[ SECRET POST #6308 ]

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⌈ Secret Post #6308 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 52 secrets from Secret Submission Post #902.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Nobody wants to work anymore... cause working fucking sucks. I'm completely worn out and I'm not even half way to retirement, if it even happens. I have to take PTO just to make the stuff that's floating around in my head for my fandoms, cause by the time I'm done working for the day my brain is fried.

[(Anonymous)]

I really think that depends on your sector and probably country. Not everyone feels this way about working and tbh I have only ever met one person who did. Just about everyone I know has felt this to some degree for a very short time but it isn’t their default position. If you hate what you do, you need to find something else.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course it depends on country, because some of them actually care about their citizens. I'm in the US where we're just vehicles for making the rich richer.

I'm actually luckier than most in that I don't hate what I do, I will probably get to retire, and I can take PTO off. But the expectation that people work 9 hrs a day (because lunch is never paid) five days a week at least for 40 years and not get paid enough to live is unreasonable and unsustainable. This system was set up when one job could support a whole family, which meant a lot of unpaid labor that could be financially supported. People can rarely do that now which means not only do we do the (under)paid work but also all of the unpaid work necessary for living. There literally isn't enough time in the day. That's not even getting into my disabilities.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT
I’m in the US, too. Plenty of people I know enjoy working at the office 9-5. Plenty others didn’t so they don’t anymore. And some work odd shifts. Some quit their miserable office jobs and got more rewarding jobs. Others have found WFH jobs which has more availability than even during the pandemic. The work environment you’re describing isn’t the norm anymore and hasn’t been for a couple years now.

[(Anonymous)]

DA - you're actually both right.

[(Anonymous)]

This system was set up when one job could support a whole family, which meant a lot of unpaid labor that could be financially supported.

this is sort of true but I think people have started to overstate the extent to which it was true. assuming that we're talking about the US here

having one person work was not the reality for every family historically - plenty of families had to have two or more members working to support themselves, especially for people who weren't middle-class and who weren't union members. and even for middle-class and well-off working class families, people were often materially much worse off than people are today. there's a lot of things in terms of consumer goods, food availability and quality, education, health care and treatment, etc, where the average modern American is enormously better off compared to people in the time period you're talking about. there's a lot of things that we take completely for granted that would have been rare or impossible or prohibitively expensive for normal people in the past.

that's not to say that we can't improve the socioeconomic bargain in America, we absolutely can. in particular, moving more towards a 4-day work week and significantly reducing housing are two really big things we can do to solve major problems that exist with the economic conditions as they exist right now. but I think people are starting to go way too far in terms of talking about how much better the prevailing economic conditions were in America historically. there's a certain strand of utopianism that I think is just not supportable by the facts.

[(Anonymous)]

DA
I think AYRT thinks everyone works white collar jobs and always has. My family were farmers until my parents’ generation; every single person worked from before sunrise until late in the evening. Kids only attended school until 8th grade. Everything everyone did was based on survival.

I think the “live to work” mentality carried over into the white collar world through the second half of the 20th century and some haven’t gotten the message that it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s more common every day for people to change their careers to something that gives them better work/life balance. That doesn’t mean they’ll never experience any burnout but AYRT is portraying burnout as a universal constant. Either they’re in a shitty sector or have a shitty employer if they everyone feels like that all the time.

Comment OP

[(Anonymous)]

My family comes from subsistence farmers. My mom was the first to move to the city and have a white collar job, the first to get a college degree. She managed to be a single mother supporting her family with college for all her kids and annual vacations with just her job.

My wife and I both work full time and in her case more than full time, and we can barely afford to save for retirement, much less indulge in vacations or hobbies. And it's not our fucking jobs. We already make more than everyone we know. And every friend we have, from line cooks to corporate managers are just. so. tired. Doesn't matter the field they work in. We're all burnt out. Because we work all day at jobs that don't pay us enough and then come home to work around the house to maintain some standard of living and have no extra time for relaxation or hobbies. When you can't get a break, you burn out.

And all the people telling me to change jobs. IT'S EVERYONE. I know of literally absolutely NO ONE across multiple types of jobs who has been working steadily since their 20s who is not feeling this way. Move where? Line cook is burnt out. Waiter is burnt out. IT rep is burnt out. Financial analyst is burnt out. Sales is burnt out. Pharmacist is burnt out. Personal trainer is burnt out.

