I must confess to be wanting in imagination. Widespread adoption of smartphones has led to a fall in social skills. Examples are pervasive, such a family members fooling with their devices rather than talking to each other at meals and our recent discussions of dysfunctional dating behaviors, such as the collapse in the ability to flirt. Even so, it had not occurred to me that these changes in habits were so extensive as to generate changes in personality, or if one prefers, temperament. But a new Financial Times account makes just this case, focusing on the most marked character change, that of a fall in conscientiousness.
Now admittedly, it is common throughout history for oldsters to complain about the comparative unfitness of the young to be trusted with responsibility. But the story by John Burn-Murdoch provides data that shows that all age cohorts are showing changes in personality that work against cooperation, with the declines most marked in the youngest group. He makes the case that conscientiousness is the most important personality trait for personal success. From the pink paper:
In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone’s intelligence or socio-economic background.
Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.
Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.
While the terminology of personality can feel vague, the science is solid. Decades of research consistently finds that all these shifts are in the direction associated with negative outcomes down the line.
If you look at the charts, you’ll see the decay in all of the seen-as-positive attributes (a word on extraversion in due course) predates the Covid lockdowns; the slope on the conscientiousness line is freakishly consistent from about 2016 onward. Neuroticism among the young similarly started to speed its rise before Covid and the rate of decline in agreeableness moderated a tad during the lockdowns. Ditto extraversion. So although the lockdowns didn’t help, they can’t be depicted as a driver of these changes.
Another chart shows considerable decay in self-assessments for all age groups for what one might view as sub-components of conscientiousness (save “can be distracted” where only the youngest group scored deterioration):
As the operator of a postage-stamp-sized business, conscientiousness is absolutely critical. I consider myself extremely lucky both to have exceedingly conscientious writers, moderators, and tech staff who are also very competent. Even at McKinsey in my day, there was an odd tolerance for consultants who were perceived to do brilliant analysis but were a bit sloppy on deadlines. In the news-related publishing business, that type get flushed out quickly. Getting copy in on time is imperative.
Needless to say, in other lines of commerce, while time requirements are not necessarily as exacting, most jobs require a high degree of reliability, such as turning up more or less on time. And let us not forget that being able to push the envelope at your job by making a habit of late arrival (if nothing else annoying co-workers even if you do get your tasks completed as required, since the practice raises the specter that they might have to take up your slack) is a modern luxury. In the days of subsistence farming, it was imperative to plant and harvest when conditions required. Sloughing off was anti-survival.
This fall in reliability also justifies the increasingly common practice among managers of intensive surveillance of their employees, on the pretext that it’s necessary to keep them on task and prevent faffing off. This argument is based on modern Taylorism, that workers should be expected to be machines and operate at a highly productive level during their entire workday. This is a myth; among many others, the Harvard Business Review debunked it, based on a review of over 80 studies.
But cynically, why should younger people be diligent and responsible? The deck is stacked against them with ever rising housing, medical, transporation, and thanks to tariffs, soon-to-arrive higher technology and food costs. Why do anything other than what you can get away with if the system is stacked against you?
The falls in agreeableness1 in those under 60 and extraversion across the board are also striking. Yours truly, as befits a curmudgeonly outlook, regards both as generally overrated, since in combination they help produce and enforce conformity. Comments on Twitter suggest that a reason people don’t wear masks is not wanting to appear different/deviant and worse be on the receiving end of criticism.2 I have long suspected that the reason employers are so keen to promote extraversion and (gah) “positivity” is a desire to keep dissent and doubt to a minimum.
The article provides further evidence of decay in postures considered important for smooth social relations:
With the US propensity to fetishize extraversion and related activities like networking, the fall in “is outgoing” goes very much against that grain. And even though introverts must gird their loins to find the energy to hang out with other people, they will typically concede the value in forging better relations and often getting more insight and information. The fall in trust is striking, and is due to more than a rise in tech-mediated dealings. Back in the early 2000s, Elizabeth Warren decried “tricks and traps” in typical financial services industry contracts. Those tricky practices have become common in other areas, particularly healthcare, witness the explosion in surprise billing and the celebration of St. Luigi.
But it’s not hard, and not wrong, to see tech attachment as the big perp. Again from the article:
While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.
Even so, there are also important reinforcing behaviors. Yours truly is so bold to suggest that pervasive lack of leadership across Western institutions is also playing a big role. Modeling responsible behavior has ripple effects across organizations and into wider society.
Across the board, the Collective West instead has people in authority who, virtually without exception, shirk making difficult decisions, let alone put shoulder to wheel to make sure that ambitious initiatives are seen though to completion. Instead we have Potemkin bosses, pretty faces with soothing voices who really do believe that controlling the narrative is the same as doing the work. Look at the news just this week out of the UK and Europe. The officialdom remains fixated on Project Ukraine rather than doing the guts of their job, which is to assure improving or at least not decaying material standards to their citizens, even in the face of rising poverty and even hunger, energy-cost induced business cutbacks, and budget crises.
And we have the issue we alluded to above: the disconnect between the self-anointed elites and the great unwashed. To the extent those at the top of the food chain care about concrete results, it’s the impact they have on their cohort and not society at large.
We argued in a 2024 post, Devolution and the Decline in Operational Capacity and Elite/Managerial Competence, that technology played a role in this sorry development:
Many pundits and commentators have been taking notice of how a worrisome number of people in positions of power in advanced economies seem unable to manage their way out of a paper bag. This is taking place despite the fact that the US, EU, and UK prize having credentials, as in at least a college education, in many cases advanced degrees, and in some posts, relevant experience (expertise in a particular field). One would think that the attainment of these status markers would require a minimum level of being able to set goals, identify what it would take to reach them, and then work in systematic way towards the objective….
