this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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I’m curious about how different Gen Z is from Millennials here, because everyone in my age range that I know seems to share this sentiment with them?
I feel like millennials have a "It is what it is, guess ill work til I die" attitude whereas Gen Z have more of a Bartleby the Scrivener "I'd rather not" energy.
Gen x here and we seen it coming as well but no options for us at the time. I don’t blame any of you. Corporate greed and the great 401k lie is bullshit. They want us to work till we’re dead. Screw them.
The great 401k lie?
Can't speak for OP, but I don't look at the 401k as a stable retirement vehicle. It's a vehicle to pump "dumb money" (read: casino chips) into the stock market. If the stock market downturns just before you retire, if the firm managing your 401k makes bad investments, if another 2008-style real estate collapse happens, your retirement fund suddenly has less money in it than you hoped, so you're gonna have to work longer.
The administrator of your accounts has zero control over most of the funds available in them, their rise or fall, and your funds are separate from any investments that financial institution may or may not have made.
If you have a 401k with fidelity, or ADP or Schwab or Trowe Price or whoever, some of those are banks, soke finance companies, some payroll, anyway, the point is for each, the money in your account is yours to allot and invest as you wish based on yhe invesrment options your company chose or negotiating with them to administer your company's plan. The admin makes money by admin fees, not by taking your money and reinvesting it in something you don't know about. Granted, yes if there is a stock market crash, most financial companies will similarly overall struggle, but they have lots of arms and operations (mortgage loans, commercial, consumer banking, investment banking, etc.) and they are 100% all disconnected from the money in your 401k.
That said, 401ks are awful and a sham that were pushed on an uninformed public and we've only just begun to see the effects as the first generation reaches end of work age...and can't stop working. It'll continue. Props to anyone fighting and organizing against it or trying to avoid as much as possible. System fully bought and broken by greed.
What's the point of your first two paragraphs? The person you responded to is 100% right. The point is to pump money in to the fuckin stock market so the wealthiest people can profit off that "investment"
The point was is the plan administrator has no control over whether the value of his account goes up and down, which Op said they did. I agree with everything else Op said but think it's important since most people don't understand the mechanics to learn about them so added the correct info.
When the plan administrator is picking the stocks in their “Target Retirement 2055” account, I’d say they have a large amount of control.
Now the S&P 500? Probably no control. But is it truly the S&P 500 or some bull shirt index fund from the 401k provider that’s not 100% following the S&P 500?
The portion of the comment I replied to, which I highlighted at the top of my response was that Op had said that "if the company managing your 4401k makes a bad investment", concerned that (among Ops other accurate concerns) your 401k funds could be used elsewhere without your knowledge or permission by the plan administrator, which they can't. So I corrected it.
Lazy people immediately REEE when someone doesn't immediately jump on the tribal circle jerk and agree even when parts of a statement are incorrect. Ops point was overall correct and a good one and correcting something that was wrong doesn't mean I disagree with the rest of it. Lookup false dichotomy.
If you’re investment is in the hands of a company that’s manually picking and choosing you’re in bad hands.
Better?
Thanks for the informed take.
While true, I'm not an investor, I'm a software engineer. I don't know good investments from bad, so if I tried to invest myself as an uninformed person, odds are good I will lose a lot of money very quickly. And becoming an informed investor is a lot of time and effort I don't have. I rely on the managed plan because I know there are professionals handling it.
My employer actually switched our 401k's from ML to John Hancock. I had no say in this, I don't know if JH is more or less competent as a firm than ML. So if I have fewer choices because I don't know how to invest and would prefer someone to manage it, I have even fewer choices because I don't even get to choose who manages it.
This is where we most agree. Most people don't know how to invest, so they either let the retirement funds handle it, or they try it themselves. If they try it themselves, they either have to learn how to invest, or they have to get lucky. If the funds handle it, they can be lured in by "stable, lucrative" investments that turn out to be bad, like Mortgage-Backed Securities. Even informed investors can lose money. No matter which path we follow, it all becomes gambling in the end. It's unacceptable that retirement funds are treated as such.
The 401k replaced the pension. It used to be that a company would pay for your retirement, now you pay for your own by being forced to pay into the stock market, and it doesn't go nearly as far as the pensions used to. People are working well into their 60s or older, because 401k's often don't pay out enough to live on. It's another way that companies have figured out to avoid having to pay their employees while pumping up the value of the stock market at the same time.