I can only assume y'all are in your 20s or early 30s.

Re: Comment OP

[(Anonymous)]

I've been working since I was a teen (poverty means everyone gets a job to contribute as soon as they can) and I'm 40 this year, and I felt the way you're describing until I switched careers and found something that didn't leave me so burnt out. I don't make much (about 50k/year) but I'm pretty happy and feel pretty good about my job. I actually love my job.

I do agree with many of your points. I mean I will most likely never be able to afford a house, and that sucks and the thought really brings me down. But on the whole its not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be, and my circle of friends feel roughly the same. Some are better off, some worse, but where you and your circle are at is not the norm.

Re: Comment OP

[(Anonymous)]

I’m 47. I quit my career in 2018 and my husband quit his in 2019. We couldn’t be happier! I’m a trail maintainer at a park and he’s an unarmed security guard. I don’t get paid vacations and he only gets one week per year. We can’t afford to go anywhere Instaworthy but we have plenty of things around us to see and do. We have health insurance, we each live within 15 minutes of our jobs, and our work stays at work. We enjoy what we do on the clock and we have lives outside of work. The nuclear physicist that lives next door quit his career two years ago and is a full time woodworker. His wife left her job at the bank and cleans hotel rooms and likes it cause she can see the results of her work. The couple across from us are 27 and 30; they both work from home and when their contracts run out they just get new ones with another company. They live here because it’s lower cost of living than where they came from so if it takes a week or a month for one to get a new contract they don’t have to worry about losing their house or starving. Neither likes what they do but they only do it for a few hours a day and have the rest of their time to enjoy life, which mostly seems to involve hanging out with their friends or redecorating their house.

Persistent burnout isn’t the norm. I believe you that you’re surrounded by people experiencing it and I think a lot of millennials and gen X were raised to aspire to that (myself included). And it’s crap.

Think of whatever activity or environment you like; there are jobs available. Career variety is at an all time high.

[(Anonymous)]

where the average modern American is enormously better off compared to people in the time period you're talking about

Housing is less affordable now than in the great depression. All the other things kinda depend on you having somewhere to live. Somewhere to live that also allows you to have money left over for those things. I dunno if this is a coast vs fly over thing but I don't know of anyone who isn't stressed about how much food they'll be able to afford. We have so many things that could improve lives, we don't need to work so much, and yet we have people rationing insulin (hopefully not for long, thanks Biden!) and working two jobs just to make ends meet.

Those are the facts.

https://liniewski.substack.com/p/great-depression-vs-today-a-comparative
https://relevantmagazine.com/current/nation/report-its-harder-to-buy-a-house-today-than-it-was-during-the-great-depression/

[(Anonymous)]

yes, housing is absolutely the fly in the ointment of the American economy, there is absolutely no doubt that housing prices are too high and have to come down.

but even with respect to housing, one of the major changes in the housing market is that Americans consume housing differently than they did 50 or 70 or 100 years ago. Americans today tend to have fewer people per housing unit and housing units tend to be larger, safer and better. part of the reason - not the whole reason, there has also been just a massive shortfall in housing investment and construction for several decades that intensified massively in the 21st century, but PART of the reason for the rise in housing costs is because people in the 1970s, 1950s, 1930s accepted housing arrangements that the bulk of Americans would reject today.

and even taking into account the problems with housing costs, I do feel pretty confident in saying that the overall economic well-being of Americans at pretty much all income levels have improved significantly compared to those prior periods. we absolutely ARE a lot better off than we were in the 70s / 50s / 30s. often in ways that we don't even recognize.

[(Anonymous)]

I dunno if this is a coast vs fly over thing

It 100% is. I live near a coast and where I live, rent increases are hard-capped at a very small percentage per year. You can't legally be paid less than $17/hour for any sort of work and our minimum wage increases every year based on the COL. We have legally mandated paid family leave and sick leave. I don't have insurance through my job; I got mine on the marketplace and the price is adjusted based on how much you earn at your job so I'm not stuck in a job in order to keep my health insurance.

Everyone I know is my area is doing very well and is happy with their job and their life.

