Don't worry everyone, you 100% have the freedom to exploit the working class yourself. See? The system is fair. Oh, you're not exploiting the working class for passive income? Maybe you're just not smart like you think you are dummy!
/$
Nobody can convince me that passive income is real.
I get around $400/mo from the VA for being exposed to toxic chemicals that will lead to me having cancer in the next ten years.
Pretty good trade off, let me tell ya!
I mean if you're wealthy enough you can just make money on interest and dividends. You can get a 5% interest rate on $2m right now and that's insured, no real risk. That's like 75k/yr without doing any work.
But that's probably not what most people mean when they say passive income. And basic income for the wealthy is kind of backwards.
Sounds like they're just lazy
/s
You joke, but that has been pounded into our heads our entire life, and even me (a gen x’er) feels like it’s my own fault because the world has been beating me down for not reaching whatever arbitrary standard it’s set for us.
I know. I'm right there too.
We should get all of us together, pool what little money we have, and buy us a huge compound somewhere and have our own community. I mean, what could go wrong, right? 👀
People do this already, check Foundation for Intentional Community. You can find communities near you that are open to visitors or new residents and check them out.
Make sure you're well acquainted with the traits of cults to keep yourself safe. There are groups out there that are fundraising and building infrastructure for new communities, as well, so there are many ways to get involved.
"Just be careful, you might accidentally join a cult" lol I totally get your point but that just made me laugh.
This just puts a huge spotlight on the thing I hate the most about my line of work. I'm sure it's not just my line of work with this problem, but there's plenty of examples of workplaces that do not have this problem.
My career is in IT support. Whether doing systems administration or networking or something else related, it's my lifeblood.
Almost every job I've ever had in this field works on the basis of tickets. A concept which, isn't in and of itself a problem, nor is it unusual. Similar systems exist in many careers; they're similar to a chit in the restaurant industry, which contains an order, which is passed to the kitchen for the cooks/chefs to complete. Same thing. And there's examples of this same idea across many careers, called all kinds of things from a requisition, to a work order, they're all variations on the same idea.
The trouble begins with how tickets are worked and completed. In other industries, you pick up a task, whether a chit or work order, you finish the task, and you mark it as complete, but in IT, it's very different in one key way. We have to not only justify and report everything we do, but also mark down exactly how long it took. It's this last point that's the problem. I am under continual scrutiny, every minute of every day to justify what I've done, and when I did it. In every job I've had, my ability to fill every second of my day with records of what I've done and how long it took to do is praised, or the lack of that ability can create some significant issues with maintaining my employment status.
There are good reasons to keep these records, to have a record of changes, and coordinate with coworkers, in the event they need to continue work I've started, or vice versa, and to note when something changed so that if issues arise, those actions can be examined as a potential cause. But this requirement has become weaponized by every employer to keep a stranglehold on productivity. If you take too long on a task that they think should have taken less time, you're suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient. If you excel and you're able to complete your tasks quickly, that faster pace becomes the new standard, and anyone who isn't capable of keeping up gets reprimanded for dragging their heels and wasting time.
The goal posts continually move. I can't so much as take an extended shit without someone taking notice.
Meanwhile, so many jobs are simply focused on being present and looking busy. Before I went into IT, I worked at a grocery store, and short of clearly and obviously standing around doing literally nothing, no manager even took notice of you. If you were doing something, literally anything that looks even remotely productive, you were left alone. Which isn't to mention all the down time, when there isn't anything to do, and you just go and adjust the products on the shelf needlessly because it made you look busy. That same concept can be applied to a lot of different jobs, but with IT, it's not sufficient to simply look busy. Your time must be put into a ticket.
It's oppressive and the way of things in IT.
The perpetual problem in IT
BOSS to you "If everything is working fine, what do I pay you for?"
Also BOSS to you "Things are broken, what am I paying you for?"
IT support
And the mentality you've described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as I'm sure you're aware.
This is paraphrased in the "Doom talk" I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, he'd come into my office and complain, "Every time I come in here you're just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we don't need to pay you."
What MBA's and PHB's don't realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. You're not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what you're doing in support and IT is fixing stuff that's broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything that's broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, I'll be doing that. But otherwise I'm not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, can't reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
I feel you fellow IT brother/sister!
The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it "takes longer", inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like they're doing stuff to justify their existence.
Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.
The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics weren't tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didn't matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.
I even took it a step further and didn't really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules... If someone needed to run an errand or "telework" for a day; fine by me. The company didn't give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.
Gen X and I’m not making much more now than I did in 2008.
Thank goodness the dollar is going so much further than it did back then.... I've made myself sad on Friday...
The US never really recovered from 2008.
You say this as corporations are making record profits.
The US recovered just fine, the elites just didn’t think it necessary to include us in that recovery.
Not sure how this is millennial-specific. Everyone has been doing this for a long time. One of the few good things to come out of Covid was work from home being integrated into scheduling. Of course big business is trying to rob people of that again.
Sorry but for those of us not in industries where WFH is even an option, it ruined things for us.
