Nobody wants to work anymore
056: Lack of work ethic is the real pandemic
Happy Friday everybody. The last week has been characterized by massive sell offs in global markets and crypto. A contagion effect has rippled throughout the entire crypto industry as lenders and funds employing leverage have blown up. In many instances investors don’t have access to their funds as liquidations occur and institutions scramble to do damage control.
Obviously I am eager to see if we find some sort of local bottom even if it is temporary but we are indeed hard pressed for bullish catalysts at the moment and my instincts tell me the sell off is far from over. A quick few market and news updates before we dive into a focus piece today - free for all subscribers.
Market & Global News Updates
On a long enough time scale, there are likely some great deals on blue chip assets to be had now. The obvious question is how long will this bear market last? It may sensibly take until a fed pivot for markets to approach levels near their ATHs during the covid money printer extravaganza.
Crypto currency markets have lost $1.1 Trillion in market capitalization in the last 70+ days, largest and fastest loss to date.
Russian natural gas flows to France via pipelines from Germany have stopped as Putin escalates his war with Western Powers
Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX are being sued for $258 billion over alleged Dogecoin pyramid schemes lmao
Crypto Hedge Fund Three Arrows Capital is facing over $400M in liquidations -Coindesk
Majority of hedge funds predict Bitcoin at $100K by the end of the year - PricewaterhouseCoopers
Babel Finance, a crypto lender backed by Sequoia and Tiger Global, has suspended withdrawals and redemptions, says it is "facing unusual liquidity pressures" (Kadhim - Twitter)
I will do a deep dive focus piece on the state of markets Monday for paid subscribers. We’ll talk about risk management, how to weather all of this volatility, and the best way to keep crypto secure. Our paid posts have been a massive success.
Nobody wants to work anymore
I’ve begun to notice a pretty disturbing phenomenon. It started towards the tail end of Covid and is alarmingly apparent in the wake of the pandemic. Nobody wants to work anymore. It’s crazy. I notice it more and more each day in varying capacities.
Everywhere I go I see signs for “help wanted” or “be patient with the workers who showed up” or some other degenerate nonsense. It’s not just in NYC either, I have seen this is multiple states and experienced the trend first hand in person at numerous restaurants, retail stores, and other venues. Just the other night I was getting dinner in NJ at a Mexican Restaurant. I was having a Modelo and some sizzling steak nachos at the bar and overheard the staff gathering by the register:
“I don’t want to be here” “When are we good to leave?
They droned on and on checking their cell phones and not servicing anyone else at tables in the establishment. Complete lack of being present. The next day I was in a sandwich/burger joint and I walked in at 7:53pm. As I tried to order the girl at the register asked the cook and other waiters if they were still taking orders. They said “yes, but make sure it’s the last one, we want to go home”. 3 more people proceeded to come in and try to order and they turned all of them down. As I waited the girls behind the counter were more concerned with how many tips they had received than making more money for the business or servicing customers. 2 of them ran out before the official closing at 8:00pm. Wild.
“There's nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work.”
- Atlas Shrugged
Towards the tail end of my time in the city I had some of the worst experiences I have ever had at casual restaurants (Chipotle, Just Salad, ShakeShack, Au Bon Pain, etc.) I stood in. line at Chipotle once, waiting for my turn. When I got to the front of the line (about 9 people in front of me) I told the guy I wanted a quesadilla. He grabbed a burrito tortilla and he proceeded to ask me what kind of rice I wanted. I said, “do you put rice in your quesadilla man?” He looked back at me puzzled and then turned around and asked another worker “how do I make a quesadilla?” The other worker turned to me and said “You want a quesadilla?” “Yes a plain quesadilla please” I replied
“Okay you’re going to have to wait for the register then order it and then we can get it started” he said and turned around to chop more meat into large sloppy chunks that no normal human would be enticed by.
“I’m not going to do that” I responded, and walked out.
I will give those guys the benefit of the doubt and assume both were high as fuck. The ironic part about all of this is that these people don’t do the basics correctly. Because of that, they will likely never progress into management or senior roles or have the opportunity to eventually better themselves and get a good job. In some regards I pity them, because with inflation, handouts, and the society we live in now, they are forever condemned to an average life.
