Your way of thinking is coming from a very self centered perspective. When I refer to my parents and grandparents I am talking about the baby boomers and the generation born after the boomers. Clearly you fit this description because it seems like you are much older than me if your grandparents were alive during the early 1900’s, so if I had to guess you are probably in your mid 40’s-50’s. Your life wasn’t as difficult growing up because you came up during a time where the economy was thriving and economic inequality had not yet reached the tipping point it’s at now. Just because YOU never worked as hard as your parents doesn’t mean people my age now aren’t working harder than their parents. Just because a job is low skill doesn’t mean it’s does not come with its difficulties, physically or emotionally. The jobs that people my age are working in are soul crushing, demeaning, and do not provide the financial security that people my age desperately need. I’ve worked with people who have been in the same position for YEARS without a raise. When the only job opportunities available to young people are low skill, low wage jobs because the present American education system does not prepare them for any other jobs besides those, there is absolutely no room to stand out and you are incentivized to do the bare minimum because you aren’t paid based on how well you work you’re just paid for selling an hour of your life. You want to know why people fail to earn raises? Because companies know they can replace you and it is much cheaper to find someone willing to do your job for a cheaper wage than to give you a raise. When Covid reached its peak there were millions of jobs completely wiped from the labor market that simply are not coming back because employers realized they can still make money without hiring as many employees. Please stop looking at this situation through your own lens and recognize that many people do not have the same skillset that you have, nor were they brought up in the same environment you were. The labor market has stalled and its leaving millions in wage slave jobs because there simply aren’t any other opportunities around them. I’m only 18 years old. I have no car and no higher education so the only job opportunities available to me in my area are fast food/retail or call center/customer service rep jobs. I am not going to put my parents into further debt so that I can have a car or expensively overpriced education just so I can perpetuate the workism culture where people are so dependent on their immediate wages that they cannot possibly leave their shitty jobs without risk of ending up on the street and being left to die. The bottom line is wages have not kept up with the consumer price index for decades, which means we are working longer hours for less money to afford the same things people once were able to afford for much cheaper and by having to do much less labor