The jobs that are set to last in the twenty-first century are the ones that are irreducibly human—the ones that robots can’t do better, or faster, or cheaper, or maybe that they can’t do at all. At both good and bad poles of job quality, employers need more affective labor from employees. Affective labor (or feeling work) engages what the Italian theorist Paolo Virno calls our “bioanthropological constants”—the innate capacities and practices that distinguish our species, like language and games and mutual understanding. A psychologist is doing affective labor, but so is a Starbucks barista. Any job it’s impossible to do while sobbing probably includes some affective labor. Under the midcentury labor regime we call Fordism, workers functioned as nonmechanical parts on a mechanical assembly line, moving, manipulating, and packaging physical objects. But as owners and market pressures pushed automation and digitization, the production process replaced American rote-task workers with robots and workers overseas whenever possible—that is, whenever the firms could get ahold of the capital to make the investments.

It’s important not to blame the wrong actor and to make sure we keep our eyes on the bottom line: Women are working more overall, men are doing more housework, and yet there’s less housework getting done and less financial stability. This is what happens when all work becomes more like women’s work: workers working more for less pay. We can see why corporations have adapted to the idea of women in the labor force. Plus, the ownership class can redirect popular blame for lousy work relations toward feminists. Millennial gender relations have been shaped by these changes in labor dynamics, and we can’t understand the phenomenon of young misogyny without understanding the workplace.

Just because some men’s work tended to be better at a time when single-worker families were more common doesn’t mean we can return to the former by returning to the latter. But that’s the narrative misogynists use to interpret what’s going on and how it could be fixed, and they’ve attracted a lot of angry and confused men who aren’t sure about their place in the world. One antidote to this kind of thinking is an alternative framework for why and how workers (of all genders) came to be in such a precarious position.

What we see in the wealth numbers is not a clean-cut case of intergenerational robbery, or at least not just that. A quadrant of young households in the Pew data are doing quite well for themselves. Over the past generation, the economy has bent heavily in the owners’ direction, like a pinball machine on tilt. The uneven impact of the 2008 crisis could have led to reevaluation of these trends. But it didn’t. Instead, the owners of land, real estate, stocks, and bonds have increased their rate of gain at the expense of everyone else. This also means that the path from worker to owner gets steeper and more treacherous, and since few Millennials are born with a stock portfolio, fewer of us will make it up the mountain than in past generations.

None of this is to say anyone should feel sorry for financiers—even junior ones—but it’s worth understanding what is really at the end of the road for Millennials who do everything right. The best the job market has to offer is a slice of the profits from driving down labor costs. One of Roose’s subjects found himself working on a deal he believed to be about rehabbing a firm, only to discover that his bosses were more interested in firing workers and auctioning equipment before selling the now “more efficient” company for a quick $50 million profit. Although they’re the natural outcomes of the wage relation, work intensification and downsizing don’t just happen by themselves. The profits have to be made, and the best of the best Millennials end up doing the analytical drudge work that makes superefficient production possible, then crying to reporters over their beers. It hardly seems worth it.