Television formats such as the German show “Armes Deutschland” exemplify how this works: they select and exaggerate specific cases in which people openly reject formal employment and then present these cases as representative for all long-term unemployed people. The implicit message, especially to those in the low-wage sector, is: exploitation is a privilege, because there is only one thing worse than being exploited and that is NOT being the subject of exploitation. People who endure poor working conditions watch these depictions, distance themselves from the “undeserving” unemployed, and use this contrast to legitimize their own exploitation instead of questioning it.

This stigmatizing image is not a side effect but serves a clear function in maintaining an unequal system. By constructing long-term unemployed people as the ultimate enemy of the “hard-working majority,” groups with shared interests are turned against one another rather than directing criticism toward employers, political decisions, and the economic logic that produces precarity.

At the same time, it is well documented that long-term unemployment is closely linked to severe mental and physical health problems, including depression, anxiety, social isolation, and chronic illness; in many cases, unemployment and ill health reinforce each other in a vicious circle. Treating one of the most vulnerable groups in society as morally inferior is therefore not only unjust but also cruel, because it targets precisely those whom the dominant economic order has no use for and who struggle the most to adapt to its demands.

An army that serves as deterrence.

Many people overlook that (long-term) unemployment plays a specific role in capitalist economies: it helps regulate wages by providing what Karl Marx called an industrial reserve army. This “reserve army” consists of unemployed and underemployed people who can be drawn into or pushed out of employment according to firms’ needs, which keeps wage levels and workers’ bargaining power low.

Socialist thinkers therefore argue that, although states may publicly present full employment as a policy goal, large corporations have little interest in actually eliminating unemployment. In their view, firms rely on a pool of potential workers who can be hired and dismissed as demand fluctuates, while the visibly long-term unemployed also function as a deterrent: they embody the fate workers are meant to fear.

In capitalism, profits depend on paying workers as little as possible while still securing their continued ability to work, which allows ongoing capital accumulation. Workers are thus typically paid just enough to get by but not enough to thrive, and the ever-present threat of unemployment is used to pressure them into accepting low wages and poor conditions. Every worker knows, or is made to feel, that there is always someone in a more desperate situation willing to work for less and under worse conditions, so the fear of being replaced becomes a central disciplinary mechanism. In this way, the permanent possibility of unemployment produces a docile workforce that helps stabilize the system.

Fear stands in the way of solidarity.

Many of the prejudices directed at (long‑term) unemployed people rest on a simple message: only those who sell their labour “deserve” full membership in society. If someone cannot find work, or makes use of the social security rights that formally exist, they are treated as morally inferior and blamed for their own exclusion. In this logic, unemployment is not seen as a social risk, that could happen to everyone, but as individual failure.

What is so striking is that this contempt very often comes from those in the low‑wage sector, even though they share the same fundamental vulnerability: at any moment, they too can be laid off in the name of profit, relocation, or rationalisation. The boundary between “poor worker” and “unemployed person” is fragile and permeable, and anyone dependent on selling their labour can cross it. Those who look down on the unemployed are therefore despising a situation they themselves could easily end up in.

One explanation is the role of fear. When people see (long‑term) unemployed individuals, they confront a possible future self: being made redundant, losing status, facing isolation and material insecurity. Fear narrows emotional bandwidth; it makes it harder to empathise and easier to harden oneself defensively. Refusing empathy in this case means refusing to recognise that “this could be me” because accepting that would force one to face just how precarious one’s own position is.

But empathy and compassion are basic preconditions for solidarity. Without them, those who are already silenced and marginalized will be pushed even further to the edge. The recent wave of lay‑offs and hiring freezes shows that unemployment is not a fringe phenomenon but a structural risk affecting almost everyone in the working class – that is, everyone who must sell their labour in order to live. Big corporations, as I argued earlier, have no structural interest in stable full employment; reducing labour costs through automation, digitalisation, or AI, and keeping a pool of people who can be easily hired, dismissed and replaced, fits their logic of accumulation.

There are many different paths into (long‑term) unemployment: childhood trauma that leads to addiction, chronic illness or disability, care responsibilities, lack of formally recognized qualifications, discrimination – and yes, a small minority who simply decide that the low benefits they receive are preferable to bad jobs. But even then, the crucial point is that this group is already disadvantaged along multiple dimensions, and yet is still instrumentalised as a warning sign to others. Media and political discourse use them as a lightning rod to direct anger away from tax‑dodging corporations, exploitative employers, or unequal structures and toward those who are most in need of support.

This mechanism is parallel to migration debates: instead of questioning an economic system that relies on cheap, insecure labour and permanent competition among workers, attention is redirected to “undeserving” groups who supposedly threaten the welfare state. That diverts energy away from building alliances between low‑wage workers, unemployed people, and other marginalized groups who actually have shared interests.

Without empathy and solidarity across these artificial boundaries, the system that exploits and divides them all remains firmly in place. And that is decisively the goal.

Let’s start with Martin Schröder himself, a sociology professor at the University of Saarbrücken in Germany. In his book, “Wann sind wir wirklich zufrieden?” (“When Are We Truly Content?”), he investigates what actually makes us content, not just happy. Contentment runs deeper than happiness, which fluctuates with emotions; instead, Schröder focuses on whether people’s expectations about life align with reality.

He bases his analysis on the SOEP (Socio-Economic Panel), one of the world’s largest longitudinal databases, running since 1984 and still ongoing. In my view, this is among the finest achievements of German social research. The SOEP enables researchers to examine a broad range of questions, from how losing a job affects satisfaction, to which personality traits are linked with higher rates of divorce.

Schröder doesn’t just compare groups, for example, parents versus non-parents, he uses advanced empirical methods like fixed-effects models to study what happens to a person’s life satisfaction after major life changes while controlling for other factors. If you’re unfamiliar with “holding constant,” this book will clarify its meaning. Such rigorous analysis is only possible thanks to the SOEP’s longitudinal structure; it’s a testament to the power of real social data.

From the start, Schröder debunks the myth that we know what makes us content. If asked, you might say you need more money, a nicer home, or a bigger car. Yet research consistently shows that, beyond a modest level of income, more wealth has little impact on happiness. This shows the value of solid empirical evidence, relying solely on personal intuition or philosophical speculation often leads us astray, a point sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also made when he criticized philosophers for their disconnect from social reality.

Below, I will summarize the findings that struck me most, and which seem to me most relevant.

1. Having children does not increase your life satisfaction substantially on the long-run if you have more to loose.

People, especially right-leaning, conservative men, often have a strange hatred for childless women. Whenever a woman dares to showcase that she’s content without children, men are quick to criticize, claiming her life must be meaningless, sad, or empty. The usual argument goes like this: children give life meaning, provide a coherent life narrative, and, most importantly, make you happy.

Well, at least in a German sample, that doesn’t seem to be true. Schröder found that while having a child does slightly increase life satisfaction shortly after birth, this effect fades over the following years. Why? The answer is simple: money. Children are extremely expensive. Looking more closely, people who experience no loss of income after having a child do show a weak positive effect on life satisfaction on the long-run. So, if your financial situation remains stable, you’re more likely to experience an increase in satisfaction. But this is not good news for most women, who often face a sharp drop in income after giving birth. Interestingly, children also make parents more content if they do not work. This makes sense: the “trad wife” narrative that having children is inherently fulfilling often comes from people who don’t have to deal with the daily grind of work under demanding conditions.

For higher-educated, high-earning women, and for low-earning women, the drop in life satisfaction is almost guaranteed:

· High earners: If you have more, you have more to lose - financially and in terms of freedom.

· Low earners: If you have little, your life is more dependent on what little you already have, so any additional costs or burdens hit harder.

In short, how much having a child affects life satisfaction depends largely on how much you have to lose. Conversely, if you have nothing to lose - no loss in leisure, income, or freedom - having a child is a safe bet for a long-term (weak) increase in satisfaction.

2. Women Like When They Do a Large Share of Household Work

Not a day goes by without seeing a LinkedIn post from a middle-aged, middle-class supermom lamenting that her husband isn’t doing his fair share of household chores. In her book The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild paints a sobering picture: women are not only engaged in paid labor but also carry a huge chunk of household and care work.

Of course, the voices we mostly hear are from highly educated, high-earning, culturally savvy women in professional managerial positions. These women often express frustration at having to cook, clean, and care for children after completing their first “shift” in the paid labor market. Naturally, you might assume that women who do more household work would be less satisfied with life.

Surprisingly, Schröder found the opposite. While men are most dissatisfied when they do more than 50% of the chores (not shocking), women are more satisfied during years when they take on a larger share of household duties. You might think this effect is due to other factors, like having more leisure time from working part-time, but Schröder accounts for all of these possibilities. These variables are “held constant,” meaning the analysis compares the same women at the same age, same level of employment, and so on. Even after controlling for these factors, the result holds.