The conventional explanations, of late-state capitalism/neoliberalism run wild and elite malfeasance, do not seem sufficient to explain the pervasiveness and acceptance of rank incompetence. I think we need to consider other factors to get a full picture.
One that seems likely to me is devolution, used in the sense where I first encountered the term, in Fine Arts 13 in college. This was a serious history of arts course, with tough exams.
It used “devolution” to describe how technology made possible increased output at the cost of increased crudeness. The example was carved statues. In the classical Greek era, all statues were made using chisels. In the later Roman period, artists started to use drills. It was not hard to see the difference in the quality of the work; if nothing else, curls and other renderings of hair were subtly cruder with the drills.
Not only did this change result in a reduction of skill levels, but it also may have changed aesthetics, as in produced an acceptance fo the coarser statues and a loss of appreciation for more finely detailed pieces.
To our current situation. I recall reading management guru Peter Drucker, the dean of the later industrial era in the US, worrying around 1980 about how the symbol economy was becoming detached from the real economy and he did not see how that could be reversed…
1980 was just before desktop computing became prevalent. I was one of the last generation on Wall Street to prepare financial analyses and forecasts on green accountants’ ledger paper, ordering SEC and company records from the library, extracting numbers manually and entering them by hand, then crunching numbers with a calculator. That laborious process weirdly had an upside. All the juniors at Wall Street shops understood the ins and outs of financial statements…
The class after mine instead made significant use of company data printed out from Compuserve. That was known to have errors. Yet the normally mistake-phobic Goldman corporate finance department didn’t have a concern about using bad data with clients (who might even recognize some of the Compuserve mistakes), in that the view seemed to be sort-of-official corrupted information was OK. It was also clear these younger bankers wound up less technically knowledgeable.
Now consider just this first order effect. The deskilling of the work would allow more senior people to devalue the labor of the lower ranks, as in see them as not deserving of as much pay. That did not happen in investment banking; the bosses demanded more output instead. But in many fields, from computing to law, entry-level jobs were being substantively hollowed out, with fewer and fewer opportunities to learn tradecraft….
We can see this propensity even more in hourly work, with increased surveillance and explicit productivity demands on seen-as-low-level laborers. The bosses treat them as tools, with little belief that their observations matter or that they have developed skills (beyond mastering company routines) that have much value.
A second effect has been the tendency to mistake menus with meals, which has many manifestations, such as believing that PowerPoint presentations correspond to reality. Again I saw this on Wall Street with the way spreadsheet programs made it vastly easier to run financial forecasts. Before, forecasts were generated only when necessary, such as merger modeling. The reason was they were very costly. One error would make everything to the right incorrect….
Due to the resources and time required, anyone who prepared these forecasts thought long and hard about the underlying scenarios they were meant to represent. But when it became trivial to jigger assumptions and produce yet another model run, I saw not just the M&A bankers but even the clients treat the model as if it were the deal, as opposed to a representation of a deal. Making the numbers work, which had always been a concern, started to become paramount….
The more general point, which I have yet to tie neatly into the decline of operational competence, is that the deployment of technologies has resulted in many many tasks becoming much easier. This has contributed to naive managerialism, that if a subordinate or interlocutor tells someone that a situation is difficult, it must be because they aren’t clever, or worse, are trying to con you by making mountains out of molehills. Many have the propensity to fire or otherwise sideline parties who are trying to give them a picture of unpleasant realities and instead turn to enablers. In the bad old days, there were more natural checks on this sort of behavior, since managers and executives tended to have long job tenures at one or two companies, so bad judgement would catch up with some of them. But with job-hopping, misleading accounting (like hiding losses then having every five year purges, presented as special writeoffs), highly-developed PR and stock buybacks to cover up for poor performance, accountability is virtually non-existent in the corporate arena, where measurable results are supposed to matter.
Burns-Murdoch cheerily contends that despair is not warranted. Personality is malleable, after all. But all the incentives point towards even more of the same.
___
1 A broader societal issue is that most people are not skilled enough at disagreeing without seeming to be disagreeable, as in difficult or obstinate. This is why high-stakes and potentially contentious matters wind up in the hands of diplomats and negotiators. Perhaps things have changed, but when I was in Australia in the early 2000s, it was evident that Aussies were better at handling differences of views than dogmatic and often self-important Americans. They were adept at using humor to make their points.
2 No doubt readers can come up with examples from their own circles, but an example of the power of social assent: a friend who is in a Covid risk category and had been pretty good about masking on the crowd-intensive portions of a trip, literally took hers off on an airplane because she was the only one wearing one, rationalizing that it was only an hour and a half flight. She became very sick afterwards. I don’t recall if she tested herself for Covid, but if not that, it was a bad case of RSV.
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Outstanding piece and food for a lot of thought. If good character is not taught or demonstrated by example, and not rewarded, then we will see less and less of it as time goes by.
What’s striking to me is that even the 60+ cohort is seeing similar, although less pronounced, chances in personality. Rightly or wrongly we tend to think of older folks’ personalities as more ingrained and less subject to change whereas younger people are more maleable. To me this speaks to just how pervasive whatever is causing this is.
One thing I’ll point out is that leadership at the brand name companies I’ve worked at is the shift in priority from quality to speed. I started my career in financial services in the mid 2000s and over the years I’ve noticed that deadlines are tighter but the quality bar is lower. Mistakes are tolerated as long as you deliver the mistakes quickly. This is even more pronounced in the tech sector where I now work. Incentives matter, so lower level employees are now producing massive amounts of questionable work. I don’t think this is due to the inherent nature of younger people, I think it’s due to how they’re evaluated
I am now 60 yo. One observation I do very often about people about my age and elder is that too often they throw in the towel and become embarrassingly accommodative in their behaviour and thinking. It turns less frequent to find someone who still keeps constant ability to think critically about oneself and everything else. To tell the truth, when you see a graph like that think about the many noises that contaminate the data series and try not to take it too seriously. This does not mean to say that a trend cannot be spotted in such studies that is somehow real but beware the noises and do not try to extract too much from the lines drawn.