In the late 80s and early 90s, all the badly managed companies went bankrupt and convinced business friendly judges to delete pensions, too expensive, you see. This left a lot of boomers and their parents with nothing all of a sudden.
The 401k problem is that you are now responsible for managing things and all the liability that brings. Pensions were managed by professionals.
As a millennial: I think it’s the dichotomy between “I play the game even though I hate it because it genuinely feels like the only viable option to have a remotely satisfying life” and “fuck the game”.
As an older Gen Z I concur. Even those of us who aren't completely fucked are extremely anti-corporate with little loyalty to any job. There's a guy named Jordan Howlett who I feel sums up the average Gen Z attitude towards all the bullshit in the world really well.
Don't get me wrong I still work hard and try to do well at my job, but the second I hit my time for the day I'm gone. Work is strictly transactional. No one expects their employer to give them money for time they didn't work, so I ain't about to give my employer time for money they didn't give me. They'll also fire my ass the second they need a stock bump, so I'll be damned if I'm gonna stick around if I find something better.
I'm a millennial too, and I see some of this but it only seems to be some industries. I'm a programmer and my coworkers are like 90% about "the grindset", but people I meet who are in health and wellness are 90% the other way. I also feel like cities and large metros tend to be more focused on work, and less urban areas are more focused on living.
I would say a lot of millenials are this way too, and it's not fair to say it's just a gem z thing, but it's far from the majority... At least around me. There seem to at least be pockets of it, but overall I feel like it's closer to 20%.
With gen z, I feel like the people are way more heavily skewed the other way. I've had gen z general contractors and such just cut the bullshit, tell it like it is, and show that they value ME more than THEIR BOSS. It seems much more universal in their generation.
But that's just my experience. I dunno which is more universal.
So you're saying that Gen Z just lay the truth out and finish their statement with "no cap"?
It’s a gradient.
Actually the biggest difference I've seen isn't in effort but ability. I work with everyone from Boomers to Gen Z and by far my Gen Z coworkers have the hardest time with being given a general task and completing it without detailed instructions. Even with detailed instructions, I often have to repeat the instructions due to mistakes and check my younger colleagues' work more closely.
I think this is, in part, because Gen Z grew up with things that just worked or that they needed to go to a third party to fix if there were issues. Boomers fixed their own cars and did a lot of DIY home repair, Gen X and Millenials both learned to navigate computers and the internet before there were any real instructional guides or helpful UIs. Shit, we used to program games on our calculators for fun. I think many in Gen Z just never had that because many of those DIY elements require proprietary tools now. A smartphone just works and is designed to be so intuitive a baby can figure it out. It's not their fault, but it does mean that some critical thinking skills are absent because they're used to outsourcing the solutions to those problems.
But, again, I have never perceived that they're not hard workers. On the contrary, I'd argue my Gen Z coworkers, when they're on their game, are way more efficient than everyone else and definitely work smarter, not harder, which I try to learn from them.
I manage teams at a university. Gen Z types tend to be very motivated but won’t easily do useless busy work just cuz you think they should. You need to motivate them. That’s the boss’ job, though.
The real problem was the previous generations who happily devoted themselves to their bosses getting richer.
That's pretty true of every generation. If you give anyone a seemingly boring task with no explanation why it matters, they're going to suck at it. What I'm saying is I can't give my Gen Z coworkers an open ended task without detailed instructions, even when I explain why it's important.
Man, I barely graduated from high school because I saw the entire thing as busy work.
My grade in any class was dependant on how much the tests were weighed versus any class or homework. Sleeping or reading through class was my usual.
Now that I'm older I see the value in building the discipline needed to do that sort of busy work because if I don't my house falls apart and such, so there's that.
I wish it didn't take me so long to learn it though.
The other half that a lot of kids (me included when I was younger) miss is the stuff that seems useless is still building a base of knowledge and shaping how you think critically. Just knowing more stuff allows you to connect more things in your head, enabling you to problem solve in completely unrelated areas better. It's not obvious how helpful that knowledge foundation is until you have more life experience.
And hey, at least you got the discipline now.
Half of genx too but nobody ever mentions us.