For men, satisfaction peaks when household chores are divided roughly 50/50. In that sense, one could cheekily argue that men are actually more progressive than women in that regard.

The author explains this effect using identity theory, developed by Akerlof and Kranton. The theory suggests that people have certain identities, mother, soldier, German, and so on, and attach behaviors and characteristics to these identities. In this framework, cooking and cleaning could be behaviors that help women embody their identity as women and feel recognized as such.

But let’s be honest - that’s just one theory. Another, more down-to-earth explanation might be that men simply don’t clean as well as women. A messy home can make women feel uncomfortable, so the satisfaction might come not from doing chores per se, but from avoiding the chaos caused by incompetent cleaning. Personally, I like that theory much better.

3. Prosperty guarantees life satisfaction but poverty does not guarantee discontent

To explore differences at the country level, Schröder draws on the World Values Survey, which measures life satisfaction among more than 300,000 respondents across 100 countries. While 100 countries may seem like a lot, it’s actually a relatively small sample for this kind of analysis, making results somewhat sensitive to outliers.

Looking at the results, it’s not surprising that Scandinavian countries sit at the top of the satisfaction rankings. What is surprising, however, is that countries like Colombia and Mexico - which are much poorer and have higher crime rates - also report very high life satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, high-income countries generally rank among the happiest, and most countries with low GDP are among the least happy. But why do some poor countries appear to be quite satisfied? Why doesn’t poverty automatically lead to discontent? Schröder argues that the key factor is perceived freedom and self-determination. The more free and autonomous people feel in their lives, the more satisfied they are.

A simple-minded political scientist might claim that perceived freedom depends on whether a country is a democracy. But the data show this is not true. The Polity-IV Project demonstrates that people in highly undemocratic countries - like Qatar, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia - still report high satisfaction. Conversely, some democracies, such as Lithuania or Latvia, do not score particularly high in life satisfaction.

The crucial factor isn’t the objective level of democracy but how free and self-determined people feel. For example, some people in China report feeling freer than people in Germany or France. This may be due to lower expectations based on historical context: Chinese citizens may compare themselves with ancestors who lived under extreme poverty and limited freedom, so their baseline expectations are lower. In contrast, Westerners often hold idealized, utopian expectations of democracy, making them more likely to feel constrained when reality falls short even in functioning democracies.

In short, your life satisfaction probably depends more on your sense of freedom and autonomy than on whether you live in a democracy. And that sense of freedom? Well, it might just be a feeling. But a very strong one!

Conclusion

What I took away from this book are surprising results that don’t come from philosophical reflections grounded in feelings or personal intuition, as is often the case with books by intellectuals. Schröder’s findings provide guidance on what is truly meaningful in our lives.

That said, this shouldn’t make us complacent. Just because additional income beyond a certain threshold doesn’t significantly increase life satisfaction doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for better working conditions and higher salaries. Similarly, just because people in undemocratic countries may feel free and self-determined, it doesn’t mean we should ignore those who demand more rights or fail to seek alliances with others advocating for change.

In other words, understanding what makes us content helps us prioritize, but it doesn’t absolve us from striving for a better life, both personally and collectively.

Although I scored straight A’s in my last history exam, I would not consider myself particularly knowledgeable about historical events. I am also quite skeptical toward the history profession, since one’s perspective on the past often depends heavily on political stance. Many of my history teachers, as is common in Germany, leaned conservative — which influenced how historical figures like Bismarck were portrayed. We were taught to see him as a great chancellor for introducing social insurance and pensions, yet these pensions were so meager that most pensioners could barely survive.

In reality, Bismarck was anything but a friend of the common people. He did everything in his power to suppress trade unions and the Social Democratic Party. His goal was always to consolidate and extend his own power — a pursuit that eventually led to his dismissal after he overstepped by trying to undermine the authority of the emperor. He also sought to extend the Sozialistengesetze (Anti-Socialist Laws), which banned socialist and communist associations, gatherings, and publications. The purpose was clear: to stabilize the status quo and weaken the ability of working people to organize for a more equal and democratic society — a dynamic not unlike what we see today when conservative parties seek to preserve existing power structures.

It was therefore refreshing to come across Bernt Engelmann’s Die Untertanen. Ein deutsches Anti-Geschichtsbuch (“The Subservients: A German Anti-History Book”). The aim is already clear from the title: it is an anti-history book, written from the perspective of those at the very bottom of the social hierarchy — the people whose labor enriched the feudal lords and capitalists, and whose wages were kept low to maintain that enrichment.

Engelmann traces key events in German history from the early Middle Ages to the end of the First World War, describing in vivid detail how mechanisms of power operated over centuries to preserve privilege for the very few. He shows how even opposing factions — political, religious, or economic — often came together in times of crisis to defend the existing order. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525, for example, both Catholic and Protestant elites, despite their theological conflicts, united out of fear that the peasants were not only demanding relief from their dire living conditions but calling for an entirely new way of organizing society. To protect their own interests, both Catholic lords and reformist nobles joined forces to crush the rebellion and restore the balance of power in their favor, condemning the vast majority of the population to continued destitution.

Later, in the early days of capitalism, as a bourgeois class began to emerge, the aristocracy and the Großbürgertum often clashed for political influence. While the aristocrats sought to preserve the old balance of power — which favored them — the Großbürgertum pushed for greater democracy and for the abolition of the privileges preserved for aristocrats. Their aim war, unsurprisingly, to expand their political influence. However, during the Revolution of 1848/49, when many powerful non-aristocrats were, like workers, peasants and students, calling for democracy and a unified Germany, their aspirations for the first parliamentary democracy were crushed. A coalition of the bürgerlich-liberal government, Prussian Junker, and Austrian aristocrats joined forces to suppress the movement. Once again, the elites — despite their differing interests — united to thwart the demands of the common people for a democratic constitution, national unity, and the realization of liberal freedoms.

As I made clear in an earlier piece — and as the title already suggests — I am not a great admirer of the Social Democratic Party. However, while reading Engelmann’s book, I was genuinely surprised to learn how closely the early Social Democratic Party once worked with trade unions and the working class, and how revolutionary its spirit originally was. How radical the social-democrats were is exemplified by this quote from their leader August Bebel:

“As long as I can still breathe, write, and speak, it shall remain no different: I want to remain the mortal enemy of this bourgeois society and this state order in order to undermine its conditions of existence and, if I can, to eliminate it.”

August Bebel (1840-1913) one of the fouding fathers of the german socialdemocracy and one of its ardent supporter until his death.

It struck me how far removed today’s SPD has become from those roots. This development is not only mirrored in Germany, but also in the British Labour Party and other parties around the world that claim to represent working people.

When the German Emperor began pushing for the First World War by provoking other European nations and trying to rally the German population behind him, the Social Democrats under the leadership of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht (later succeeded by his son Karl Liebknecht) made it clear that they opposed any increase in the military budget. They recognized that the war the elites were preparing was not fought in the interest of ordinary Germans. As Karl Liebknecht poigntly argued:

“This war, which none of the peoples involved wanted, was not waged for the welfare of the German people or any other people. It is an imperialist war, a war for capitalist domination of the world market, for political control of important settlement areas for industrial and banking capital. From the point of view of the arms race, it is a preventive war brought about jointly by the German and Austrian warring parties in the darkness of semi-absolutism and secret diplomacy. It is a Bonapartist enterprise aimed at demoralizing and destroying the growing labor movement. The past months have taught us this with increasing clarity, despite a ruthless campaign of confusion".

However, the revolutionary wing of the SPD was gradually undermined by a more moderate faction that favored reform over revolution. Under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert, the SPD ultimately voted in favor of the war credits, paving the way for Germany’s disastrous participation in a conflict designed to expand the power and sphere of influence of the German Kaiserreich. The war enriched industrialists such as Friedrich Krupp in Essen, while devastating the lives of millions of working people and soldiers which is the very constituency the SPD claimed to represent. And on top of that, Germany ended up loosing the war.

From reading this book, I learned two key lessons:

1. Those at the very top, even when competing for influence, will ultimately unite to preserve the status quo and to prevent the transfer of real power to working people.

2. Even those who claim to represent the working class can end up betraying its goals. A recent and striking example is the so-called “social reforms” introduced by Germany’s Social Democrats, which have placed harsh restrictions on the most vulnerable members of society.

Overall, Die Untertanen was an eye-opening and deeply instructive book. It illustrates with great clarity how history has been — and continues to be — written on the backs of working people who, despite constituting the vast majority of society, have always had to fight for the basic right to live a dignified life.

The latest proposed reforms by the germans conservatives and so-called social democrats (and it’s a disgrace to even call them that) reveal their true priorities. The same politicians who once promised to “boost the economy,” “create jobs,” and “ensure sustainable growth” are now targeting the most vulnerable among us to win the approval of the wealthy and the middle class who aspire to join them (which they never will).

