In regard to work ethic we are seeing a decline because we have it easy today. Hungry? Have mom fix you dinner, or go to the local store. Need money? Ask Dad, or live at home and work some $10 an hour job. Why not? No rent, you make $300 a week for doing virtually nothing. Life is great.
We are spoiled. It was inevitable. You don't have to work really hard anymore. The consequences aren't as harsh as they were in the past. In my city I know many young men who work in the summer and take off for 7 months. They all collect unemployment. Many avoid work for long periods of time. There are many who do work hard. But, we have a large population of young men who avoid work.
Check out this article.
https://www.intheblack.com/articles/2017/04/01/why-young-men-arent-working
I have two friends in this situation. Both are married. First one, his wife works and he stays home; no kids. Basically a stay-at-home husband (not a stay-at-home dad). Second one, his mom takes care of him. Neither one is disabled in either way, but also...neither one works.
I don't believe video games are the root cause. I believe that the people who act as their enablers are the root cause. Well, a step above the real root cause, but more on that in a minute. Basically, if those enablers were to cut them off from support - support being financial, a place to live, food, a washer & dryer to use (or have their laundry done for them), etc. - the non-workers would be in pretty hot water. Because really, who can blame the non-workers? I'm not abdicating them of responsibility over their lives, but if your mom said hey, why don't you live at home rent-free, I'll make you dinner, you don't have to work, why would you say no to that? lol. A free pass to play video games and do whatever you want all day? That's living the dream! The movie "Failure to Launch" is a great example of that. Why put in the effort to be independent when you can be taken care of, especially if you're not a naturally ambitious person?
Everything boils down to personal choice. The real root cause is usually just laziness, but it's a complex mix of fear of having to find a job, competition, having to work, leaving the nest, finding out that jobs in the real world aren't what you expected them to be, etc. But it's also partly the fault of the caretakers. In nature, the momma bird sometimes has to drop the baby bird out of the nest in order to get the baby bird to fly. Or going back even further, if you help a baby bird crack an egg, that bird is going to die because it needs to go through the effort & hardship of cracking the egg to grow. If you never give your kids the opportunity to be independent, then how do you expect them to be independent? That last section of the article is great:
Mark's perfect world
Mark [not his real name], a 28-year-old from the central coast of New South Wales, has been unemployed for much of his 20s. He works a couple of days a week but considers himself underemployed, so is applying for other jobs.
He currently plays Perfect World, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), for 16 hours per day when not working, and puts in about five hours on a work day, before starting and after finishing his day job.
Mark says gaming gives him a chance to demonstrate his skills, while keeping him connected and informed.
“If something happens in the world I hear it first from other players on Perfect World. It also offers relief from the reality that there is so much job competition out there. You can have another life and you can have it whenever you want it,” he explains.
Would his love of online games affect his willingness to work more? “I wouldn’t turn down the perfect job for it, but when looking for work I do consider the hours, preferring part-time as it gives me more time to do … other things.”
For Mark, gaming is his work. “You’d be surprised how similar it [video gaming] is to a real job. As a guild leader, I have daily duties to attend to, disagreements to resolve and activities to organise for my team. If I don’t do a good job my guild could fall apart, so I feel a sense of duty to put in the hours to build and grow my team. This means you can’t be away from a keyboard for too long – so it does eat into your life.”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using your free time however you want - assuming, of course, that you are taking care of your responsibilities. I work with guys who put in 40 hours a week and literally spend every other free waking moment on the Xbox. They are providing for themselves and staying out of trouble, so even though that wouldn't be the path I would choose, I can't fault them for using their discretionary time however they want to.
But if your mom is paying rent, making your meals, doing your laundry, cleaning your room, while you don't work or hardly work and are instead playing video games, yeah, that's nuts & shameful. I can understand it in some circumstances, sure...if you have really bad anxiety or something, that's one thing, but since the rate of unemployment in males in their 20's has apparently skyrocketed, that can't be the case for
everyone out there.
To quote the guy in the article above, "“You’d be surprised how similar it [video gaming] is to a real job. As a guild leader, I have daily duties to attend to, disagreements to resolve and activities to organise for my team. If I don’t do a good job my guild could fall apart". That sounds stupid, but I totally understand getting sucked into projects...I've done my fair share of useless hobbies like VR, hackintosh, Counter-strike, etc. over the years. And like I said above, I can also understand why you would want to take advantage of that situation...if someone offers you a free pass to play all day, why wouldn't you jump all over that? I'd love to stay home and play video games for 16 hours a day instead of going to work.
My guess is that the bottom line in most of these situations is that they have parents or other caretakers who aren't pushing them to be independent. If you only work part-time at an hourly job and don't have school, how are you going to afford rent, food, dating, clothes, a car payment, gas, insurance, etc? Someone is being a maid to these kids. It's hard to blame the kids when you setup a comfortable trap for them. Stay home, we'll take care of you, you do you.
PS - on a tangent, is anyone looking to adopt an adult male to stay home & play video games all day? I can cook...