Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

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> Where’s my check?

That right there is the real problem. I’m convinced a huge motivation for a lot of the current performative outrage is a combination of conscious and unconscious anxiety about having very little to no real skill based leverage or ownership/stewardship of things that anchor you to society, like housing and kids. That’s the sympathetic angle. The unsympathetic angle is laziness and greed. Both are applicable.

Everything is so damn complicated and fast paced and fewer and fewer people seem to know how anything actually works. That means fewer and fewer people know what a reliable career track will be. A lot of people can’t pivot their skillset nearly as fast as tech is demanding and they’re worried they’re going to be made obsolete and left without any viable alternative path if the one they’re on dries up.

I think a lot of the performative outrage would disappear if the middle class regained stability and people felt like they owned something rather than felt like a replaceable cog in an unintelligible bureaucratic machine.

Whose performative outrage? The complainant from the article, or the one you just responded to? They are both complaints. A huge assumption underlying the post you responded to is that there's some check, waiting. Perhaps this is driven by media reports of examples that titillate viewers, but I think it's a fairly unfounded assumption. Underlying any of those cases is a fact pattern that has to go beyond whatever the headline trivialization of the case is. I've had limited experience litigating employment cases, but in my time, I did not come away with the impression that a client could walk into my office, complaining that somebody called him a "G", and I tell them that they are going to need to start picking out a new boat.

There is the other side of the coin that you are discussing, and it's what I pointed out above. The belief that all these things are an easy out to the financial problems you have, and that's the only reason why someone would complain about being called a "G".

The cases of actual litigation with a big payout are rare, but the cases of people in paid positions meant to prevent big payouts and to make sure employees are speaking to each other and hiring people in the least risky way possible are not. That’s been a huge industry.

I’m not arguing that there’s no legitimate level of complaint or job for helping employees relate to each other better, or that people shouldn’t strive to relate to each other naturally on each others’ terms, but it seems like there’s been a steep rise in bureaucracy that is less about actually encouraging productive cooperation and happy employees and a lot more about job stability for the bureaucracy.

That can be true despite there being a majority of good faith participation in that bureaucracy and a lot of employees who believe in the mission. If you get a job and you’re a decent person, which I believe the majority of people are, you want to do a decent job. But if it’s hard to find other comparable jobs, the need to feed and house yourself usually overrides considering whether or not your job is actually exacerbating the problem you’re tasked with solving.

I don’t think having people dedicated to monitoring employee communication for insensitive interactions and training people in the way that is currently done typically helps, I think it typically makes employees more paranoid and prone to overanalyzing interactions due to increased focus on sensitivities. Which is tragic, because again, I think most employees who get involved in jobs to help people communicate better legitimately want to be making a positive impact.

>The cases of actual litigation with a big payout are rare, but the cases of people in paid positions meant to prevent big payouts and to make sure employees are speaking to each other and hiring people in the least risky way possible are not. That’s been a huge industry.

What does that have to do with people thinking that complaining that someone called you a "G" means you are now going to be rich? Seems completely besides the point. In fact, your whole response is.

I am not talking about people wanting to be rich. I am talking about people who want a stable paycheck and a middle class life.

A lot of performative outrage seems to be propping up a very large white collar industry of sensitivity training and related roles, and a lot of it might go away if there were more alternative, stable white collar industries that were related to skills taught in college and did not require constant learning and new skill acquisition.

I also think people who have a hard time learning new skills at the ever increasing pace technology demands lean on performative outrage as a way to scare employers and increase job security. If people felt more stable in their jobs, another chunk of performative outrage would probably disappear.

And I also think a lack of social belonging and attention from things like family and neighbors you’d get from a middle class household experience leads people to use performative outrage to get a fix of attention they’re missing.

I combined a lot of those ideas/what I’m saying may not have been clear, but those are all side effects of a shrinking middle class and pathways to the stable mass achievable paychecks that enable it.

>I am not talking about people wanting to be rich. I am talking about people who want a stable paycheck and a middle class life.

You're just playing semantics with my words. Well past my meaning. Sure, not rich. Comfortable. Some people might call that rich, but they are obviously much more poor.

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