Boeing.
Not sure when this started, but I saw the same thing in the tech sector mid-90s. Nobody cared about QA — only deadlines. The idea was somehow that all the known problems would get fixed later. My sense is that this idea comes from software development, where bugs and test failures are just accepted and only addressed when certain thresholds of “bugginess” are passed or when customers are specifically complaining.
Software became more something that “suggests” or “demonstrates” a possible solution, at first under very limited conditions, but with a promise that “these limitations will be addressed in a future release” regardless of whether anybody actually intends to do that.
Many years ago, I read an interview with Bill Gates in which he argued that software updates were NOT about fixing bugs but were rather about cool new features. At the time, I thought: “oh… I guess I won’t be updating any M$ apps, but rather looking for third-party or open source alternatives.” ;)
I dislike the term “software engineer” for the very same reason – the programmers don’t care about robustness in the same way that actual engineers have to care.
It goes both ways.
Earlier in my career I’ve had to write software for the safety critical components of an EOD robot, so there’s my name on a bunch of paperwork outlining what safety performance requirements my company (and myself) were held to, the design of the tests we used with the robot to actually prove the hardware reached those safety requirements, and then a record of who was there to independently audit and verify the results. Since I very much have my skin in the game for this system, I would call what I did “Software engineering.”
Usually when programmers don’t care about robustness, it’s from poor oversight and practices passed down from supervisors, project managers, and engineers from other disciplines who treat software as both something that can magically fix the deficiencies of improper hardware design and/or the absence of business/project forecasting, but also as something that doesn’t require careful planning or skill itself to make up for those deficiencies.
The EOD robot project suffered from this mentality, particularly from some of the mechanical engineers who started before I did on the project, but “self-selected” for lack of a better term, off the project and moved on from the company when the deficiencies of the gripper/end-effector used for the project were identified and they were obstinate about addressing them.
Without getting into too much detail, the robot had to be able to reliably pick up and place a device it carried on itself without the device slipping or tipping over. We were behind on delivering a prototype of this robot because it was constantly slipping or tipping this device from where it was carried on board to where it needed to be placed.
Said engineers had always insisted “You have a computer on board, just let it generate a new motion plan if it wobbles around!” Failing to understand: 1) The computer was not powerful enough to generate real-time kinematic solutions for the arm. If the device was wobbling, by the time the arm might have computed a way to save a fumble, the device could have already fumbled. 2) Even if it was powerful enough to generate a real-time solution, it would need some type of sensor to identify what the issue was when picking up and moving the device in front of it. It only had cameras facing forward for when it was placing it, and basically was relying on the tolerance stack for position and orientation uncertainty to retrieve it reliably. 3) From thorough testing/experimentation, we found that not all the tolerance from how the device could be carried/stored could actually be recovered, given the center of gravity of the device itself relative to the gripper picking it up required kinematic solutions the arm could not actually perform, either because certain joints were at the limits of their motion/too-weak, or the arm would self-intersect.
Thankfully the mechanical engineer who replaced the other two previous ones was willing to entertain the idea of modifying the gripper to address some of the deficiencies. Because both of us had prior experience in robotics beforehand, he understood the grasping portion of the gripper was inadequate for the job, and designed one that could more reliably pick up the device, even though it looked ugly/added some material cost to the project. Because the new gripper had a different shape that allowed the device to “slip” out with specific intentional movement instead of unintentionally, I only had to add a constrained number of additional kinematic plans to determine which way the arm would position itself to control the direction of the slip.
The point of this whole long-winded response is that, often time the people who make decisions about when software is released and if it’s determined to be fit are not made by those who write it and sometimes those people are engineers from other disciplines who don’t have an appreciation of how computers work, their limitations, and how the software and workstations they use often have hidden tricks to make it seem like the software is more powerful than it actually is.
That 737 Max thing?
Trailblazer (instead of ThinThread) would never have been ready?
Did anyone care about QA when manufacturing those godawful cars in the 50s, 60s and on? In my opinion US people are always focused on speed before quality. Deming had to go to Japan to be recognized; The Malcom Baldridge Award for Quality Management fell by the wayside after a few short years; even NASA succumbed (see Challenger). Speed kills.
There are bugs, and re “user friendly,” instead too often it’s “user spaced out.” In terms of “logical” steps the phones take you through [laptops almost as bad] they must be decimating the concept young folks have of logic.
These guys do in software like the “brightest & best” did in politics. They seem to be obsessed with proving McLuhan was right [about tech seeming magical], yet in promulgating their idea of magic they actually put magic in a box.
The phones serve as telescreens as well. Most people in vids aren’t wearing masks, so “…a reason people don’t wear masks is not wanting to appear different/” (author) They want to be centrists in the center. Everybody wants it, therefore everybody becomes alike (undifferentiation). Too much alike-ness fosters rivalry and tension. In that modality you can’t organize a “movement” [though you’re primed to fight in a war]. Or I guess you could say Taylorism won’t let you get the movement going. Keeping exhaustive records of what you’re doing on the job it seems to me can get in the way of the job. When the U.S. workforce gets burnt out by that it won’t even believe we can set up chip foundries on home turf (not that I think it would be some great thing; what makes sense now is to import’em (made sense?)).
