Daniel Conderman 
Once upon a time, every kid had a way to get their first taste of work. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was honest. You started out young—paper routes, bagging groceries, bussing tables, mowing lawns. You got your first paycheck, your first cash tips, and you started understanding the grind. You wanted something? You earned it. By the time you were 16, you had saved up enough to buy a car. Not some junker either—something respectable, something that showed the world you had the discipline to get out there and hustle.
Now? It’s all gone. Strangled out by corporate greed and a society that has stripped kids of responsibility, ambition, and the ability to fend for themselves. Every entry-level job that used to be a stepping stone has been either automated, outsourced, or handed over to adults desperate for work. And the result? A generation of young people who have no concept of earning, no idea what it means to work towards something, and absolutely no shame about sponging off their parents indefinitely.
I’ve tried hiring under-20s. It’s a joke. They don’t want to work. They don’t want to earn. They don’t even see it as necessary. They think they’ll just drift through life with their parents covering the bills forever. They don’t realize that work is more than money—it’s the first real step into adulthood. It’s proving you can handle responsibility, that you can show up on time, that someone outside your family can vouch for you. Without that, you’re just another dead weight on society.
And the saddest part? The last youth subculture that truly understood hustle was the Juggalos. Yeah, laugh if you want, but they got it. They were out there selling merch, running their own underground networks, making music, promoting events, building something out of nothing. They didn’t wait for permission. They weren’t begging for participation trophies. They put in the work because they knew no one was coming to save them. They knew how to hustle, how to create, how to survive.
But corporate media and advertisers couldn’t let that stand. They’ve spent the last 20 years poisoning young minds with comfort, convenience, and dependency. They don’t want kids to be independent. They want them to be passive consumers—addicted to screens, doped up on entertainment, and too soft to ever challenge the system. They’ve convinced an entire generation that labor is beneath them, that grinding for success is for suckers, and that money should just appear out of thin air because they exist.
We screwed society over by stripping away those first jobs, those first steps toward independence. We told kids that work isn’t necessary, that ambition is outdated, and that struggle should be avoided at all costs. And now? We’ve got a generation with no drive, no fight, and no future.
Juggalos were the last real hustlers in youth culture. And if you’ve got a problem with that, you probably don’t even know what it means to work for something in the first place.
