Internet Dad Walsh Is Here With A Reality Check
Episode Stats
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197.33673
Summary
Gen Z complains that he has to work 40 hours a week just to survive, and wants to live a life without having to go to school or buy a car. Does he have a point? Or does he just want to spend more time with his family?
Transcript
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Our first daily cancellation of the week revisits a theme that we have become familiar with in this
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segment. Another video has gone viral of a young person, appears to be Gen Z, bitterly lamenting
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the fact that he's expected to work. In fact, he says that this expectation is sick and twisted,
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quote unquote. Here he is. It's sick and twisted that I have to work just to survive, just to live
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my life for basic ass necessities. I don't want to work until the day I die just to eat
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and sleep. Free housing, free health care shouldn't be a pipe dream. And I know a lot of people are
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going to be like, oh, you should be doing this or that. No. Like, what if I don't want to be rich?
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What if I want to achieve? I still have to work till the day I die just to live, just to survive.
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People give up their entire lives just to retire at the ripe age of 60 whatever. For what? To get
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paid dirt even then? Just to feed into a capitalistic system that does not give a s*** about you.
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God didn't make me the smartest angel, but I know that s*** needs to change. And I don't want to be
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told that I should be s*** happy to have a job where it's taking up 40 hours of my s*** week.
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You know, I want to spend time with my family. I want to do s*** that is fulfilling to me.
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But all that s***, like, requires so much privilege. It requires so much wealth. And
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That's it? Only 40 hours a week? That is incredible to me. I can't even, like, conceive of only doing
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40 hours of work in a week. Okay, so we have, again, a young man who appears to be well-fed,
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appears to be living in some kind of comfortable shelter, presumably a house or an apartment,
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and who is obviously blessed with any number of luxuries like a phone, internet connection,
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we can assume copious amounts of hair product. He has all of this and yet doesn't believe that
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work should be a requirement to maintain it. It's sick and twisted that he should have to work just
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to live, let alone to afford his hair conditioner. As I've often said in response to these kinds of
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disturbingly common complaints from his generation, b***ing about the fact that you have to work is like
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b***ing about the fact that you have to breathe. You might as well make a video whining like,
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you're telling me I have to breathe every second of the day just to live? Exhale, inhale, exhale,
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inhale all the time just to live? What if I don't want to breathe? What if I want to live at the
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bottom of the ocean like a starfish? Why should breathing be a requirement? This is sick and
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twisted. On a certain way, you'd be kind of right. It is unfortunate that we have to breathe.
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We have to eat. We have to sleep. All of these are chores that we are compelled to complete every day,
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or in some cases, every second of the day. It'd be a lot easier if we didn't have to do any of that.
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It'd be easier if we could exist as immortal, indestructible supermen who need nothing and
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want nothing and can do anything without expending any energy at all. That would be nice.
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But that is not how things are. He says that there should be a universal housing, universal health
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care, and we should be given all the food that we need to eat. Who exactly is building the houses
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that we are living in? Who is cultivating the food? You could say, well, the government will do it.
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But the government is not a genie that can make things materialize out of thin air. The government
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can only hire, or more likely conscript, other people to build the homes and harvest the food
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and so on. No matter what system is in place, someone, lots of people, have to work in order
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to keep all of society afloat and all of the many mouths, including your own, fed. Capitalism doesn't
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demand it. Life demands it. What you are demanding is not that you get to drop out of the system,
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but that you be granted the privilege of benefiting from it without contributing to it.
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Hey, Dale, I noticed your lawns getting a little high.
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That's what you want. You have all the moral credibility of a plantation owner in the 1840s.
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You have less moral credibility, in fact, because even those plantation owners
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personally did more work than what you're willing to do, apparently.
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You know, you're sitting there saying, hey, I have a proposal. Here it is. I'll do nothing at all,
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and you guys will take care of me and do all the work, and in exchange, I will contribute
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absolutely nothing of value to the world. How's that sound?
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Sounds like life needs to give you some shock therapy, son.
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By the way, just so you know, the only reason you're able to exist and survive as such a soft,
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non-contributing little brat is because of capitalism. You complain that capitalism has
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made your life so difficult, but in fact, the greatest indictment on capitalism is that it has
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made your life far too easy. Prior to our modern capitalistic age, somebody with your attitude would
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be dead. You would have died a long time ago. That's the situation that most people historically
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have faced, and even today in most parts of the world. You are working every day, every single day,
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sun up to sun down, and when the sun goes down, you fall asleep dead tired, and then you get up and
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you do it all over again. And if you tried to drop out of that system, you either would have died of
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starvation or else the other people in your community or village would have banded together
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and killed you. But let's not allow that to distract us from a more important point.
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As a young man, you shouldn't want to not work. You shouldn't want to coast through life. As a young
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man, you should have big dreams and goals. You should have designs on conquering the world. You may lack
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wisdom and experience, but you should not lack for ambition. I mean, that's the one thing you should
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not lack for. I can remember being in my early 20s. I was impulsive, somewhat petulant. Some would say
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I still am on both counts, but I had ambition. If someone had offered to hand me a million dollars
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when I was like 22, I would have taken it because I'm not crazy, but I didn't want it to be handed to
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me. I didn't sit around dreaming of that. My dream was not winning the lottery.
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I wanted to earn it myself. I wanted to do it myself so that I could say that I did it. I wanted
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to scratch and claw my way to success. I just look with revulsion at the young people who don't have
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this ambition. The folly of youth is supposed to be an overabundance of ambition, fearlessness,
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a propensity to take too many risks, to be too wild in the risks that you take. If you're a young
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person, you have no family, no kids, nothing. You can move anywhere. You can try different things.
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You can take risks. There's almost nothing at stake. How can you be this jaded and lazy already?
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Well, I know the answer. And it's not that the world is so much harder for young people today.
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I don't want to hear that. It's not that they've been dealt a tougher hand than anyone else in
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history was ever dealt. Now, there are some unique and profound challenges that young people today
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face, of course, but you don't have to go back that far in history to find generations who face
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struggles that none of us could ever conceive of. That's how hard they were. I think the answer is
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much more banal. The fact is that the digital age, phones, screens, porn, video games, social media,
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has acted as a great mental numbing agent. Kids aren't programmed from a young age to seek
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stimulation and affirmation from anything but the little dopamine machines that they carry around
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in their pockets. The only success they crave is the kind that can be measured in likes and shares.
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They're never alone with their own thoughts long enough to develop the sort of rich inner life where
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all of those dreams and ambitions are supposed to live and grow.
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Now, there may be more to the problem, but there isn't much more to it than that. I don't think
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there is. We got an entire generation addicted to phones practically from birth, and as a result,
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we destroyed for many of them any hope that they might become successful and well-rounded as people.
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And along with that, we destroyed civilization as well. But the good news is that the aliens are just
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going to vaporize us anyway. So it's all a moot point.