[(Anonymous)]

because lunch is never paid

... ??? Every salaried job I've ever had has paid for my lunch hour.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I have to admit I am honestly baffled by the people who say these kinds of things because I haven't experienced this in all of my years of working (in the US) outside of one particular instance, and I quit that job and moved on to another one BECAUSE they were treating me like shit.

Like, genuine question, what sort of fields are y'all working in where this is the norm?

[(Anonymous)]

I’m the exact same! I was in information security and had one job with a toxic boss. It takes time for upper management to get rid of people like that if everyone always just shunted them across, as was the case in our company. They did eventually get rid of him and it killed his career because they revoked his security credentials. I was gone by then but to this day am friends with some of my old coworkers who are still there. The toxic POS became a mechanic at a local dealership and then moved away a year or two later.
I also left the field a few years later but was careful to do it without burning bridges; it’s been enormously helpful knowing I can go back if I really need to someday.

[(Anonymous)]

"Toxic boss" was the exact reason I left LOL. I'd been at the job for a little over five years at that point and my previous bosses had all loved me and been happy with my work, but then they brought this guy in and he was just the definition of a toxic, sexist boss.

So I started applying to other jobs, and the moment one hired me, I put in my two weeks and was out of there. Which meant that then said toxic boss was left high and dry without an executive assistant and needed to waste his time training my replacement, which I did not feel bad in the slightest about since he was the entire reason I left in the first place.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm in a scientific field and love my job. I have a few colleagues who are always complaining, though, and seem very downtrodden and cranky about work, even though we have essentially the same jobs. Meanwhile, I have friends and relatives who have jobs I know I wouldn't like or jobs considered very unpleasant and undesirable or very high pressure, and yet they seem to love their jobs. I do think there are major systemic factors at work because otherwise why would so many different people be dissatisfied and burned out, but I think there are also issues on the individual level with A) mismatch between the job and one's personality and B) getting dealt an unlucky hand with bosses, coworkers, and clients/ customers/ patients/ students (great coworkers can save an otherwise terrible job and bad coworkers can tank a dream job).

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, just go out to the job farm and get a job off the job tree. You all are idiots.

[(Anonymous)]

It pretty much is a job tree right now, though. I have multiple friends who have changed jobs in the past few years just because there are so many positions open right now that they were able to leave jobs they didn't really love for jobs they enjoy more. A bunch of them now are fully WFH too.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, you can actually do this in most (all?) of America. It’s ridiculously easy to change jobs or even entire career fields right now and has been pretty much since the pandemic first started.

[(Anonymous)]

Only if you have a degree and a certain level of intelligence mixed with zero disabilities. Also suoer dependent on area. In my area there are not a lot of options. Not saying people shouldnt try if they are miserable where they're at, just that it's not the guarantee y'all are making itnout to be.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you’re OP. I’m the very first anon who responded to you. My intent was only to point out that you stated your personal experience as the universal absolute when it’s really not even the majority position in America.

You don’t need a degree to get a new job. You can be disabled. What you need more than anything, and I really mean this, is the right attitude. You have to be willing to learn. Be honest up front about your strengths and limitations. Both with yourself and your employer. Almost every company and every organization is desperate for more workers. You will find openings in hotels, restaurants, stores, banks, utilities companies, your local government (they need people for hundreds of different roles that cover everything from data entry to lawn care to babysitting self check -in kiosks to healthcare providers to commercial planning and civil engineering), vets and doctors offices need more people to work reception or handle records, hair and nail salons need similar (but typically for far worse pay and benefits). There are things out there and if you keep looking you can find something in relatively short order. Just think of something you can tolerate, something that includes and interest of yours. I love the outdoors and animals. I can’t work in a restaurant or retail because of my own disability. I can’t work my dream job, either. But I did find something with my city and the pay cut was far outweighed by the benefits, which include healthcare and a pension.

I hope you see this if only to know someone is thinking about you and wishing the best for you. You deserve to be happy and it sounds like you’re trapped in a place that’s so awful that it’s poisoned the rest of your life.

Every town and region is going to have different opportunities and I’m sorry if there isn’t anything near you that suits your needs better. Because it sounds like you have the job from hell and I hate that for you.

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking as someone probably old enough to be your mom...it's always sucked.

Although I wrote a LOT of fic when I was working full-time. Creative loafing rocks.

[(Anonymous)]

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime.
That's why I write fic on company time.