The so called 🍂autumn-reforms🍂

Under these reforms, welfare recipients could see their benefits cut by up to 30% for missing two mandatory appointments, and another missed appointment could lead to a complete suspension of all benefits. Only payments for housing, health insurance and heating are sparred from this drastic cut. The period during which personal savings are protected while looking for work - the so-called Karenzzeit - would also be shortened, forcing many to burn through what little financial security they have before receiving any help. And if the Jobcenter deems your rent “too high,” you may be forced to move, even though anyone who has tried to find affordable apartments knows how absurd that suggestion is in our current housing crisis. Despite Germany’s reputation for strong social protections, those receiving Bürgergeld already struggle to survive. Buying healthy food is often impossible and those reforms will only make things worse. Worse still was the tone of the announcement. When Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Bärbel Bas declared, “We are going to the limits of what is allowed under the constitution,” she revealed more than she perhaps intended: they would go even further if the constitution didn’t stop them.

The message is anything but unclear. The goal is to make unemployment so unbearable - by forcing people to spend their savings, accept lower living standards, or move into worse housing - that any job will seem preferable to none. These reforms are, once more, further shifting the balance of power in favor of employers and away from workers. It erodes workers bargaining power and deepens social inequality. Losing your job becomes a far more tangible threat, one that will lead to a heightened degree of obedience in the workplace.

And this is happening precisely at a time when stable employment is harder to find. Recent graduates struggle to get a foothold. Older workers face age discrimination despite their qualification and years of experience. Even established companies like Bosch are cutting jobs amid “internal restructuring.” These measures don’t just affect the poor. The shrinking job market means that more middle-class workers - those who once felt safe - are at real risk of falling into unemployment, and therefore economic precarity, themselves.

The goal is to have less and not more employees

You’ve probably seen the headlines about mass layoffs across the United States. But the same pattern is unfolding here in Germany. As I mentioned earlier, there has been an alarming layoffs at major employers such as Bosch, VW, Thyssenkrupp, and Schaeffler - most of them key players in the automotive industry.

According to Capital, a leading German economic magazine, the chances for those who lose their jobs to find new employment have reached a historic low, while the risk of losing one’s job has been steadily rising for years, albeit the increase has been, fortunately, unalarming. Yes, a lot of layoffs have been occurred to the lack of foresight in the german car industry. But considering that, there are less open positions overall, other reason as to why the current situation is so unbearable should be considered and I would very much argue that having fewer but more “productive” employees are a part of capitalism’s very logic. Why spent money on training a recent graduate, an older employee or someone who is changing sectors if that money could be spent by distributing the work onto the already existing workforce? Or even use technology that emulate the work of an employee?

Viviane Forrester, the French intellectual who wrote one of the most piercing pamphlets I have ever read, captured this logic perfectly when she asked:

“What should they do with all those costly ‘employees’ for whom social insurance must be paid, who are so unreliable and inconvenient compared to the clear, stable machines that require no social protection, are naturally obedient, and, moreover, economical and free from dubious emotions, aggressive complaints, or dangerous desires?”

Her words, written decades ago, feel disturbingly contemporary. The system’s aim has not changed: to replace people with cheaper, more compliant alternatives to maximize profits.

Forced to look for something that does not exist

Corporations, of course, have every right to slow or even freeze their hiring processes. When the economy is in decline, and Germany has been in a recession for several years now, hiring new employees means taking on additional costs that even well-intentioned companies struggle to bear.

But instead of steering Germany toward a path of growth that could create new opportunities — especially for younger generations — the government has chosen a different route. Rather than investing in training for those who are unemployed, improving access to training and education, and giving people the freedom and time to be creative and innovative (a privilege currently reserved for the wealthy few), it proposes measures that will only deepen misery, increase destitution, and widen inequality.

Instead of transformative policies that could make people more capable and adaptable in a changing world, the state has opted for punishment. Those already at the bottom are being pushed further down, forced into jobs for which they are either unqualified (therefore rejected) or overqualified and underpaid. Considering that open job positions are decreasing, the job you are looking for might not even be there!

Viviane Forrester captured this absurdity with striking precision when she asked:

“Is it normal, or even logical, that people are forced to do something that hardly exists anymore? Is it also legal to demand something as a necessary condition for survival [employment] that does not exist at all?”

Her words are as relevant now as they were then in 1994 when her pamphlet was published To demand work where there is none that matches your qualification and to punish those who cannot find it is cruelty disguised as responsibility.

This labor, crucial to the very foundation of AI’s development, is dispersed across the whole world. It ranges from the extraction of the minerals needed to produce chips, to the tedious work of annotating data for algorithms, all the way to moderating disturbing and harmful content, sometimes involving material far too horrifying to describe in detail.

The book succeeds in giving readers two crucial perspectives:

1. A deep economic and political analysis of the labor systems that sustain AI.

2. An ethnographic account of the lives of workers, from data annotators and data center operators to investors, who each contribute to the wider production network in distinct but interconnected ways.

The authors frame their observations through the lens of coloniality: a system of power that shapes culture, labor, and knowledge production by drawing on older colonial hierarchies. The global production networks underpinning AI mirror these colonial structures. Resources and labor are extracted from the Global South, while major tech firms capitalize on weaker labor protections and skewed trade agreements for their own benefit.

Each chapter of the book introduces a different individual connected to AI’s production chain, e.g., an annotator in Uganda, a data center operator in Iceland, or an investor in the divided states of America. What emerges is a web of interconnected network nods, marked by exploitation. Harsh working conditions, short or medium-termed contracts, and low pay are particularly concentrated in the Global South, though the system also relies on intellectual labor drawn from countless sources: authors, artists, and ordinary internet users (with most of them being located in the Western World) whose work, whether texts, images, or cultural material, is absorbed into AI models without consideration of copyright or compensation. The authors aptly describe AI as an extraction machine, one that devours both physical labor, often under exploitative conditions, and intellectual labor, which is consumed invisibly and without recognition.

how to stop the extraction machine.

One of the major obstacles to improving working conditions for workers in the Global South is the ease with which their labor can be replaced. If annotators in Uganda strike to demand better wages, longer contracts, or less surveillance, tech companies can simply threaten their managers with shifting contracts to another data annotation center in Indonesia. This undermines workers’ bargaining power at its core.

To counter this, transnational solidarity is crucial. Building collective power across the production network - from those performing tedious annotation tasks to well-paid AI engineers - is the only way to improve working conditions for all. Data annotators may be easily substituted due to a global “race to the bottom,” but highly specialized AI researchers and software engineers are not. Their relative scarcity, and higher wages, reflect this. What the engineers are doing, is based on the work that is being done at the beginning of the production chain. Solidarity throughout the whole production chain puts more pressure on companies due to the lack of supply of highly specialized silicon-valley-guys.

The authors propose several measures to protect vulnerable workers. Among them are stricter regulation of global supply chains, such as Germany’s Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz (sounds very german, I know), which requires companies to ensure compliance with human rights and environmental standards throughout their supply chains, civil society oversight, where NGOs and advocacy groups hold companies accountable through campaigns and demands for reform or worker cooperatives, which allow workers to collectively own and manage their businesses.

Each of these approaches carries challenges. Countries in the Global South may hesitate to adopt stricter labor regulations out of fear of losing contracts with powerful tech companies. Cooperatives, while promising, struggle to scale in a globalized market dominated by massive corporations. Yet without such initiatives, exploitation remains entrenched.

capitlism is the culprit, as always.

At the root of these dynamics lies capitalism itself: a system structured around the exploitation of labor, land, and resources for capital accumulation. AI companies, like all corporations, are incentivized to maximize profits, which means paying workers as little as possible wherever and whenever they can. This underlying logic of accumulation shapes every aspect of labor conditions in the AI economy.

I recently had a conversation with someone that argued that the state was the institutions that proposed and provided workers with a 40 hours week, and all types of insurance that we enjoy in most European countries. I disagreed vehemently. Rights and protections have been won through workers struggle, through people coming together discussing their grievances and demanding more than they have now. Whether we are talking peasants tied to the land, industrial workers in the 19th century, or today’s data annotators, elites have always used power to exploit those dependent on selling their labor. Only through worker organization, solidarity and unionization have conditions ever improved.

Workers enmeshed in the machinery of extraction, whether annotators, moderators, or engineers, must build collective power. And civil society must support them in this struggle. As Frederick Douglass put it:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

If AI is to respect the dignity of all those who contribute to it, then dismantling the extractive machine is not optional, it is necessary. What must be built in its place is a system that centers dignity and co-determination across the entire global production network.

I highly recommend reading this book! See u next week.

xxx

As Sennett argues, the rise of new capitalism, driven by globalization and financialization, has profoundly altered how institutions are organized and what they demand from workers. Stability, craftsmanship, and the slow development of a defined skill set have been replaced by the expectation that workers must constantly shift between tasks and juggle multiple projects at once. This transformation stems from shareholder-driven management, which prioritizes short-term profits over steady, incremental growth. The repercussions for workers are severe: the ability to craft a coherent life narrative is undermined by increasingly unpredictable employment. Wealth and power concentrate at the very top, with little evidence of trickle-down benefits.