You might not think this is that big of a deal but what I am trying to emphasize here is a clear lack of initiative, critical thinking, or basic comprehension and this is hardly an isolated instance. ZERO consideration for the details. In a similar experience at Dos Toros, a fat guy ignored me as the sole customer waiting at the counter for about 3 minutes. When he finally started, he sloppily began making the burrito.
By the time I got to the salsa part, I said two stripes of orange hot sauce (IYKYK) and I watched him proceed to give me two stripes of Green and two stripes of Brown salsa. The other girl working quipped “what are you doing? He just said Orange salsa”. The fat guy chortled “I did it right?! what do you mean” and then it clicked in his cricket brain and he literally stepped back from my burrito took off his gloves and tried to play it off laughing while also relinquishing control to the girl.
Shoutout to this girl who was clearly embarrassed by the lard ass, she made a new one and was super courteous and helpful. You’re a good person and a hard worker.
Andy who are you to criticize minimum wage workers?
I recently moved outside of New York City to seek more room, lower rents, and a better quality of life. I was in the city for almost 8 years and enjoyed an epic run living there in my early 20’s. Due to higher crime rates, soaring rents, absurd taxes, and a litany of other changes, I decided to vote physically and leave. I will always carry a piece of the energy that lives in NYC with me wherever I go. I showed up with probably $3,000 to my name and left with much more plus incredible life experiences that have given me the confidence to scale and grow my business, go after much bigger life goals, and to be frank, simply put up with more shit while persevering through life. The city gives you that perspective and humbles you.
While I am fortunate to come from an intact loving family who taught me the value of hard work I don’t come from the silver spoon ranks of the East Coast elite. I come from a military family, my father was a pilot and my mom has been a labor and delivery nurse her whole life. When I turned 16 I got my first job at a lumber yard and nursery for the summer. I worked in 100 degree + heat moving large trees, pots, cinder blocks, and lumber. It was a manual labor job that paid $8 an hour. It fucking sucked. I lost 20 pounds, developed blisters on my hands, was sore every day, and was at the whim of my boss who loved having a 6’5” ogre to help him on the grounds. I was a human swiss army knife. The guy could’ve used Ox for what I was doing. I can say, that as rough as the job was, I felt an incredible sense of fulfillment and accomplishment at the end of each day.
That job taught me so many lessons about life that ended up being instrumental in my success in life. Pushing through discomfort, getting work dumped on me at 4pm on a Friday, being accountable for pieces of a business, and many many more. Let me let all of you in on a little secret. There is no way around discipline, pain, and grit to grow and become successful. All of these values and experiences have been completely forgotten and cast aside by the new working class in the United States from the McDonald’s worker all the way up to Congress.
In college I competed in D1 athletics and again, learned the value of hard work and accountability. Weight lifting at 5:30am and again at 4:00pm. Practice and weight lifting for 80% of the year. Structure, format. ownership. Balancing athletics, classes, and social life while most showed up to class drunk or high and partied incessantly for 4 years. You know what I liked most about that time? I was forced to put in the work. It was back breaking, shitty, miserable physical work. But sure enough the results followed. As cliche as it sounds, this formed the basis for the way I conduct myself in my professional life now and is a major factor in the success of the company I have built. DO THE WORK. There is no simply way around it. Anyone saying otherwise is coping. You have to suffer to some degree to accomplish anything of value.
Corporate “work” ethic is pathetic
Don’t get me started on the absolute disgusting state of woke corporate cultures. They use to throw fucking chairs out the window at Salomon Brothers and accost interns, making them do countless runs for cheeseburgers and other requests. Nowadays at most companies, woke socialism has invaded the workplace opting for diversity, inclusion, and virtue signaling over efficiency, profits, and logic. This is a micro-chasm of why our government and country is deteriorating on a massive scale. This new ideology of sloth, laziness, dodging issues, and selfishness is everywhere. No accountability. No self awareness. A complete lack of understanding as to how the real world works and consequences.
If you want to be entertained by how soft the world has become and how truly absurd some of the world’s largest corporations are, take a view through the twitter link above which shows live slack responses to Elon Musk’s all hands meeting with twitter employees yesterday. Soft cowards hiding behind key boards and tech induced beta-ness. It’s actually laughable. In any case these are the dweebs censoring filtering, and curtailing the information millions get to see every day. Think about that. Now scale it across all of the media and companies in America. Detrimental doesn’t even begin to describe the impact this has likely had.
