The Sad State Of American Work Ethic, Especially With Younger Generations

One of my sons was updating his work history on Facebook recently. The detail he's adding got me thinking about my own work history in similar detail. What I came up with brought me to the realization that the average young person (through age 40 or so) has a much different sense of responsibility than folks of my generation and older.

Here's my list of jobs in rough chronological order:

1. Electrician crew helper at a zinc smelter.
2. Zinc production crew which entailed standing over long rows of cells filled with a sulfuric acid mixture and pulling out metal sheets with zinc plated on them from the electrolysis process. The acid fumes ate through our pants ... a new pair of jeans lasted barely one week. Every night found me treating acid burns on my feet, legs and hands with hydrogen peroxide to neutralize it. It couldn't have been a good environment for my lungs, eh?
3. Electrician crew helper at a lead smelter. One task that lasted three months was inventorying and servicing (mostly lubricating) the hundreds of motors covered in lead dust. We wore no masks in such work. And people worry about minute amounts of lead in anything these days?
4. Forest fire fighter. Probably the hardest work I've ever done. 12-14 hour days in hot and dangerous conditions. Sleeping in paper bags.
5. Timber repair in underground hardrock mine. Dangerous and physically demanding work a full mile underground.
6. Enlisted(!) in US Air Force in the midst of the Viet Nam war. Never made it to Viet Nam but it was an 'interesting' time to enlist in the military. Sometimes I wonder what was I thinking? Most of the time I'm convinced it was both patriotic and (much needed!) maturity-growing.
7. Just a note: My life took a positive turn the first night after I enlisted. From that point on I completely owned responsibility for my life ... what it would or would not become. Below is what followed four years of honorable military service to our country.
8. Computer repair tech for Honeywell. I took a correspondence course in electronics to make that possible.
9. After 4 years of #8 I began taking night classes at San Francisco's Heald School of Engineering.
10. Got married and completed Foothill Junior College's engineering prep curriculum.
11. Transferred to Stanford, getting BS and MS in computer design.
12. CPU designer for Amdahl, the most state of the art computer design company in its day.
13. Various engineering department manager jobs in various high tech companies.
14. Various project/program management jobs in various high tech companies.

The point I wanted to make of all this has nothing to do with bragging or a self-congratulatory attitude. My point boils down to four questions really, comparing how people used to think about personal responsibility with what's going on these days. 1) How many young people in recent generations take real personal responsibility for their lives? 2) How many young people are willing to do physically demanding work if that's all that's available or is about all they're qualified for? 3) How many young people these days would do whatever it takes to earn a living, not expecting anyone else to take care of them or their needs? 4) How many young people do the responsible thing, live within their means and postpone material and other gratification until they're financially and otherwise able to handle it?

What made our country successful through the 1970's or so were strong work ethics, strong sense of responsibility, strong sense of personal accountability, etc. Too many young people these days don't get it and our country will be far worse off for it. We're headed in a really, really bad direction with so many people thinking that others owe them things they haven't earned (entitlement) and that it's okay to mortgage their future (and that of others) for completely selfish and highly materialistic self-gratification in the present. We live in the country with the greatest opportunity to succeed and excel based almost entirely on one's own desire to do whatever it takes. What are people doing to take advantage of it based on a strong sense of personal responsibility, honesty and integrity? What I see going on isn't encouraging about our country's future.