Ownage
Member
The Lost Generation
For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.
www.compactmag.com
There are many stories similar to this one.
From my own experience, DEI meant that narrow political priorities were pushed onto the majority of people who had no connection to those issues and no say in the change, while standards quietly slipped. I watched roles get filled by people who lacked the skills for the job, and the decline shows up in everyday life. Customer service reps who cannot troubleshoot basic issues because they were never properly trained. Software releases that feel rushed and buggy because competence took a back seat to optics and near-term cost savings. Construction and maintenance work that needs to be redone because fundamentals were missed. Schools spending time on ideological programming while reading, math, and discipline fall behind. Medical offices staffed by administrators who make constant scheduling and billing errors, slowing care for everyone. At the same time, workplaces, schools, and public services became saturated with moralized language, symbolic gestures, and performative virtue signaling that created the appearance of progress without delivering any real improvement in performance or learning outcomes. This decline cannot be brushed off as underfunding, because outcomes have worsened even as spending, staffing, and administrative layers have increased. Ordinary people were expected to absorb the cost of these poor decisions, and now the outcome is flagrantly obvious: lower quality, more friction, weaker trust, and a growing sense that hiring and promotion stopped being about who could actually do the work.
The honest question we all need to ask ourselves is what we are going to do about it.
