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Honestly? It looks to me like there are now generations of people who were never even shown what hard work looks like, or would sacrifice looks like, or would deferring gratification looks like. They've only ever been told how to consoom, and now they've consoomed as hard as they were told and they're not sure why they're deeply in debt, miserable, making no money, have no family, working a shit dead end job.

And in the suffering that is produced by completely eliminating deferred gratification, they think that that is work because it is hard, and it is true that their lives are hard don't get me wrong -- but their lives are hard because they've already taken their reward, not because they deferred gratification to receive a greater reward tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm just sounding like a grumpy old man.

Seems like some Old testament shit to me. Like, you need to have faith in doing the right thing even if you're being punished for it because even if they cast you into flames your faith in doing the right thing will be rewarded, and if you lose faith in doing the right things then that sin will be passed down to your children whether it seems fair or not.

Going back to the old testament, the Israelites weren't told to go with the flow and do what they were told by the government or the people around them. Kings fucked up and failed to be virtuous, people fucked up and failed to be virtuous, populations fucked up and failed to be virtuous, even Moses and the Israelites routinely fucked up and failed to be virtuous (Moses was cursed by God to never see the promised land because of his hubris), and as a direct result of that, unnecessary suffering was brought upon those people.

Even the new testament which is substantially more chill than the old testament has a strong message of not just conforming to the pressure of whatever society you're in at the moment. Jesus could have just said "yeah, the Pharisees are totally chill and correct" and not gotten himself crucified, but that's not what happened -- he had a vision of right and wrong and pushed for that vision regardless of what the Pharisees said.

Now all that being said, I think it's a false dichotomy to say that self-sacrifice and hard work don't work when you're doing it in a certain way so it doesn't work period and you should throw yourself on your sword to spite your masters. If working for corporate overlords isn't working, then it's time to change strategy, but that doesn't mean hard work and sacrifice aren't a way to get ahead, it just means you need to direct your hard work and sacrifice towards something that'll actually be beneficial, even if it's not something beneficial to the powerful people around you. If you can't do better by being a good corporate drone, then you do better by betting yourself, your family, your community. It's a matter of faith of course that if you pay into the future that you'll have a better future, but when the alternative is just self-destruction it's not a bad gamble.