “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable”:
“The hybrid, hi-tech workforce ? comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent ? is manned, generally, by terribly smart older people with advanced engineering degrees. Yes, the people designing gadgets for our grandiose gimps are often Asians, many of whom are older. They beaver away under fewer, also terribly smart, older Americans. The hi-tech endeavor is thus all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.
My source in the industry tells me that the millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity. I am told too that for every useless, self-important millennial, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings.
Let the lazy American youngster look down at his superiors, and live-off his delusions and his parents. His young Asian counterpart harbors a different sensibility and skill; he is hungrily learning from his higher-ups with a view to displacing artificially fattened geese like Meghan McCain.”
UPDATE II (April 23): Myron, Right you are. My source behind enemy lines—one of the biggest, most prestigious American corporations—is reduced to working in his garage, where he has better lab equipment, solving the company’s technical problems.
Well said. When my children were small I discouraged them from watching programs like Sesame Street. I realized that when they got to a classroom setting they wouldn’t have spiffy graphics and “Conjunction Junction” rhymes. Since entertainment and personal self worth seem to be second only to leftist dogma as the ultimate goals of American education there’s no wonder that all the doctors and engineers in the country are foreigners.
Well, God bless my White Anglo Saxon Protestant Jewish father for teaching me to defer gratification (most of the time.) Thus, I was able to lend money to many acquisitive friends who wanted more things than they could possibly afford while I wanted shelter, food, wine and some musical instruments. (Wine, women and song?) I guess that’s one of the reasons I had money to lend them. It’s amazing nobody ever stiffed me.
But let’s face it, the concept of “enough” only applies to immediately unpleasant stimuli today, kinda like when you give a flatworm an electric shock.
You wrote:
They’ve been taught, by parents and pedagogues – falsely – that learning and work must be jolly fun all the time. If your field of endeavor is no fun, quit it.
Ilana some businesses are now teaching the same thing. This was confirmed to me by a “career consultant.”
I had a kid (22) come into my office to pitch to me about joining his office supply company.
As he was setting things up in the computer he decided to make small talk.
He asked me what “fun” thing I did that day.
I replied you mean here at work? And he said yes.
I replied I did my job. He seemed mystified at my answer and I was shocked at his question.
You see I am an older person (60) with a work ethic.
If these idiots are teaching these kids that work is supposed to be fun no wonder nothing is getting done or getting done right.
**
Pathological pleasure.
I managed a small technology company in the early 00’s (summer of ’02 to summer of ’05, to be exact). We hired engineering students from the local university to work as interns in our testing lab during summers but also during the school year.
I will tell you that all of these kids (usually about 20 or 21 years old) were good. Not only were they smart, they were self-starters. If there was something to be done, they did it without having to be asked.
My impression is that guys pursuing technical degrees (NOT software or IT) have good work ethic. My experiences with young people with any other background is quite dismal, and this includes IT, which I do not consider to be truly technical work.
Had an update today from a UCLA physics professor about more American decline:
His University used to get “hundreds” of applications for grad school from very bright Chinese which has now gotten down to a trickle. Why??
(1) “TSA-style harrassment” of any foreign visitors makes them leery of coming to a hostile environment.
(2) The first two “generations” of Chinese that came here to study are now back in China and teaching with MODERN lab and computer equipment – not old primitive ones lacking equipment.
(3) Enormous industrial and academic high tech Research and Development investment funds in China while America’s dries up. Computers and manufacturing are booming there while the US excels in lawsuits and affirmative action.
The time may come when America falls behind Botswana on the tech curve.
“is reduced to working in his garage, where he has better lab equipment, solving the company’s technical problems.”
This is becoming all to common !
I work in a high tech company, in hardware engineering. It is one of the few remaining areas where US dominates a consumer market. The average age of the hardware engineering staff has to be in the mid to late 40s. It is all so very strange, when I started in the field in the 1980’s, young fellows were very common with few older engineers. Now all the new engineering staff seems to be coming from overseas. The H1B program has a lot to do with it, why bust your nut for seveal years to be poorly paid and discarded by the time you are 55? Few of the Engineers I work with advise their sons to go into this field as a result, and I note many of the sons are not following their fathers footsteps, but seeking degrees in other technical areas. I do not think the youth are lazy, but see the system set up against them. That said, most of the technical staff feel that we are in a state of industrial decline.
I’ll admit initially I reluctantly followed my father into the profession of engineering. Engineering was my plan B. In the end I chose a profession that has required me to learn and undertand more than just what I learned in College as an Electrical Engineering Major.
It took me more than a couple of years to begin to master my craft. Even with all the politics and crap that goes on with my profession I believe I have made the right decision. Although I’m pretty smart and usually pick-up things quickly I found that I was seemingly forever coming and never arriving in my profession.
I once head a preacher describe mastery of the piano this way. “In order to freely express yourself playing the piano you must essentially become a slave to the instrument.
For Myron another approch to the summing of integers from 1 to 100. There are 100 samples, if you could quickly compute the average of sum of integers from 1 to 100 by multiply this average by 100 you have your solution. It turns out that if you add the endpoints 1 and 100 and divide by 2 you will get the same answer as the average of all 100 numbers. This average is of course 50.5, if you multply this by 100 you get the answer 5050 as Gauss did. I do agree that working smarter is better than working harder, when you can do it.
Ilana I have tried to teach my daughters a good work ethic by my example. I did a lot of work at home on my own laptop in addition to work at the office. Surprsingly the group of people who seemed to appreciate this were some of the young males my daughters dated.
To summarize in many ways saving and delaying gratification, and developing a good work ethic and problem solving skills are two sides of the same coin. In many instances the two seem to go togehter.
Many years ago, the leading industrial companies (Xerox, AT&T, IBM, GE…) all maintained top quality science and engineering laboratories working on advanced to mundane problems. Now, no “engineer” has an entitlement “right” to a job but a sensible nation would nurture its intellectual talent.
Instead, circa 2011, “tech workers” – H1B style, are a commodity to be imported for temp jobs like migrant lettuce pickers and discarded when the contract expires. With most American companies being run into the ground by MBA’s who know how to manipulate short term profit margins and garner government handouts – there is no long term future for American manufacturing. [Exactly the observation my source has made.]
American born kids see what goes on and would rather get drunk, play internet games, and have sex throughout college getting pseudointellectual degrees from leftists University dogmatists than to submit to the discipline of science or engineering. Heck – it is hard to blame the current kids for being intellectually lazy.
But I’m old and will expire soon enough and my daughter is cute and China has a woman shortage – so why worry!