Run the math on a DoorDash shift sometime. After gas, insurance, and what every mile quietly takes off the car, the average driver clears $11 to $14 an hour. A first-year plumbing apprentice — a kid who's never sweat a fitting in his life — starts at $22 to $28 on a W-2, with benefits and a tool allowance. Four years later he's a journeyman at $34 to $52 plus overtime, and the company hands him a truck.
That's not a close call. That's a rout. And yet for twenty years a whole generation got steered toward the first number and away from the second, and now half the internet is kids wondering why everything feels rigged.
I don't blame the kids. I want that on the record. They ran the play they were handed. “Do what you love and the money will follow” — that was the sermon from every commencement stage in America, and for most of them the money followed about as far as a barista counter in Brooklyn and a graduate degree the market never asked for. Meanwhile the guys who supposedly “settled” for the trades are out shopping for second homes.
The parents ran the same play. Half the moms and dads pushing college in 2014 hadn't hired an electrician in ten years and had no idea what one made. “You don't want to be doing that,” they'd say — about a career that out-earns most of the people at their own office. They weren't lying to their kids. They were just wrong, confidently, at the exact moment it mattered.
And the algorithm finished the job. The plumbers, welders, and electricians making $110,000 to $140,000 a year don't post about it. They're busy, and nobody films themselves clearing a main line for the aesthetic. The DoorDash driver making $32,000 with a philosophy degree posts every day. Guess which feed the next sixteen-year-old is watching when he decides what his life is going to be.
Here's the part that gives me some hope. Trades enrollment is up 27 percent since 2019. Union apprenticeship applications are at all-time highs. Colleges are quietly closing the programs that don't lead to jobs, which is about the closest a college gets to an apology. The signal got through. It just took a decade of gig-app suffering to deliver it, which is a hell of a tuition bill for a lesson the trades would've taught for free — while paying you.
So the next kid you hear say the system is rigged, go easy on him. Somebody did rig it, just with bad advice instead of malice. Ask him if he's ever picked up a wrench. If he says no, hand him one. There's a $70,000-a-year job on the other end of it, and it's been waiting the whole time.