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If You’re Looking For A New Job But Can’t Find One, You’re Probably Not Looking Hard Enough

Concerns over what appears to be a dwindling work ethic.

Susan Poole
5 min readJul 1, 2021
Photo by Linda Eller-Shein from Pexels

I don’t have to look further than my own home to find evidence of how the work ethic in this country has changed. I’m not bashing my 19-year-old son when I say that he got his very first job this year. This year. To all you Generation Xers and beyond, let that sink in for a moment. My guess is that if you were born anywhere around the same time I was (mid-60s), you had your first job earlier in life than that.

I started babysitting as soon as I could, got an early taste of how nice it was to make my own money, and then picked up a paper route to keep the ball rolling. As soon as I turned sixteen, I got a job at a fast-food restaurant (which today my 22-year-old diva daughter says must have been “social suicide”). Flash forward all through high school and college where I juggled as many jobs as I could handle, never thinking twice about it. It’s what we did.

So, why is it that over the past couple of weeks, I’ve fielded several surprising comments about my son’s summer job? “Let’s see how long he lasts,” a good friend said. “Is he still hanging in there or has he quit yet?” said another.

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Susan Poole
Susan Poole

Written by Susan Poole

Mother, lawyer, nonprofit executive, breast cancer survivor, and women's fiction author. https://susanpooleauthor.com

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