Because the world at large is often so focused on the present immediacy of itself, it’s easy to forget if and how things were essentially exactly the same in the past, just slightly more elegant thanks to people actually dressing themselves. With the nonstop barrage of “think pieces” about how millennials are the laziest, most self-involved generation to date, it makes an office worker in this age bracket question whether or not the “fuck you, pay me” philosophy–first popularized by Goodfellas–was something helmed by us, or has long been a tenet of the cube life.
To elaborate for those who can’t glean its meaning based on phrase alone, “fuck you, pay me” infers doing a minimal amount of work and expecting a far greater return on the effort you’ve put in. As Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) explains of fellow gangster Paulie (Paul Sorvino) collecting his payment from people, “Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh you had a fire, fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.” The bottom line being, of course, that there is no excuse for someone who owes you money to skirt or skimp.
As an employee in the office world, things are not quite so overtly gangster. One kind of has to silently wish for his employer’s death if the payment doesn’t come soon. Moreover, because there are so many fake jobs in New York that use the smoke and mirrors of being a startup to get you to believe that they will eventually pay you “once [they] get the money,” the “fuck you, pay me” philosophy is even more legitimate–not merely a byproduct of the millennial’s predilection toward loafing.
And while, sure, there are truly indolent office workers of the millennial variety who expect to show up, do the minimum and get the paycheck, one must ask: can you blame them? Work like this is “high-paying” by sole virtue of its tedium factor. It’s only natural that their mental languor would manifest into a nominal work ethic. By the same token, it’s likely that office workers of generations past felt and acted in precisely the same manner.