This is a frequent topic of conversation with friends and family members who are old enough to remember when more people in the gen pop actually gave a flying fig about the quality of their work. Lack of conscientiousness is ubiquitous and pervasive in our society and it is growing every day. It’s nice to see that it’s not just this old timer complaining about what’s been lost but it is a scientific fact. Like the orange moron says, “So Sad!” Thanks for your attention to this matter!
Yesterday this was a headline on the Drudge Report, but the last word “conscientiousness” appeared with one letter missing – “conscientiousnes” – I wondered if this was a typo, or perhaps an intentional witticism demonstrating an effect of the waning of attention to detail.
One of the underlying issues, beyond the addictive nature of smart phones, is that society is no longer capable of articulating a positive vision for the future (or any vision of the future). Why make plans or expend the effort to better oneself or community when there seems to be no reason to do so. Better to take what you can get in the moment or escape into the online world altogether.
Wasn’t there a link recently about COVID reducing empathy?
Idiocracy is inevitable.
“all age cohorts are showing changes in personality that work against cooperation”
Social and economic change cannot happen without solidarity and collective action. The most successful unionizations and revolutions took place 90-150 years ago with class solidarity, unfiltered shared work and life experiences and paper media spreading the messages.
Big tech works diligently to cultivate snowflakes and actively censors sources that encourage solidarity except for tiny woke minorites. “The Century of Self” was 23 years ago; what exists now is a high tech Frankenstein compared to that series. Everything is working according to plan.
“Social and economic change cannot happen without solidarity and collective action. The most successful unionizations and revolutions took place 90-150 years ago with class solidarity, unfiltered shared work and life experiences and paper media spreading the messages.“
Thank you, yes.
Outside my own experiences as both an organizer and event promotor — and how difficult it is to get people who don’t go to things, to go to things — I think a lot about how my dad wasn’t a politically engaged union member but he still spent time at the union hall. There were stories, opinions, and stacks of work-related or ‘blue’ comics printed out on fax paper, shared from the other locals.
My brother, also in the sheet metal union, had friends from the union but I don’t remember him ever spending time at the union hall (was there a social hall by the time he was a member?) for anything other than paperwork, and eventually that was all by phone or online.
woody allen nailed it decades ago: “80%of success in life is just showing up.”
MP:
Would that be the same Woody Allen whose billet doux to Jeffrey Epstein is now making the circuit of the WWW?
yes, but it’s common to be funny AND screwed up.
when did moral purity become a precondition for humor or astute observation?
i missed that memo.
MP: I don’t think that Woody Allen lacks standing because of various scandals in his personal life, some of which sure do seem cooked up.
I think Allen should be criticized for becoming sloppy.
Eighty percent is just showing up? As background wallpaper at a party, proffering a jello mold? As an extra in a film, like Day of the Locust? Love notes to Epstein? Sloppy.
This is analogous to the paradox of corruption. In today’s world, there is no reason why I personally should be honest, except for fear of punishment. Similarly, if I do an incompetent job and leave someone else to tidy up, it’s unlikely that I will suffer, whereas I will economise on time and effort. In the past, external social, political or religious pressures socialised people into the belief that if a thing was worth doing it was worth doing well. But we’ve left all that behind now. So what argument, apart from fear, can you adduce to encourage me to behave conscientiously?
Another thing that I wonder might be the case is that there are multiple sources of pressure that people are under, along with erosion of societal-personal ties, or even professional ones (plus a sense of “honor”/”pride” for the lack of better word). I’m inclined to do work hard and conscientiously on project X because, say, I feel a sense of “honorable obligation” for the people whom I owe the word to plus a sense of professional pride. If the social ties are frayed, neither honor nor pride matter much and the people for whom I’m doing X for are just random images on screen which mean nothing to you. (One might add that, if you have stronger social ties, there will be points of “penalty” that you’ll be subject to further down the line in your usual interactions, too, I suppose). At the same time, if you are subject to pressure from many random schmoes, so to speak, you can only spend so much time on each thing (And by this, I don’t mean just the “work,” but personal obligations, too–to family, friends, and so forth. If anything, to the degree that family and friends exert more “pressure” that matters, the more reason you have to set aside “work” obligations.
PS. Or, in a way, hte causality may be reversed–consciousness may be in decline because the paths towards personal and societal successes have gotten slippery and opaque.
Spot on. My observation is that people who have grown up in situations that lack positive emotional, social and moral qualities seem to march to the drums of self-interest, laziness and dishonesty. And that is just at the family and local level. You can feel sorry for them while at the same time avoiding them like the plague.
I’m not religious, but one of the great things about the Christian religion was that it gave a set of rules for life which aren’t too bad to maintain a community. But the power of religion has dissipated in the last century, to be replaced by the power of self-interest and wealth accumulation by any means possible.
The looters have infested the legislature so much that government services, regulation oversight and general all round lawfulness has been defunded and pilloried as a waste of money.
Sadly, our young are growing up soaked in this pervasive atmosphere of looking out for number one to survive and thrive. And of course social media has amped this up a thousand percent. Social media panders to narcissistic traits and shallow explanations of the world.
The old style tradesman, who knew the town and did a good job both for his reputation and for his peace of mind, has almost completely vanished. I know a few but sadly they are mostly reaching retirement age. Some of the up and comers with their inflated quotes seem like very congenial fellows with laugh lines around their wallets.
“…laugh lines around their wallets.”
Aah, now that phrase brings back some cheerful memories:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyaitC91hEM
I still miss John Clarke terribly. Having him around to describe today’s world with his wry humor would make it just that much more bearable.