At the same time, new capitalism has produced an explosion in the variety of goods available at low prices. Entering a retailer, we find dish soap only a few aisles away from electronics, each offered in countless variations, often barely distinguishable from one another. Just as hierarchical layers have been stripped away in firms, the same holds true in consumer markets. The salesperson, once a guide and persuader, has been replaced by mass marketing and advertising. Why rely on a single person’s pitch when a glossy campaign featuring a celebrity can generate desire at scale?

But abundance carries its pitfalls. We rarely consume only what we need. Once we acquire what we thought we desired, the pleasure quickly fades. This is what Sennett calls a “self-consuming passion.” Corporations deliberately exploit this cycle in the pursuit of endless accumulation. Constant marketing campaigns manufacture ever-new trends, while products themselves are designed for obsolescence. The goal is not to sell a durable good but to keep consumers locked in a loop of desire, dissatisfaction, and repeat purchase.

Two additional strategies fuel this cycle: branding and potency.

branding.

Products are “gold-plated” with symbolic value. A BMW, for instance, is sold not just as a car but as an experience, a lifestyle, a badge of identity—worth going into debt for. Advertising often works with “half-finished” narratives that enlist the consumer’s imagination to complete the picture. A similar logic now operates in hiring: employers look not so much at what you have achieved, but at the future potential they imagine you possess. By contrast, in the older capitalism of the Rockefeller and Carnegie era, imagination was suppressed to prevent rivals from envisioning replacing the great tycoons.

potency.

Many products are sold on the basis of their potential capacities with electronics habving features that most users will never touch. What matters is not actual use but the sense of unlimited possibility. As Sennett notes, “You don’t limit what you want by what you can do.”

In sum, consumer passions are organized around two complementary logics: the engagement in imagining and the allure of potency.

This brings us to politics: do we now consume politics in the same way we consume products? Have we begun shopping for politicians as though they were brands - seeking promises of lifestyle, identity, or potency rather than concrete, durable outcomes?

political branding and the narrowing of differences.

Richard Sennett highlights how contemporary citizens increasingly operate as consumers, a dynamic that profoundly affects the political sphere. One of the primary shifts he identifies is the transformation of political platforms into product platforms. Just as minor distinctions between products are accentuated through branding to create separate identities in the marketplace, so too do political parties exaggerate their differences to form distinct political brands.

Despite the heated rhetoric between Democratic and Republican supporters these parties often govern in remarkably similar ways once in office. Both have historically supported neoliberal reforms, prioritized business interests, and resisted major redistributions of power toward workers. For instance, Ronald Reagan initiated sweeping neoliberal policies, which were subsequently reinforced and extended by Bill Clinton, whose administration maintained low minimum wage policies and continued deregulation, creating favorable environments for business elites.

In this political landscape, the differences between opposing parties are less substantial than the branding suggests. The emphasis on preserving the status quo has meant that, no matter the party in power, there is limited shift in the balance of power toward ordinary workers. This mirrors the consumer market, where branding convinces individuals to desire one product over another despite their underlying similarities. Citizens, therefore, increasingly approach politics as consumers - shopping for parties and politicians based on branded identities and emotional appeals, rather than evaluating substantive policy distinctions. This shift, Sennett warns, undermines the democratic process: it erodes genuine deliberation and replaces it with market-like logic, where personal preference and brand loyalty take precedence over collective decision-making and meaningful representation

symbolic inflation of trivia.

Another strategy that political parties and candidates deploy is what Sennett calls the “symbolic inflation of trivia.” This approach is highly visible in current German politics, particularly in debates about Bürgergeld, the social benefit provided to people in financial hardship. Despite the fact that Bürgergeld accounts for only about 4% of all social spending—with pensions and health insurance constituting well over 40%—the reform debate is overwhelmingly focused on Bürgergeld, often detached from its actual fiscal significance. Proposed reforms tend to risk stripping support from the vulnerable, even though such changes are unlikely to set Germany on a path to meaningful, sustained growth.

This dynamic is not confined to social spending; it also appears in discussions about migration policy. Recent implementation of extensive border controls and costly security measures has been justified by political narratives framing migrants and refugees as threats to national security and the livelihoods of hard-working citizens. These portrayals ignore the indispensable role migrants have played in Germany’s economic development, and conveniently omit the fact that right-wing violence poses a far greater threat to public safety than any alleged danger from migrants.

The fear nurtured by political parties and the media serves to ignite the imagination of citizens in much the same way that consumers engage with half-finished products, as Richard Sennett describes. Migrants or refugees are portrayed as ultimate enemies—stealing money and threatening safety, particularly of women. This kind of exaggeration reflects what Sigmund Freud coined as the “narcissism of small differences,” a phenomenon where minor distinctions between groups are amplified to create or maintain divisions. Such small differences gain outsized significance especially during times of perceived threat or insecurity, fueling hostility and conflict despite the underlying similarities between groups (many of those being on the far right are just as many migrants part of the working class). This dynamic operates politically by magnifying trivial issues to distract from substantive problems, fostering a sense of identity through opposition to a constructed enemy. The process preserves the status quo by keeping power relations intact, while emotional aggression is projected onto symbolic scapegoats.

from craftsmen to consumers.

When citizens act like modern consumers, they cease to act like craftsmen. Choosing to disengage when political problems become too difficult is increasingly common if immersing oneself in political issues is not perceived as necessary.

As I explained in an earlier piece, craftsmanship is defined by engaging deeply with an activity with heightened interest. When something does not work out, the craftsman is interested in understanding the issue and committed to solving it. There is a greater sense of attachment in someone who operates like a craftsman. By contrast, as a consumer you do not want to deal with the intricacies of a device; you want it to be as user-friendly as possible. Minor problems are tolerable as long as they can be fixed with one click. Engagement is something to avoid, as everything should operate as smoothly as possible.

Democracy, however, requires people to think more like craftsmen and less like consumers. The prerequisite for political engagement is the willingness to understand the basics of a problem and to take a genuine interest in how things work and how they might be changed. Yet this type of engagement is losing traction. U.S. soldiers who fought in Iraq often did not know how the conflict had even begun. Some ardent supporters of the war could not locate Iraq on a map. Ask a random German who supports cutting Bürgergeld how much the state actually spends on it, and you will likely hear an exaggerated response.

Thinking less like craftsmen and more like consumers in the political sphere erodes democracy. People do not engage deeply with contestable issues, making them more susceptible to politicians who engage in the “symbolic inflation of trivia” described above. As Sennett puts it:

“My point is not that people are lazy but that the economy created a political climate in which citizens have difficulty in thinking like craftsmen. In institutions organized around flexible labor, getting involved deeply in something risks making the worker ingrown or narrowly focused”.

in conclusion.

How we consume strongly shapes how we behave politically. Just as corporations highlight small distinctions between nearly identical products to convince consumers to buy, political parties and candidates engage in a kind of “gold-plating,” inflating minor differences to capture voter loyalty. For example, Republicans are framed as being for a smaller state, and Democrats as being for a larger one, yet in practice the state remains powerful regardless of who wins. This inflation of small differences obscures how similar the major parties are and how limited our real choices become. Rarely do we encounter candidates who genuinely seek to transform the balance of power in favor of the working clas (Zack Polanski in the UK and the Left in Germany are prominent european examples). At the same time, public discourse turns minor issues into existential threats. Immigration or modest levels of social spending, for instance, are amplified to fuel voter anxiety, even though such matters pale in fiscal significance compared to healthcare, wages, or pensions. These inflated debates not only distort public priorities but also serve to deflect attention from entrenched economic realities.

Consumer tendencies reinforce this pattern. We prefer user-friendly products that work instantly and require little effort to understand. But this convenience comes at a cost: rather than learning how things function and how to repair them, we accept disposability and superficial engagement. The same applies to knowledge. Social media provides information in bite-sized, pre-digested formats that demand little from us and discourage deeper critical inquiry. Craftsmanship, whether in handling material objects or grappling with political complexities, requires time, patience, and analysis. Yet today, citizens often expect quick fixes. When wages stagnate, many are quick to believe that deporting migrants will solve the problem - though basic reasoning tells us the labor market is far more complex. A sustained material analysis of wages, corporate profits, and labor structures is required, but this is precisely what is missing from mainstream political life. Its just not easy digestable and must therefore be avoided.

The inflation of small issues and the demand for immediate, simple solutions serve two functions. First, they distract from structural economic problems. Second, they fuel emotionally charged, divisive debates that make citizens feel engaged while leaving the real distribution of power unchallenged. In this way, political actors appear responsive and decisive, though their “solutions” are shallow (e.g., stricter border control. I wonder if americans can afford eggs now?). The public, reassured that progress is being made, loses sight of deeper problems - and the status quo remains.

