Whatever You Think of Millennials, Gen Z, and Generation Alpha

They're going to have the last word

Okay, I get it. These feckless kids, always wanting something like a payoff on their student loans, or a shot at actually buying a home or, lately, even a new car, just burn you up with their bloated sense of entitlement. Who the hell do they think they are, anyway?

And now, of all things, after you sent them all home from the office for two years over a phony pandemic, they discovered they rather enjoyed working from inside their own four corners, and so are reluctant to return to the cubicles to which their supervisors, deprived for several years of the pleasures of terrorizing their worker peons for their own good, wish to re-consign them.

Now, like everything else these days, this is as much a class issue as anything else. After all, nobody sent the farm workers home, or the guys keeping the power stations running, or any of the other job classes that involved grease, dirty fingernails, hard physical labor, or, especially, working class white men. If you were a so-called “knowledge worker,” or a laborer in a “digital profession,” ie, one in which the work product could be delivered over phone lines or distributed networks, well then, to hell, er, to home with you, and right now. And be grateful - after all, we are saving you from a dreadful death-by-Covid which, for most of you, involves about a .00001 percent chance of actually affecting you in any terminal manner.

Since I spend a lot of time preaching on the virtues of not overlooking potential downsides, lest they return and bite you upside your ass, I have to confess I enjoyed a great deal of healthy mirth over the shocked expressions in C-suites across the land when the banished serfs chorused as one, “Oh, god, please, don’t throw us in that work-from-home briar patch! And most certainly, above all, please don’t make us leave it to return to your halcyon cube farms!”

Who could possibly have imagined? Well, aside from anybody with even half a functioning brain who had never experienced cube life in any meaningful way, I mean…

It’s no accident that support for the work from home position increases with each generation that succeeds the source of all evil. the Bad Boomers. By the time Gen Alpha reaches an age sufficient to make them eligible for cubicle incarceration, they may well have decided to oppose work of any sort. If they are clear-eyed enough, they may even wonder out loud why they should be expected to work in order to supply tax support to illegal aliens, welfare layabouts, or reparations-addled ethnics who have their gibme hands out.

Which should actually work out fairly well, since they’ll be hitting that age just about the time that AI renders about sixty percent of the cubicle jobs in America unavoidably obsolete. (Many of them are already obsolete, but so far we have managed to avoid admitting that openly).

In fact, we can’t admit that, because the entire structure of entitlement America rests on a foundation of American workers paying the piper for the retirement of all the generations preceding them. Knocking half of that income stream straight to flinders would send a jolt through America’s nursing homes, retirement communities, and public golf courses like nothing since the powers-that-were decided it was an excellent idea to let Covid victims “recover” among the one group in the country that was actually threatened by the mostly non-deadly disease - our seniors.

We have always, one way or another, depended on our kids to take care of us if and when we are no longer able to do so ourselves. Modernity has tried to replace “kids” with “government,” but a quick look at Social Security, Medicare, and a slew of other such programs currently approaching the “suddenly” state of Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, (It happens gradually, then suddenly) should tell you everything you need to know about the success of that strategy.

Cube farms are going away, whether you like it or not. Trying to cram the kids back into them won’t slow that a bit. If anything, it will accelerate it.

Suddenly.