Kids learning rhetorical methods in school, with links back to Aristotle, helped build in greater flexibility of thought and verbal agility. There were benefits to many old ways that got lost over the last several decades. The shift toward greater transactionality throughout society led to, and reinforced, the shorter time horizons.
Conscientiousness is a casualty of the relentless war consumer tech companies are waging on our attention spans. In its latest earnings call, Meta celebrated the rise in the time users spent engaging with its family of apps (needless to say the rise in ad revenue that attention capture on such a gigantic scale enables tickled Mr Market in all the right places). People with the attention span of a mayfly may not be good for society but man are they good for the bottomline and rent seeking. It’s hard to be disciplined when your attention is fragmented, and discipline and dependability are bound together in a tangled hierarchy (the latter withers in direct proportion to the former) so the data on the charts isn’t surprising at all.
With AI capex currently outpacing AI revenue by an order of magnitude, expect the depredations of big tech on our attention to kick into high gear to try and recoup their investments. And with that will come the relegation of qualities like conscientiousness to curious relics from a bygone era.
Perhaps less “consumer tech companies” as much by modern “consumer tech”? There are too many things pulling on people’s attention. Prioritization is increasingly hard. Without senses of loyalty, pride, and honor (and all these are “social” qualities that come out of interactions with people), you are not sure what to put first anyways. The younger people are likely to be affected more, but everyone would be hit by this and that seems consistent with the article.
…..Are we not entertained?
A whole generation of young adults was brought up not having to remember anything, a smartphone will do it for you.
A lot of what passes for conscientiousness & socialization is remembering shit.
God my life would be so much richer if I could just remember any of it. But I was never a young adult ether, as far as I can remember.
first 5 years i was out here, i used the phone(landline, natch) over in the big barn at moms house. i’d get a call, and she’d go out on the front porch and shine a q-beam towards my trailer…or yell, since i didnt have a/c and the winders were open,lol.
and i’d mosey over and call whomever back.
prior to cell fones, one had to keep numbers in one’s head, too….there are still many written on the frame boards of the barn where that phone used to be..
i still remember many numbers from my youth.
these days, i dont go around the farm with either the cordless landline, nor my cell…they are parked at the bar.
but i check them when i breeze in for a cig, a break, or lunch…
i tell myself its in case my boys have need of me…but if i’m honest, i’m lookin for a dopamine hit.
less tangential to the initial premise of this offering by Yves: it was our youngest son who got the full on smart fone experience…as well as the ipad, video game and so on.
his work ethic, on-time-ness, and etc are markedly worse than our eldest’s.
i gave him a new nickname a year or so ago: Glacier.
because he is always late.
seems to show up at his various jobs on time…and not mess around with his fone when he’s there…but otherwise, he’s addicted to the damned thing.
and he forgets so many things…like “pick me up some milk”,lol.
i reckon part of it is, beyond the tech intrusion(which i was against), in his early days, my hip had full on died, and i was struggling mightily to raise and take care of 2 little boys….and to my shame, and eldests eventual betterment, i required the latter to step up at 4 yo to help me lug around all the paraphernalia one requires with a baby=>toddler.
so Youngest didnt get the full on, and solo, socratic treatment that Eldest got.
Tech definitely had a large effect on Youngest’s development, tho.
Our builder 12 years ago took on a young apprentice as a favour to his friend, the father.
At every opportunity the apprentice disappeared round a corner, behind the shed, behind his ute, down the paddock etc, to play with his phone. In the end the builder confiscated the phone for a while to get the apprentice to do some work.
That apprentice would be in his thirties now. Unless he saw the light, he is probably cutting corners, charging high, and going home early.
Not to mention the young plumbers who came to put in our hot water system, and decided to call it a day because a small part was missing and they would have to go to the hardware store 5 mins away. Their boss put them right though.
Back in the day people who were work-shy got the nickname Thallium – a slow working dope.
There is much to think about here. I’d say that digitization has meant detachment from the physical world and its limits. I am always thankful that my career is in publishing — producing physical books that go in a warehouse — rather than filling in Excel documents. Excel is the fate of many of our peers. My fate is black ink on paper.
Some of the lack of conscientiousness stems from this detachment from the physical world. Think of the reminders at theaters to the audience to shut up. They don’t know that there are actors on stage? Further, because I write letters, and I pretty much always have, I note that very few people of any age are capable of writing a letter. Not even a postcard. No moment of making words of affection, or a witticism, physical. (Compare: Grindr / Tinder)
Likewise, we see digitization destroying certain art forms: I submit that photography isn’t photography unless the image can be printed. If all one is doing is making Flickr galleries, it is the equivalent of old-style contact sheets. This aligns with Yves Smith’s observations about use of the drill to make statues.
Then our young ‘uns (those under 50) are looking for transportation through Uber, reading their telephones instead of maps, and scrolling Tinder and Grindr for love. And let’s not talk about the job boards, which lead to having to go through seventeen interviews for some bullshit jobs.
Here in the Undisclosed Region, the Piedmontese are notoriously conscientious. They wash the sidewalks. The other Italians think that the Piedmontese are a tantino too conscientious and considerate.
Yet a lesson that I keep bumping against is the meticulousness of Italians. That fine Italian hand. The appreciation of craft. The ability to use skill. Americans swarm Italy for the conscientiousness of Italian service, the atmospheric hotels, the atmospheric restaurants, but the marvel is the meticulousness, right down to how the farmers in the markets make little bouquets out of the rucola and arrange the fennel.
Of course, I am the complete Myers-Briggs ISTP, as some may have noticed. Grain of salt needed, eh.