If we want meaningful change, we must shift from being passive consumers to active citizens, but that transformation requires caution, attention and the willigness for critical inquiry. An obedient consumer is trained not to think too deeply, while democratic politics depends on exactly that: on people willing to challenge appearances, trace problems to their root causes, and imagine alternatives. Thinking, not consumption, is the true enemy of the status quo.

According to Sennett, this specter is driven by three main forces: the global supply chain, automation, and the use of age as a measure of value and obsolescence.

global supply chain

One of the most visible dynamics here is the restructuring of firms through outsourcing - the contracting out of specific business functions to third-party providers - or offshoring, the relocation of operations to another country. The consequences of these strategies have often been dire for workers. Job displacement and redundancy can quickly translate into unemployment, financial hardship, and declining life satisfaction. The effects ripple outward: communities themselves suffer from shrinking tax revenues, reduced public services, and falling property values. As the Expert Network Calls reports, over the past two decades, Poland and Romania have become two of the fastest-growing destinations for offshoring within the European Union, due to their highly skilled yet comparatively low-cost labor pools. While such moves are rationalized as cost-saving measures by firms, they pose real threats to workers who have no control over these top-down decisions. The result is a loss of stability, deepening the very insecurity that Sennett identifies.

automation

The fear of being replaced by machines is hardly new - it dates back to the very first steam-powered spinning machines. Employers have always turned to technology because it allows them to adapt quickly to shifts in demand. Machines can be reconfigured in moments, unlike humans, who require time, money, and patience to retrain. The consequences of artificial intelligence for employment—whether in the form of job losses or restricted opportunities for new graduates—remain far from certain. Yet one assumption seems safe: if firms can cut costs through new technologies, they will. In that sense, automation is not simply progress but a driving force behind the looming specter of human redundancy.

age as a measure of uselessness

Negative stereotypes about older people are pervasive, which is hardly surprising in a society obsessed with preserving youth for as long as possible. The cultural message is unmistakable: aging is bad, something to avoid, an inconvenience to postpone indefinitely. These stereotypes are especially visible in the workplace, where older workers are often labeled as slower, less adaptable, overly critical of change, and prone to a decline in energy. Whether or not these assumptions hold true matters less than the fact that such traits - being “slow” or “resistant to change” - are seen as liabilities in a world where agility and flexibility are treated as the highest virtues. Retraining older employees is often perceived as too costly, prompting firms to prefer younger hires whose LinkedIn profiles already showcase their capacity for constant reinvention. Here again, change is celebrated uncritically, while hesitation or the willingness to question, to reflect critically is viewed as a flaw. As Richard Sennett emphasizes in his work based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research, older workers are often labeled “difficult” because, unlike their younger counterparts, they are more likely to voice dissatisfaction openly. By contrast, younger workers are seen as both cheaper and less troublesome. This perception may help explain why older employees are largely absent in cutting-edge start-ups, where the cult of youth and disruption reigns.

the loss of craftsmanship

In new capitalism, being a skillful person means demonstrating the ability to adapt and innovate, rather than relying solely on established expertise. Corporations seek individuals, often young or middle-aged, who excel at tackling new challenges, valuing the capacity to abandon familiar routines in favor of fresh approaches. This preference for novelty undermines the cultivation of craftsmanship, which, as Sennett describes, involves doing something well for the sake of quality and is rooted in accumulated experience. Modern corporate cultures, which prioritize flexibility and continual movement between projects, hinder the development of institutional knowledge and craftsmanship. In fast-paced, cutting-edge organizations, success is measured by one’s ability to jump from project to project, making the deep, careful work required for true craftsmanship seem inefficient or even counterproductive. As projects can end as quickly as they begin, there’s little room to pursue excellence through sustained effort (i would argue that the pursuit of excellence is something that can only be pursued by a small number of priviliged people who either are “naturally” talented, e.g., people in sports, or by people who have distinguished educational credentials that allows them to work in a specilized field their whole working lifes, e.g., researchers that study a rare form of cancer)

Man working on Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1909.

A skill that takes years to master.

Global supply chain shifts, automation, emerging technologies, and age-based prejudice all contribute to what Sennett terms the “specter of uselessness.” These forces are not neutral; they are shaped by the capitalist class, who restructure production primarily to maximize profit, often at the expense of workers’ rights, security, and confidence. To counter these trends, workers must organize collectively - across national borders - to resist or critically examine outsourcing and offshoring driven by cost-cutting motives that exploit more vulnerable labor markets. Equally important is the demand for democratic participation in technological change. Workers should have a decisive role in determining how automation and new technologies are adopted, ensuring they genuinely improve working conditions rather than threatening livelihoods. Employers and employees must jointly negotiate the pace and scope of technological implementation. Finally, age discrimination remains a neglected but critical issue. Older workers are too often dismissed as incapable of “keeping up” rather than valued for their experience and abilities. Cultivating a culture that recognizes the contributions of all workers is essential if we are to build a fair and inclusive workplace for all.

To understand how we reached this point, it’s helpful to revisit the work of American sociologist Richard Sennett, especially his lecture series later published as The Culture of the New Capitalism over twenty years ago. Sennett explored the transformation of corporate culture in the wake of globalization and financialization, examining how managerial priorities gave way to shareholder-driven short-term decision-making. He posed a crucial question: what do businesses in this new era provide, and what do they demand? For workers, the answers were troubling. The constant threat of redundancy began to shape identities, and “employability” shifted from competence in a specific field towards the demonstration of flexibility. Though written decades ago, Sennett’s insights continue to resonate powerfully today with anyone seeking to understand why modern corporate culture feels so toxic and exhausting.

Why, then, was work more stable and life more predictable in the past? Sennett contends that early capitalism drew on the Prussian Army as a model, leading to the militarization of civil society. In an army, everyone’s role and function are clearly defined. By structuring civil society like the military, stability could be maintained and social unrest avoided. If every member of society feels they have a specific role to play, there’s less impetus to oppose the existing structures. Sennett termed this “social capitalism.” It was still capitalism, but with a strong social component - inclusion mattered, because exclusion risked upheaval. Most organizations adopted hierarchical structures: the higher up the ladder, the fewer people occupied those positions, while the lower levels included many more members. This “fattening” of the base was acceptable for organizations built on inclusion, as it allowed them to absorb a large workforce and maintain social stability.

Time was central to social capitalism: it was incremental, long-term, and predictable. This sense of time enabled people to construct a coherent life narrative—when to marry, buy a house, retire. Whether or not these milestones were achievable for everyone was beside the point; the mere existence of such narratives fostered stability. Yet stability came with its own costs. Being assigned a fixed role and skillset could feel like living in an “iron cage”—a life designed by someone else, offering little room for personal agency. The only solace this cage provided was the promise of delayed gratification, which often proved frustrating: those who mastered the discipline of postponement frequently found themselves unable to accept the rewards they’d been promised. What did confer some sense of agency was “interpretative modulation”—workers received commands from higher up but didn’t blindly follow them; they interpreted and adapted them based on their accrued knowledge and the realities at hand. The scope for agency was limited, but people could at least shape how orders were executed.

This paradigm changed with the onset of the “fresh page”—the advent of “new capitalism”. The transition from managerial power to shareholder dominance meant that investors now came from across the globe, untethered to nation-state interests. Reading this, one might recall the famous scene from Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network. In it, the head of the network corporation tells Howard Beale—a television host who rebelled against the network but was ultimately absorbed into its machinery—that genuine power is no longer tied to the state. He yells almost uncontrollably:

“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Ned Beatty as he yells “You have meddled with the primary forces of nature!”

Multinational corporations and financial networks are no longer bound by national loyalties. Traditional nation-states are no longer the preeminent global power brokers. The true global players now are shareholders, whose nationality is irrelevant—their interests, however, fundamentally shape how corporations operate, often to the detriment of workers.

Investors today are primarily interested in short-term results rather than long-term stability, leading them to frequently buy and sell shares rather than maintain long-term holdings, as those practices yield higher returns. To appear attractive to investors, businesses underwent internal restructuring to showcase flexibility and dynamism. Yet, as Sennett argues, in striving to please investors, organizations became dysfunctional and corrupt, and stability came to be seen as a weakness. Stability runs contrary to the values of innovation and continual disruption that define the new corporate ethos.

Sennett identifies key transformations that have fundamentally altered the internal structure of businesses, many of which have been accelerated by the information revolution. First, the practice of interpretative modulation—where commands were adapted by workers to suit their circumstances—has been replaced by strict centralization. Now, directives come directly from top executives, motivated by capital accumulation, leaving no space for workers to reinterpret or exercise agency.

Second, automation has made it unnecessary for large organizations to maintain a broad workforce at the bottom. The inclusive aspect of social capitalism, where mass participation helped maintain social stability, has faded; shareholders increasingly prefer a smaller, flexible workforce that can be easily dismissed if needed. Those most at risk in this new environment are people without specialized human skills, who are more likely to be excluded.