In my own experience in companies outside of finance I have had my mind absolutely blown by the level of incompetence, buck passing, and just general ambivalence towards doing a good and complete job. There is ZERO consideration for the details and small things that ensure you succeed and manage client expectations. It’s pretty crazy lol. Remote work has absolutely contributed to this. Nobody wants to have ownership over high impact projects or take on issues head on. Leadership has become fat and lazy, delegating even the simplest tasks to whoever they can and failing to answer even the simplest questions. I’m sure you guys have experienced this as well. It’s quite pervasive and blatant. So many people are okay with doing the absolute bare minimum.
I have even experienced instances where appropriate decision makers have essentially just said “I don’t want to do this or deal with this work load”” shamelessly to my face. I actually don’t even ask questions any more because I know I am going to get a drawn out vague answer that inevitably ends up with me doing another job myself. Instead I take to the front and attack the roadblock head on, you want to wallow around and waste everyone’s time? GTFO of my way.
Where are the leaders? Where are the men (and women) who are willing to lead from the front and conquer problems, issues, and conflicts with a hands on approach? Very few exist in this day and age.
We’ve strayed so far from the values that built this nation and the freedoms we enjoy.
Is it the pandemic? Remote work? Stimulus checks? Ease of dopamine access in the form of porn, seamless, drugs, booze, and tik tok? Social wokeism that praises people for literally doing nothing? Self sufficiency, sovereignty, and ambition seem to be gone.
My hunch is it is a mixture of all of the above plus one major fact that young people in the United States simply can’t avoid. Lack of conflict and a cushy existence that fell within the ultimate peak of Western Civilization. The comforts of modern life and the pandemic allowed people in all capacities to slack off. And slack off they did.
I hate to use the exhaustive and much used example of the Fall of Rome but in similar fashion we have become so inundated with up only markets, technological advances, pleasures, and comfort that many people live their daily lives with as much comfort as possible, seeking all refuge from conflict, issues, and HARD WORK. Hard work forges people. It’s the main ingredient to actually become something in your life and that means doing shit you don’t want to do.
Most of my followers probably don’t fall into the camp that I have described there. But I think this is an important trend to call out for a few reasons:
You can stand out with basic drive and work ethic
Things will get worse because of the scale of this trend
Surround yourself with people better than you.
I have found that merely operating at my resting level has been enough to surpass many of my peers because the bar is so fucking low these days. Make a conscious decision today to do the hard work. Get it done and do it completely. If no one else will then grab that shit and GET IT DONE.
Father’s Day is this weekend and some of you have DMd us asking if there is the ability to gift subscriptions to Arb Letter premium. Yes there is. Great gift for a dad who’s formed his life with discipline, hard work, and perseverance. Should be a refreshing piece of recurring media for people. If you’re new, Arb Letter is primarily covering financial markets and global news but the premium edition includes the following:
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I will see paid subs on Monday for everyone else I wish you a good weekend and week ahead. Remember to remove emotion from your trading and try to get outside to get away from the noise in the markets and the news/media.
Mental health has been pushed to the wayside during the pandemic and everyone could use a reminder to give themselves some grace. If you guys have some wild stories about lack of work ethic or laziness in your life let me know in the comments.
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*DISCLAIMER - None of this is financial advice, it is important that you do your own research and make your own investment decisions. I am a former trader and currently work within sales/financial technology/brand building/e comm.
This malaise seems like the appropriate response to the corporate greed which has been trying to decimate the working class since the 80s. Big boys use their feduciary responsibility as justification for utterly wrecking middle class benefits. The pendulum is in full swing back toward a worker uprising. The fact is anybody who isn’t executive level is grossly underpaid and the powers at be will continue to siphon the wealth that was generated from the creation of the middle class in the early 20th c. until somebody notices. The ultra wealthy have learned this time around to stay secretive about their obscene wealth. If nobody knows about it how can anyone get angry and demand change? I fear that as a highly specialized professional I will be relegated to a lifestyle of mediocrity and it only worsens for those with less skill. I find it promising that workers with perfunctory jobs are realizing that they aren’t being adequately compensated for their time. I can only hope the rest of the work force follows suit.
Glad to see you’re also a hard working mofo and can guess all your readers are as well. Thank you for sharing. We, people like us have to put the nation on our backs to save it.