The culprit, I suggest, is neoliberalism, which is all avarice and exploitation. The culprit is digitalization, which stopped solving our problems years ago. Maybe we should have stopped at e-mail. And the problem is when people fall into radical dualism (“he left his body”) and make everything disposable. There be monsters: Look at the quality of presidential candidates of late: Hillary “Deplorable” Clinton, Donald “Peace Prize” Trump, Joe (or was there no Joe there?) Biden, Kamala “I’m Speaking Bullshit” Harris.
Other than that, things here in the Chocolate City are quiet and, errr, meticulous. They sure do make a good caffè shakerato.
It may be that the young are having problems, but let’s also keep in mind that perspective (and lack thereof) is a problem. I believe that someone once published this anecdote about Themistocles in the comments. Plutarch, natch, one of the most conscientious and meticulous observers of humankind, tells us:
Plutarch, Themistocles (18.5): (5) Of his son, who lorded it over his mother, and through her over himself, he said, jestingly, that the boy was the most powerful of all the Hellenes; for the Hellenes were commanded by the Athenians, the Athenians by himself, himself by the boy’s mother, and the mother by her boy. (Bernadotte Perrin, Ed., via Perseus Project)
Maybe USonians should be a little more demanding — of themselves and of others — but with Themistocles’ wit.
What strikes me about this article is how downward directed it seems, at least to me.
What about conscientiousness in the employer class? Nothing in this life is free, not even loyalty or conscientiousness. You get what you pay for, and if you don’t pay to have conscientious workers, or are not a conscientious employer, you will not have them. Just as, if you aren’t loyal to your workers, you won’t have loyal workers.
Conscientiousness isn’t rewarded at any level. Employers are under pressure to squeeze workers as much as possible and to discard them for AI as soon as they can
I did say, and pretty clearly, that the young have reasons not to be conscientious given how the deck is so stacked against them.
Moreover, you are the one who made it all about employment. That is your projection.
A lack of conscientiousness is harmful to the self. It means an inability to stick to things, from a healthy diet to regular exercise to mastering skills, like learning a new language or mastering a craft, or having the self-discipline to be attentive enough to a partner to keep them.
When one has hired and fired as many people as I have for various levels of skill and experience, one gets a sixth sense about how it is going to work out from the projected vib in spite of credentials. Employers hire for different reasons then employees seek work. It varies but there has to be some mutuallity in order for it to work. Unless you like working a miserable job pay should be secondary. There has to be some effort at whatever level to contribute to the enterprise. A bad attitude, no matter what the level of skill or position in the enterprise, just becomes a weak spot in the structure. Of course there are a$$holes to be found in all corners but that is not really what this discussion is about. What we are speaking of is more akin to morality. These are things one learns from role models and good parenting not rap music. But I agree loyalty must be earned.
a lot of my left leaning peers do a thing where theyre like “i dont owe my employer anything, its fine to do a terrible job at work because im not getting paid to do an incredible job”
and for a while i was like “so true, employers evil, yay communism” but in practice when im out working my low paying kitchen jobs i end up being like “omg i need to work harder as to not let my coworkers down.” like if i put in extra effort to chop chicken really fast, that means my coworkers will have less work to do, and i like my coworkers and frankly, as one of the youngest employees, id rather it be me than someone with back problems. it sounds like im moralitywanking and humblebragging here or smth but its something i struggle with bc on one hand: why should i put extra effort into a job that doesnt care abt me? on the other hand: my coworkers do care for me and i deeply care for and respect my coworkers and am pathetically desperate for their approval. like it is pathetic how much i just want them to like me.
sometimes i spin this in a machiavellian angle where if i am nice to my coworkers now and do a good job, they will like me and want to give me things in the future. maybe not my boss specifically, but a coworker who jumps jobs and is like “yo wanna come work at this better place with me?” a combination of this website, catholic theology, and chemistry did a number on my mind where i do view everything as debt, and the goal is to be nice to people, thus putting them into your debt, but like implicitly. not to be like “you owe me” but to make them feel like they owe me, then reap profits.
like. if nobody owes anyone conscientiousness, nobody is going to do anything. like if ur waiting for ur boss 2 b nice 2 u first, and hes also waiting 4 u 2 b nice 2 him first, neither of u r ever gonna b nice 2 each other. someone has to be the first mover. someone has to start a debt of kindness in order for the debt to be repayed. and not everyone is gonna repay that debt which is why u must make like a bank and assume some risk in ur investments.
and like dude. its not just ur employers. its also ur coworkers. i will admit that ive been blessed to never have had a bad job, but i work for my coworkers and not for my boss. at the end of this year im jumping ship to a better paying job but like im not gonna let my coworkers down still. ppl go on abt unionizing but unionizing starts with being nice 2 ur coworkers. some coworkers will suck but some are so awesome.
i feel like i sound annoying and preachy here but it just bothers me how so many people i know r like “i dont work hard because it doesnt benefit me” when A) that just seems so boring and B) working hard does benefit u sometimes tho. like. it very much can benefit u. maybe not monetarily, but in terms of friendships? priceless.
youd make a fine boss, with some more experience in foodservice, if it is afforded to you in our post-empire future.(perhaps an Inn, like in game of thrones)
i was a good boss…in foodservice(25 years or so)…and in hiring farmhands.
treat yer people good, and they’ll backatcha…as my grandad used to say.
bosses?
fuck the bosses.
they are to be used.
extract as much as you can from them, and they might even respect you for it…which is quite perverse,lol.
but always treat your coworkers with respect, listen to them rant, etc.
What you’re describing here seems to me to be the essence of the ethos underlying the original gift economies. There’s a healthy recognition of reciprocity and mutuality’s — you probably shouldn’t feel terribly guilty about it, since it’s a feature of human biology and anthropology.