I have to quit my job eventually and move to a completely different state because once WFH took off and everyone that could move out of the areas their jobs were in did so the housing market exploded.
I had just reached a point where I was financially healthy enough to consider buying a house and then pretty much immediately had the rug pulled out from under me.... Now between greedflation and everything else, the raises I had been fighting for are equal in purchasing power as my income was like 4 years ago...
Yeah screw those people being able to be happy and move to an area that doesn't bend them over almost definitely worse than you. What assholes! They should have to stay in the downtown centers and pay $15 million to live in an old phone booth with a sink.
This has the same energy of people being pissed off with student loan forgiveness or something. "If I had to deal with it, so should you! I can't be happy so you can't either blah blah"
I don't think WFH is completely to blame for that. A significant contributor to the explosion in housing prices was historically low mortgage rates (<2%) as part of the covid era stimulus plans. This triggered a wave of home buying, which in turn led to a lot of panic from people that were afraid they would be priced out of the market and fueled further home buying.
If you want, say, a boat; its probably less work to build it from scratch than to 'earn' it for the overwhelming majority.
Which is wild: Even with modern tools, economies of scale, and specialized master craftspeople (or more likely; enslaved teenagers halfway across the world chained to a shop bench, similar effect here) its easier to DIY than go through 'society', unless the thing has been made deliberately difficult to DIY-which more and more things, especially repairs and retrofits, are.
It takes more work, more coordination, and orders of magnitude more time to get the government to raise your taxes to half assedly feed the hungry with food that was gonna get thrown away than it does to just find a patch of land nobody's watching and do it yourself from Fucking scratch. Every Fucking time.
All the big decisions, decisions about Commons, and decisions about the future, including habitability of the planet, are being made in what we can all agree is the dumbest fucking way possible, and regardless of our disagreements, 999/1000 random people off the street would find it difficult to make worse ones.
So, communist or individualist, insurrectionist or moderate, what kind of brain dead fucking moron would participate in this on purpose? Would follow the rules of this on purpose?
So, what the fuck is to be done?
P.S. If you say "vote" I swear I'll fucking scream.
Definitely me. I just went several months interviewing and when they asked what my financial requirements were, I started saying I’d just like to be able to buy a house with my masters degree and 15 years experience.
Usually got a genuine laugh
They laughed not because your expectations were laughable, but because they expected you to state a dollar range, therefore when you made a blunt relatable reply, it had a comedic effect. Their laughter was a compliment of your wit.
You could just say "Millennials are exhausted" and be correct.
I'm gen X and I too am exhausted. Solidarity with my young homies.
I cannot buy healthy, tasty, food. I can work less hours, buy ingredients in the marker and make that food.
I will never be able to buy a house, never. Even saving over half my income by living in shit neighborhoods. The cost of houses goes up too fast. Even after investing, and getting good returns, on the little I managed to save, it is not enough.
So working a little less, and having healthy food it is.
After understanding the ongoing ecological collapse, I don't care much about a house anymore, rich or poor, we are all dead in less than 10 years anyway.
If you can, work less, play more. And I actually love what I do at work, but fuck that scam.
Everything is measured now. That has to add to the pressure.
Grade schoolers are going to get called into the principal's office for not hitting their KPI targets.
Twice as exhausting for us boomers. You think you're tired. 60 and 2 jobs is bullshit.
This points out why the idea that boomers (as a whole) caused many of our modern problems upsets me
I sincerely doubt you voted for the situation you're in now
This in-fighting and blaming does nothing but detract from the real issue of who's doing this to us (spoiler alert: it's the politicians and it always has been)
Yeah some dude has a failed acting career, and now I have to hope my for profit insurance will cover a doctor or I'll be eating ramen for the rest of my life
It's okay. Soon AI will take over our jobs and we won't have to work anymore. But we won't have wages either. So no food. No shelter. No clothes. No future.
Win-win.
And the moneyed and political class will continue this late stage capitalism trend by reducing any "upward mobility" opportunities.
Named generations don't exist and function as a working class divider. They're used so we squabble with each other and not those in power who force us all work more for less money. We all have to deal with their nonsense in unison.
YAY WORKING 6 DAY WEEKS AT 2ND SHIFT I LOVE NEVER BEING ABLE TO GO OUT AND DO SHIT LIKE KEEP MY FRIENDS AND BEING ABLE TO VISIT MY MOM AND DAD BUT THE COMPANY REEEEEEEEAAAAALLLLLLLY NEEDS ME TO BE THERE SO TGE CEO OF ONE OF THE KARGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD CAN BUY THEIR 23RD BEACH MANSION THEYLL NEVER USE I FUCKING HATE THIS WORLD
Okay, I can't actually get work at the moment, I've ended up in the "precariat" despite my MSc because I didn't understand what would be helpful in the labour market when I was younger. Didn't have a supportive family, to make something of an understatement. So my question is, shall I kill myself? I've worked very hard in physical jobs so it's not laziness, the labour market is just very cruel and is happy to kill me.
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