As automation expands, the pool of traditional, fixed human skills is shrinking. The new ideal employee is someone who is always prepared to adapt to whatever is demanded, constantly acquiring fresh skills and qualifications - often showcased on platforms like LinkedIn. This “idealized self” is task-oriented, highly motivated, and independent, acting almost as a mini-entrepreneur. Such a mindset stands in sharp contrast to the old model of social capitalism, which prioritized fixed roles and linear career progression. Today’s environment demands continuous flexibility and a willingness to jump between tasks.

We are all too familiar with the consequences these changes have had on employees: the rise of short-term contracts, the expansion of the gig economy which allows firms to avoid paying social security, and the frequent shifting of workers from task to task (especially for project managers who must juggle multiple projects simultaneously). All these changes aim to maximize capital accumulation while evading responsibilities that were once considered standard and self-evident.

These “cutting-edge” institutions operate by exerting greater control over the output workers produce, even as they reduce direct authority over them, as Sennett points out. By hiring entrepreneurial-minded individuals expected to act independently, employers avoid responsibility by providing less guidance. The consequences for workers are severe. Institutional loyalty erodes, since there is little reason to remain loyal to an employer that communicates “you’re on your own” and demands self-management. Informal trust among workers also declines, because entrepreneurial-style workplaces with short-term employment make building trust difficult as trust typically develops over time with shared experience. Moreover, institutional knowledge deteriorates, as it can only be accumulated through prolonged tenure, something that has become increasingly impossible under current organizational arrangements.

I am certain that many people, myself included, deeply resonate with what Sennett described in his book. As the balance of power has heavily shifted from a more balanced relationship between workers and capital toward capital's dominance, workers’ rights have significantly eroded. This shift has brought less stability, less security, and a diminished ability for individuals to construct coherent life narratives.

Given this context, it is unsurprising that many people choose not to have children, as life grows increasingly unpredictable and the threat of redundancy looms large. As many scholars and commentators have noted, a democratization of the economic sphere is necessary to restore a reasonable balance of power - one that allows workers to live lives not dominated by the constant fear of job loss. However, what we see in most firms today is the stark opposite.

As Grace Blakely argues in Vulture Capitalism, the modern corporation functions like a political entity, wielding despotic power over its workers. It is built on centralized control and rigid hierarchy, not democratic principles. If we want an economy that works for people rather than against them, it falls to socialist democrats to push back , to demand a system where workers reclaim power, stability, and dignity. The choice before us is clear: accept the corporate despotism of today, or fight for a future where democracy extends beyond the ballot box and into the workplace itself.

Into this constant churn of stereotypes steps internet personality Kyla Scanlon, who recently appeared on The Ezra Klein Show. She offers yet another generational diagnosis: Millennials and Gen Z, she insists, experience the economy in fundamentally different ways - almost as though your year of birth ties you magically to a distinct economic reality (and not your socioeconomic status). What Scanlon emphasizes is the unpredictability of career paths today: jobs are less secure than they used to be, economic instability feels like the default, and home ownership is increasingly out of reach. These observations are fair enough. But she then frames them as the defining experience of a generation, as if birth cohorts themselves were explanatory categories.

A similar story comes from Yael Meier, a Swiss entrepreneur who has built a career on positioning herself as a Gen Z spokesperson. Running a consulting and advertising agency, she leverages her generational identity into viral LinkedIn posts and even a book about the wishes and desires of her peers. In one of those posts, she confidently claims that Gen Z wants three things from work: output orientation, trust-based relationships with managers, and “smart” work - efficiency over long hours. If you are a young worker, you might find yourself nodding along, thinking: Yes, that resonates. That must be true for Gen Z. But is it really unique to Gen Z? Do we honestly think that a 45-year-old worker prefers a boss who manages with envy and distrust, or values inefficiency over efficiency? The packaging of these claims is generational, but the substance is universal.

This is precisely the point made by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in their consensus study report Are Generational Categories Meaningful Distinctions for Workforce Management? They conclude:

“while dividing the workforce into generations may have appeal, doing so is not strongly supported by science and is not useful for workforce management. …many of the stereotypes about generations result from imprecise use of the terminology in the popular literature and recent research, and thus cannot adequately inform workforce management decisions.”

That judgment feels entirely reasonable. What, after all, do people really share with millions of people born in the same 15-year window - people of different genders, races, classes, and nationalities? Where is the nuance in treating them all as if they share the same outlook?

John Quiggin, writing on the Crooked Timber blog, points out the absurdity of this logic:

“Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.”

On a personal level, I feel this disconnect keenly. Looking at Yael Meier’s biography - a blonde, thin, conventionally attractive woman who grew up in a house with a garden on a lake in Switzerland - I struggle to see what I could possibly have in common with her. In fact, I feel more affinity with Günther, a middle-aged man in Dresden working a physically demanding job for 12.50 an hour, even though he is not part of my so-called generation. That comparison alone reveals the emptiness of “generations” as social categories.

Let me introduce you: Our spokesperson, Mrs. Gen Z, Yael Meier

The arbitrariness of generational spans makes this problem even more glaring. Gen Z is usually defined as people born between 1997 and 2012. But as someone born near the start of this range, I cannot help but wonder: what do I truly share with a 13-year-old? A teenager whose formative experience of the pandemic was being stuck at home, unable to see friends or attend school, while my own pandemic experience - living in a shared flat with great roommates - was one of the happiest periods of my life? Why am I supposed to have more in common with that 13-year-old than with someone who is 30?

Sociologist Philip N. Cohen has raised exactly this issue in an open letter responding to Pew Research, which used generational categories in its surveys. Cohen writes:

“Are we going to keep arbitrarily dividing the population into generations and giving them names — after “Z”? On what scientific basis would the practice continue? One might be tempted to address these problems by formalizing the process, with a conference and a dramatic launch, to make it even more “official.” But there is no scientific rationale for dividing the population arbitrarily into cohorts of any particular length for purposes of analyzing social trends, and to fix their membership a priori.”

So if “generations” are this arbitrary and misleading, why do they persist? The answer, in part, is that claiming to be a spokesperson for “your generation” is an excellent career strategy. There is money and attention in speaking on behalf of your cohort, whether or not the claims rest on evidence.

To see further whether these claims have empirical validity, I turned to Martin Schröder, a sociology professor in Germany, who has published on this question. His argument is clear: empirically, there are no generations. The claim that generations exist would mean that people’s attitudes can be explained at least partly by their birth year - even if you account for how old they are when surveyed (age effects) or the historical moment in which they are surveyed (period effects). But once you account for both age and period effects, the supposed “generation effect” disappears.

Think about it this way: young people usually do think differently from older people - for example, they may value leisure more highly than career advancement. That’s an age effect. And people’s views also shift with context: during a recession, everyone worries more about job security. That’s a period effect. For generations to be real, we would need to find systematic differences that remain after we remove those two factors. But across large-scale panel datasets, those differences barely exist.

That is why Schröder and other sociologists conclude that generations are essentially myths. They are storytelling devices that feel explanatory but are, in reality, about as scientific as astrology. Convenient, maybe even entertaining - but ultimately not real.

Of course, if you are an ambitious entrepreneur or influencer, it can still be profitable to act as though generations exist. Selling the illusion of unique generational insight is a career path in itself. And since few people bother to check whether the evidence holds up, you can continue insisting on using categories that social science has already shown to be meaningless.

Needless to say, many jobs today fall into the category of what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.” At the same time, work has grown increasingly precarious. The flexibilization of labor, along with the gig economy, has eroded stability, making employment more insecure and unpredictable. For many young people, this translates into long hours, low pay, and the lingering hope that enduring these conditions will one day “pay off.”

But joblessness is more than an economic inconvenience. It’s not just about struggling to pay rent, cover bills, or afford a night out with friends (although I have to admit that this is already bad enough). It’s the gnawing shame of feeling like you’re failing at being a productive member of society. Some of my friends and I have even blamed ourselves, wondering if we should have chosen “safer” paths - medicine, law, finance. But deep down, we know those paths wouldn’t have suited us anyway.

Trying to look for something that isn’t there can seem utterly absurd. What’s even more troubling is the shame and self-blame that come when society demands something of you that may not exist. It’s not surprising that research shows unemployment is strongly associated with lower life satisfaction. If you feel you cannot contribute to your community or society, you inevitably feel bad about yourself.

But when you, as an individual, blame yourself for the difficulties you encounter, it’s worthwhile to step back and consider the broader picture. I, like many others, have already outlined explanations for why the job market for recent graduates is so tight. It helps to look at the systemic level to understand what’s actually driving scarcity.