Consider people like Donald Trump, Ursula von der Leyen, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. They are all dishonest, self-righteous, uncooperative, and morally bankrupt. In modern times, honesty and cooperation are despised. This is not a generational issue, but rather a zeitgeist issue.
This morning I caught a few moments of a long interview with the original founder of Tesla, Martin Eberhard, and was struck by what a not-a-hole the guy was. My next thought was well of course he got driven out of the company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KHfX_kPIY
Side-question about usage: when did “societal” replace “social”?
There might have originally been a shade of difference in their meanings, but they now appear to be used interchangeably, with “societal” gaining ground.
Syllabic inflation rules?
Raymond Williams from ‘Keywords’ [hat tip Lambert]:
: Society is now clear in two main senses: as our most general term for the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live; and as our most abstract term for the condition in which such institutions and relationships are formed.
This coheres with Yves thesis and your question on the fundamental of ‘relatively large group’. In the not-long-ago, social skills were almost exclusively face-to-face; even phone calls required some implicit coordination. But with electronic mediation, the dating pool may be regional, the best friends may be on the other side of the planet. That vast increase in the size of the group requires an institutional framework, which an app provides. A social group can be as small as two people. ‘Societal’ is more accurate for mass-produced relationships. From the chisel to the drill.
Personal honor?
If anyone brings up honor or anything like that, they will be mocked in the current American society.
Ah, yes, honor. Honor used to be very personal. Ask Alexander
Hamilton. Honor (along with ‘Glory’) lured hundreds of thousands
to die on the battlefield. I think WWI ended that episode. Andrew
Jackson carried several bullets in his body throughout his life
defending his (and his wife’s) honor. “Honor killings” are still popular
in a number of Islamic nations. Judges are still known as “Your Honor”. Societies are generally classified as ‘Shame Societies”,
or “Death Societies. Japan is an example of the former, The US
of the latter.
Whether honor is still a relevant trophe in what passes
for ‘civilization’ these days is another question entirely.
I fall within the 16-39 cohort, as do many of my coworkers. I agree there is little reward for us to be hard-working. Owning a home and raising a family seems nearly unattainable. When not unattainable it appears so financially burdensome as to be undesirable (becoming house poor does not seem fun). Why be diligent? The strategy at least at my workplace is to do as little as possible without attracting the attention of our boss. Something I’ve also observed in my age group is the obsession with the idea of investing ones way out of active employment or at the very least counteracting the declining living standard with a growing portfolio. Fairly unrealistic for some lowly paid blue collar schmucks.
I am pretty old so not very smart but a lot of perspective. I have always worked hard but my object was not to buy a house or get rich. That’s a lie. I always wanted to get rich but unlike many of my contemporaries I was willing to work hard. Knowledge became my most important goal. In pursuit of money I needed to know more. I’m not talking about some accredited profession. First I was a machinist. Then a tool and die maker then a hydraulic mechanic then a fluid power system designer. Because I had previous experience in actually making shit I was able to set up my own shop and bid finished work for government infrastructure. I didn’t really start making good money until I was over 55.
Think outside the box. Opportunity abounds. Sometimes looking at what constrains you blinds you to what potential is right in front of you. Try investing in yourself.
Yes, it also assumes future ROI from the everything bubble.
I wonder how much of this is caused by a combination of burnout and overwhelm.
E.g., I’m in my mid-40s and I feel way less conscientious (and crankier too) than I did 5-10 years ago. I just feel like, to get everything done I need to do, I kind of need to rush through things.
Also, I feel there’s an incompetence cascade effect, where someone else’s incompetence makes you more incompetent because you have to expend time/energy to fix/work around their mistake.
FWIW, my social media usage has probably gone down over that time period.
I agree overall, and I especially agree about the poor leadership. When top leaders are obviously morons and self-centered, it trickles down in so many ways. It sets an example of poor behavior, encourages helplessness and hopelessness, and more.
Thank you for the well written and very relative essay on a attribute critical to a positive human experience—imo.
Extrapolates across everything societal, though your exposition leans towards ‘business’.
That first graphic categories, and that red line crowd(16-39) got me thinking about the increase in trash (litter) I have been collecting daily/weekly along my modest 600’ of road frontage.
For 38 years now.
Same low income subsidized apartments at the end of the road. Same trailer park using the same road. Apparently same 16-39 demographic through the cycle over those 38 years.
One hands worth of trash every now and then in 1987.
A 5 gallon bucket of trash twice a week(maybe more) nowadays—as well as the not infrequent plastic bag of household trash falling off from the forgotten morning chore of a dumpster visit.
(In my experience, nobody comes back for those).
Anecdote is not data—but lack of conscientiousness among the 16-39 sure is implicated.
We haul our own trash to the ‘green boxes’ and every 6 weeks at least 1 of our 40 gallon cans is filled with my neighbors trash.
And I don’t even want to get started on not giving pedestrians picking up roadside trash a wide vehicular berth….
The article reports on four of the five OCEAN axes. What’s missing? Intellect, or open-mindedness. Is it that in today’s modern world, open-minded people are a obstacle?
My father survived the Second World War and was bitterly disappointed that the sacrifices of his contemporaries were rendered meaningless by the failure of the civil rights movement to deliver on the promise of equality, by the mindless slaughter of the Vietnamese people, and by the grossly dishonorable behavior of Richard Nixon and his cronies.
The idealism of Woodstock was bookended a few months later by the murderous nihilism of Altamont. It has been downhill ever since. The meaningless, petty, and often mean-spirited self-gratification practiced by those two draft-dodgers Slick Willie and Donny Bone-spurs are emblematic of the Altamont generation and the culture of nihilism over which they have presided since 1970.
It is still possible to aspire to knowledge, morality, and meaning — but only if you were able to avoid the brain-worms of television, mass media, and organized sports.
Didn’t Martin Luther King say, “If you’re a janitor, be the best janitor you can be”.
Advice that is never out of date.
MLK
A much broader and profound statement that along with his critique of Vietnam, Riverside Church (April 4, 1967), marked his assassination exactly a year later.
His was a voice that the Empire could not abide.
As to my quote of MLK:
Transcript of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at SMU on March 17, 1966
There is still a long way to go, even now.
I should add that I am an irredeemable atheist.
Well, I’m an outlier, though past my own sell by date, for musicians, classical and jazz, you show up and you deliver. The youngsters today are doing both. The credentialed or not are holding forth. Of course it’s the same old same old, there’s never enough work, except sometimes there is. For the credentialed with student debt the dire can set in more precipitously. I was not credentialed but determined and I made my way. The most gifted did not need a bleeping credential, though that has been a woeful tendency. That is a story in itself.
As an oldster with Gen Z students for some years now, I go back and forth on this. In my experience, the want-to-be-elite-and-credentialed mostly can’t even show up.
Example: I used to organize film screenings for the students. After switching to a more elite school, I noticed a significant change. As before, I would solicit interest — their hands would always go up, calendars would be checked and confirmed weeks in advance — but then on the appointed day, none would show. It was made very clear that the films were from an archive and not available anywhere else — not on YT, streaming, DVD, torrents, etc. I also tried making the screenings an actual class assignment, but that had surprisingly little effect.
The excuses for failing to show up were generally some “busyness” that could never really be defined, or else sudden vacay travel, which they seem to be doing more and more in the middle of a semester. After these complete no-show events happened a number of times, I mostly gave up trying.
Fast forward a few years, and I had a request from a group of students about this. I replied that a screening room could be reserved at the school, they could watch there, and they just had to let me know the time. They did that, I reserved the room, the staff waited, but the students never appeared. Not even one. No email to say “sorry”. Nothing. No communication at all. I had to apologize to the staff for making them wait around for nothing.
After dealing with this for some years, I go back and forth on Gen Z. It’s like they never got the memo that “80% of success is showing up”. It’s hard to imagine planning any events for them in the future.
I hope these students can actually find jobs after graduation, but between this chronic inability to show up, all the middle managers who want AI “Artisans” (lol) to eliminate entry-level jobs (AI apps that Gen Z are also helping to train, btw), and the overproduction of bachelor degrees, it’s hard to feel terribly optimistic.
I’m not sure what to even say to students about this. It’s not even “being conscientious”, but rather a more basic value (i.e., word is bond) which many of them don’t seem to take seriously at all.
I’m now interested in these generational designations, and their material/social conditions. To bake into my broader understanding.
im 21 and my answer is that phone time is so easy compared to the perils of trying, and there are no punishments if you do a terrible job. (a lack of enforced standards.)
every day i wake up and ask myself “how do i keep getting away with my terrible papers?”. whenever someone makes me try im like “oh thank god” and become desperate for their approval. my favorite professors are always the ones who scare me into trying and never the ones who give me too much leeway. part of this is my own neuroticisms. another part is how there are genuinely so few consequences to doing a bad job. no standards. no punishments. it makes me feel insane sometimes. things have gotten better since i got further in my studies but it has felt like nobody ever cares so i dont care either. and it’s so much easier to not care than care.
i cant comment on the workplace. i have never had a real job. i remain delusionally confident that i will be fine because if i dont i will get really sad, and being sad about the future is the least helpful thing i can do rn.
It would be interesting to see this survey broken down by country. I recently read (somewhere) that 70% of the younger citizens in China own their homes as opposed to about 15% of that same group in America. I know China has problems, but it would be interesting to see if those in China that are able to live the “
AmericanChinese Dream” are more socially engaged than the same age group in other countries especially America where housing prices and rent are so high.Plus I do remember reading quite some time ago that the tech people working on the smartphone (or smart device) software in Silicon Valley were not getting these devices for their children. My children were already adults by then, but I think that would have gotten my attention if they were still young:
Why many Silicon Valley parents are curbing their kids’ tech time
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/silicon-valley-parents-are-raising-their-kids-tech-free/
Even with all that, my kids did not get even dumb cell phones until they were at least able to drive/had a job after school despite us constantly hearing that all their friends had cell phones.
Just finished reading Karl Polyani’s “The Great Transformation.” I can’t help but think that the growth in these individual shortcomings, which are just symptoms of the underlying societal decay, is directly tied to both the rise of machine technology, starting in the early 19th century, and the rise of what the new machines made possible, what Polyani called the “self regulating market,” in the mid 19th century. A very fascinating read that is still relevant today. Societal decay has accelerated with the rise of mass information and communication technology, and the global rollout of the neoliberal economic system, the most virulent form of capitalism yet, over the past 50 years. This is the dream come true of Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman that Polyani warned us about…and of course our billionaire ruling class…a total market takeover of society. And this is the nightmare that the rest of society has been fighting to prevent.
Lest indeed.
I’m in the over 60 group now, and the Keynesian world I grew up in was a far more conscientious world than the neoliberal world my kids are growing up in. In today’s world conscientiousness does not pay. It may even get you punished, severely punished. Just look at all the bad that college administrators, at the behest of our federal government, are reigning down upon the college students who dare organize and protest against the genocide in Gaza. Just look at how the remaining conscientious Republican politicians were quickly purged from the party for denying that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Just look at how the Democratic party knee capped the Bernie Sanders campaign in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Conscientiousness is of no value, even negative value, in today’s neoliberal world. Credit the young for recognizing what their elders have been slow to recognize and adjust to.