The Paradox of Work

It may be useful to interrogate the very idea our society rests upon. For centuries, work- typically in a firm or government institution - was unquestioned and tightly interwoven with how society was organized. As Richard Sennett describes in The Culture of the New Capitalism, work, with its stability, predictability, defined duties, and clear roles, provided individuals with the opportunity to craft life narratives: when to buy a house, when to start a family, when to expect a promotion. In an age where technology and AI are increasingly used to replace workers and requires skills and taltens are ever changing, holding onto work in the same way is not a privilege younger workers can assume.

Proponents of workers’ democracy - where workers have a say in production processes and other matters that affect them - argue that this model, and the eventual democratization of the whole economy, could slow the pace of replacement. If you, as a worker, had a say in how much technology and AI to implement, you would only approve it to the extent that it didn’t jeopardize your job. But because the balance of power is not in favor of workers, and we’re far from workers’ democracy, we have to admit that the pace of AI adoption is not for us to decide. The capitalist class will do everything in its power to replace living workers - who get sick, need insurance, and demand higher wages - with machines.

If the replacement of jobs becomes widespread and work as we once knew it becomes obsolete, we must ask the question Viviane Forrester posed in her 1996 pamphlet The Terror of the Economy, written during a period of record unemployment in France:

“Is it normal, or even logical, that people are forced to do something that hardly exists anymore? Is it also legal to demand something as a necessary condition for survival that does not exist at all?”

the french author Viviane Forrester (1925-2013)

Why force people who are struggling to find jobs that suit their qualifications - while firms halt hiring to save money and distribute it to shareholders—to pursue something that is obviously not there? Is there really a need to harass workers into submission for something that does not exist? To humiliate them by saying they are only good, viable members of society if they “earn their living”? To make them feel so worthless that they ask themselves:

“What use can a life have that is not useful for profit?”

That work is inherently exploitative is not a new claim. The interests of workers and employers are often antagonistic: workers want to put in as little work as possible to maximize their payoff, while employers seek to minimize wages for the sake of surplus value. Yet people who find themselves unemployed lament, as Forrester notes:

“[…] beyond the exploitation of people, there is something worse—the absence of any exploitation at all. It’s understandable that the masses tremble, and each individual trembles with good reason, for he is not exploitable, not even exploitable, since he is no longer needed for the already obsolete form of exploitation.”

What we hear from politicians is that work serves as the foundation of our society. Those who do not work must be punished for not fulfilling what the state demands, even as we witness a situation where bullshit jobs proliferate and entry-level jobs vanish. Their supposed solution is always the same: tax cuts for enterprises. This is sold as a way to stimulate investment and job creation. But as we know, the relationship between corporate tax cuts and GDP growth and anything but clear, with research even suggesting a publicaiton-bias in favor of studies confirming what politicians would like us to believe: That they will provide jobs, by providing more money to big businesses. But we must never forget, they do it for us! As Forrester puts it:

“In reality, the texts and speeches that analyze the problems of work and unemployment are concerned with profit as their underlying matrix, without ever naming it. Profit is the big boss, but we do not talk about it.”

What Forrester wrote resonates with me because it captures the absurdity of being told to search for work that may not exist, and the humiliation of being defined, or defining yourself, as worthless without it. In Germany, the debate today revolves around Fachkräftemangel - a supposed shortage of skilled workers. At first glance, this might look like the solution to the paradox I’ve described. Why not apply for the jobs needed in the care, or in IT sector that are so desperatly needed right now? In my next piece, I will explain why, despite so many of us young professionals desperately seeking employment, the shortage persists - and why it will likely continue to persist in the future.

At first, I didn’t understand. Why take offense at being mistaken for a cashier? But the more I thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. Many university graduates carry an ingrained, often unexamined, condescension toward blue-collar workers. For them, being mistaken for a cashier is about the perceived drop in social status, the symbolic fall from a hard-earned rung on the ladder and an offense at their intelligence (because cashiers are all stupid as we know).

German rapper Nura in the german series “Die Discounter”.

The Dream of Climbing the Social Ladder – so pervasive and so descructive

What strikes me most is how pervasive this attitude is among graduates whose parents themselves are blue-collar workers. Many of us from migrant or working-class families grow up with a clear message: do better than your parents. And “doing better” almost always means avoiding physically demanding work or jobs in the care sector. It means going to university so you can land an “important” and well-paid role - ideally one that comes with a nice office.

This mindset rests on a deep, often invisible hierarchy of labor. White-collar jobs are seen as inherently more valuable, while jobs that don’t require a degree - no matter how essential these jobs are - are devalued. The belief in a “meritocratic” system justifies this: degrees supposedly prove that you deserve higher pay and more respect. But if you look closely, that justification collapses.

Why should a project manager in a consultancy earn more than a teacher? There’s no fair, logical reason - only the cultural and economic myths we’ve built around credentials and prestige. Degrees become convenient markers of worth, not because they measure societal value, but because they keep us from questioning the unjust distribution of wages in the first place.

Self-blame and lack of empathy

To be fair, there are faire reasons why people avoid blue-collar work: lower pay, more physical and mental strain, limited remote-work possibilities, stricter hierarchies, and overall lower job satisfaction. But I think my former colleague’s reaction to being “mistaken” for a cashier has a deeper psychological explanation.

Research by McCoy et al. (2013) shows that members of low-status groups who endorse meritocracy - and then fail to meet its supposed standards - are more likely to blame themselves for their position. When meritocracy is fully embraced, the logic is simple: ability and effort determine social position, so differences in status must be justified. And if you fail to adhere to the meritocratic project, there is only one to blame and that is yourself. This belief system serves to legitimize inequality (Major & McCoy, 2007).

These “system-justifying” beliefs matter because they have measurable social effects. Studies suggest a negative relationship between holding such beliefs and the willingness to help disadvantaged individuals - whether through redistributing resources or supporting policies that aid lower-status groups. Li and Edwards (2021), for instance, found that activating meritocratic thinking can actually reduce both perspective-taking and empathic concern.

This has real-world consequences. In countries like Germany, people in low-wage sectors often rely on additional state support even while working full-time, and they face a significantly higher risk of poverty in old age. If meritocracy erodes empathy, it makes it that much harder to build public support for fixing these inequalities.

Was she right?

So maybe my friend’s reaction wasn’t entirely misplaced. In our world, working in a job that doesn’t require a degree often means not only lower pay, but also lower self-regard - especially when you’ve internalized meritocratic beliefs as deeply as many of us in the West have. In that framework, your work is a direct reflection of your worth.

Her offense likely came from the belief that she is better than a cashier - not out of cruelty, but because she has mastered the “rules” that supposedly elevate both your income and your self-esteem. She sees herself as someone who has “worked hard,” earned a master’s degree, and therefore should never be mistaken for someone in low-paid, low-status work.

And that’s the cruel genius of meritocracy: it doesn’t just shape how we value others -it shapes how we value ourselves. It convinces us that status is proof of virtue, that income is proof of effort, and that to be mistaken for someone lower in the hierarchy is an irredeemable offense.

The recent resurgence of this rhetoric is rooted in anxiety. Anxiety about the growing presence of women in previously male-dominated spaces, anxiety about the complexity of modern life, and about the perceived loss of male (and often white male) status. But it also has deep historical roots. It’s a lingering relic of Christian tradition, in which a woman was never regarded as a whole and independent being, but rather as an extension of a man. Her independence is discouraged or even fundamentally denied. The man leads, because he is seen as the natural and God-ordained authority, while the woman serves as supporter, caregiver, and helper.

But here’s the twist I’ve observed over the past few years: while these men preach submission for women, they themselves engage in a form of submission - a deep emotional loyalty to dominant male leaders, especially those who promise to fight their battles for them. In their hunger for strength, order, and control, they reveal something peculiar: men, too, long to be led. Their calls for “traditional values” often mask their own yearning for authority - not just to wield power, but to surrender to it in the presence of a figure they believe can restore meaning and structure to their lives.

Longing for that male authority figure.

I believe this male yearning for authority becomes most visible in times of crisis - like the one we are currently enduring. Whether you're young, middle-aged, or older, we all feel the ground shifting. Housing and healthy food have become nearly unaffordable. Incomes stagnate while the wealth of the world’s billionaires has ballooned. The economy is not “economing,” and the erosion of community contributes to growing isolation and record levels of loneliness. Things are not as they once were - and certainly not as they should be.

In times like these, people search not only for a remedy, but for a vision - a sense of where to go, and who should lead them there. Whereas democratic socialists argue that the people themselves - organizing, advocating, and demanding a seat at the table - should shape the direction of society, many on the conservative and far-right seek a strongman: someone who can fix it all, restore order, and bring them back to a time when things were… well, supposedly “great”.

Right-wing - and increasingly, mainstream conservative - leaders position themselves as saviors. They promise to deliver, to restore wholeness, and to re-establish a familiar social hierarchy with (white) men at the top and everyone else below. This rhetoric resonates especially with people who hold strong conservative values — values like loyalty, authority, purity, and tradition. As philosopher Philipp Hübl outlines in Die aufgeregte Gesellschaft, those who lean conservative tend to be more sensitive to perceived threats, disorder, and moral decay. They often see strict hierarchies as necessary, and believe the role of the state is to preserve order, enforce norms, and protect cultural identity.

Now, isn’t that odd? The very same men who claim to be leaders - who advocate for “traditional” roles where men lead the household and set the rules - are often the first to eagerly delegate their political agency to authoritarian figures. Rather than building communal structures where everyone’s voice is heard, they prefer to be led - to hand over power to someone they see as strong enough to bring order, meaning, and simplicity back into a world that no longer revolves around them.

The submissive man is at odds with real democracy.

Delegating one’s political agency to someone else goes against the core of real democratic participation - not the limited version of democracy we see today, where people are simply politely asked to vote every four or five years. This kind of democracy falls short of what true democracy should be. As Grace Blakeley argues in her book Vulture Capitalism, real democracy - which she equates with democratic socialism - is a “[…] project of collective liberation, which would allow workers to take control over production and citizens to take control over government” (p. 270). History shows us that blind faith in government - particularly in systems where the balance of power is skewed in favor of the wealthy - is rarely a promising path to improve the living conditions of ordinary people. Trump’s presidency perfectly reveals how populist language and appeals to a submissive, authoritarian right-leaning men can serve as a smokescreen for protecting elite power.

I am the daughter of two Rwandese migrants who came to Germany in the late 1980s, hoping to find a better life in Europe and secure a hopeful future for their children. The hard work of moving across continents should have meant that we, their children, would be able to secure better-paying jobs, enjoy a higher standard of living, and experience the kind of life satisfaction they were never afforded.

Similar to many other migrant families who arrived in Germany during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as part of the Gastarbeiter program – several initiatives from Germany based on bilateral labour agreements with countries such as Turkey, Italy, and Spain - my parents found themselves in physically and emotionally exhausting jobs. Both of them work in fields that were deemed “system-relevant” during the COVID-19 pandemic. My mother works in elderly care. My father installs heating systems. And yet, despite their essential roles, they continue to struggle - and likely will continue to struggle after retiring - with basic needs such as stable housing and access to nutritious food.

As is often the case, their dream was for us to have better lives. They encouraged us to get good educations, land secure jobs, and lead lives that looked nothing like theirs. I embraced this dream wholeheartedly. I witnessed, firsthand, the toll it takes to work in care sectors that are central to a functioning society - but receive so little recognition in return. My friends, who mostly have parents migration background, and I never even considered entering these kinds of jobs. We all aspired to work in big, global, prestigious institutions. And some of us, like me, even joined initiatives such as Network Chances, a social mobility network that offers career development and mentorship to those from low socio-economic backgrounds.

But pursuing a “better life” comes with hidden costs.

One of them is alienation. As our life circumstances, values, and cultural references shift, we sometimes find ourselves at odds with the very people we grew up with and love. Literature like Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims or Annie Ernaux’s La Place explores this generational and class-based disconnect with painful clarity. While this estrangement can be painful, it is not what troubles me most.

What truly concerns me is what we leave behind as we rise.

In our pursuit of upward mobility, many of us are eager to escape. To flee from the conditions our parents endured. But in doing so, we risk abandoning the very people and problems that shaped us. We ignore the bus driver who has to strike on a regular basis just to remind us that he, too, deserves to be paid well. We avoid eye contact with the cleaning woman exposed to toxic chemicals for 40 hours a week with meager pay. We don’t speak up for the construction worker laboring under a burning sun.

We should be among the loudest voices advocating for change - because we know how exploitation feels, even if secondhand. Instead, we often become quiet and even complicit. Grateful to have made it. Anxious not to fall back. Eager to be accepted into our new, prestigious world.

Worse still, we may begin to believe the story we’re told: that we deserve our success. That our degrees and late-night study sessions justify the gap between our lives and theirs. This is what philosopher Michael Sandel calls “the tyranny of merit” - the idea that success is earned and therefore deserved, while failure is a reflection of personal shortcomings. This belief is not only comforting - it’s blinding. It keeps us from seeing how structural inequalities, not just hard work (whatever that is supposed to mean), determines who rises and earns well, and who remains invisible and struggles to make ends meet.

And as we assimilate into elite spaces, we risk losing not just solidarity, but sight: sight of the economic structures and political decisions that keep entire job sectors - like care work and manual labor - permanently precarious. We risk losing the vocabulary, the patience, and the moral urgency to ask hard questions about inequality, dignity, and justice.

In a world flooded with toxic positivity, personal branding, and self-help mantras, it takes courage to look away from our polished reflections and toward the uncomfortable. To ask ourselves:

• Why is society so quick to reward those who study with recognition, and so slow to value those who work in system-relevant jobs?

• What legitimizes the exploitation of human bodies in work that is essential to our well-being?

• And why have we so easily forgotten the very people we clapped for during the pandemic?

Meritocracy promises mobility. But if our ascent stabilizes a system that continues to grind others down, then maybe the dream isn’t as rewarding as it seems.

His concern is entirely valid, and unfortunately, his story is far from unique: More and more young graduates are facing a similar reality. After years of academic dedication, internships, and unpaid side projects meant to boost employability, they are entering a job market that offers little in return. Many are being pushed into underemployment - taking roles they are clearly overqualified for - just to get by.

When looking into why the job market is in such a difficult state, multiple reasons emerge. One widely acknowledged issue is the growing competitiveness of the labor market. Higher education has become more accessible, which, while a positive development in many ways, means that having a degree is no longer a differentiating factor - it’s the baseline.

On top of that, ongoing economic uncertainty has made companies more hesitant to hire. Trade policies like the Trump-era tariffs have introduced volatility into the global economy, causing organizations to adopt a more risk-averse approach. That risk aversion often starts at the bottom of the hiring chain: at entry-level positions. Many companies are no longer willing to invest in young professionals without multiple years of full-time experience. In fact, a quick glance at many so-called “entry-level” job listings reveals an odd contradiction: a minimum requirement of three years of consecutive, full-time experience. It’s hard not to question whether these roles were ever truly intended for new graduates.

Then there's the looming and polarizing issue of artificial intelligence. While AI has yet to fully disrupt the labor market, its rapid adoption has already begun to displace certain tasks that were once seen as valuable stepping stones for early-career professionals. If AI can draft reports, schedule meetings, or manage basic research, then those opportunities for hands-on learning disappear.

All of this contributes to a growing sense of disillusionment among young people. They were told that education, hard work, and persistence would open doors. But many now find themselves knocking repeatedly, only to be met with silence. For many young people it feels like a promise was broken that serves as a perfect narrative on how life should evolve: The promise of meritocracy. You put work in and you get a lot out of it. What you earn depends on what you learn. But that promise is no longer valid.

In response to an increasingly competitive job market, young professionals often feel compelled to engage in relentless self-optimization. Like the young man mentioned earlier, they invest in themselves - pursuing additional degrees, certifications, language courses - not necessarily because they find intrinsic value in these activities, but because they believe it’s the only way to enhance their employability. And this is where the real problem lies.

It’s not just about the instrumentalization of education - although that, too, is a troubling trend deserving of its own discussion. The deeper issue is the widespread belief that systemic problems can be solved through individual effort alone. This mindset is reinforced by the rise of pop-academic psychology, which offers endless advice on how to better manage yourself, hack your habits, and fine-tune your mindset not to transform the world, but to survive it.

Instead of addressing structural flaws, we’re encouraged to treat ourselves as the problem. Change your routine, rewire your brain, stay positive, go to the gym and drink Saratoga water. But this relentless focus on individual adjustment masks a larger truth: no amount of self-discipline can fix a broken system. And perhaps the real act of courage today is not to conquer the world by adjusting to the very expectations it has on you - but to question the conditions that make this kind of conquest necessary in the first place.

Instead of asking the critical question: What are the structural conditions that lead to the lack of employment opportunities for early-career professionals? - we’ve been trained to ask something very different: How can I make myself more employable? How can I stand out? How can I outcompete others in the same struggle?

This shift in perspective doesn’t just distract us from the root causes, it reinforces them. It internalizes failure as a personal flaw rather than a symptom of systemic dysfunction that you as an individual can not control. No matter how powerful your so-called mindset is, you alone cannot stop the imposition of tariffs, convince multinational corporations to hire more entry-level workers, or push through meaningful regulation on AI to safeguard jobs. These are political issues that require collective solutions. Yet the dominant narrative insists that if you're not succeeding, it's because you're not optimizing hard enough. Not grinding enough. Not manifesting enough. And in believing that, we turn away from the very structural change that’s actually needed. In doing so, it hands even more power to those who hold the keys to opportunity: the employers, the gatekeepers, the ones who decide whether we’re hired, whether we eat, whether we can afford a roof over our heads.

It becomes less about collective change and more about individual survival. Less about justice, more about branding. And in this zero-sum game, even the winners lose something essential.

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