what ultimately led to the ax was his insistence on boundaries
Come on, how is this not satire?
Boundaries are counter productive to a vibrant workplace. Great leaders like Andrew Cuomo and Joe Biden know this well.
I initially read that as "potty" demons and for some reason that just seems so fucking funny to me.
Neoliberal ideology is, at root, about destroying all barriers preventing the total submission of everything to the Free Market
Nothing is sacred, and if it is, it is destroyed. Your identity, your values, your family, your religion, your hobbies - everything has to have its distinctions blurred and turned into a commodity of which the Market can make use.
It is capitalist fundamentalism in the purest sense, not only a return to the savagery of earlier ages of capitalism, but an eager embrace of the emptiness and violence that savagery implied.
That's already happened to me. My identity, what I believe in, what I'm able to do on my off time has been destroyed so I can work 60 hours a week. I don't want anything. I just want to die.
Take the grillpill comrade. Go spend time with people in your community or your family and friends. If you cant figure out what to do - support your local food not bombs and serve up some meals.
I don't have a community. I only get one day off and every one lives at least an hour a away. I don't even care about getting time off or doing anything. Nothing means anything anymore. All I want to do is lie in bed and watch videos on my phone. I don't even have the energy to even cook anything half the time. Even if I wanted to I couldn't go to DSA meetings. I'm too broken and death is the only option
Damn I fucking feel this. I know it's not much consolation but we're on the same wavelength
I use to drive to work at 5am and constantly want to
TW: Self harm
Steer full speed into the concrete walls and also end it all constantly
But I eventually left that job, took some time off, did a whole lot of nothing for awhile. Was the first time I had more than three days off in years. It helped a lot, even if I wasn't productive with it. I found a lot less stressful job and didn't have to work so hard but of course it was less pay. But it was enough to get by and that was more important to me. Mental health is important and having bad thoughts just existing to work isn't good. Please try to find somewhere else to work or just stop giving as much of a shit. Letting a job you dislike control you isn't fair and life is too short to be doing this shit.
Would you mind elaborating on this? I feel like I've been at that point with my job for far too long. I've got the money saved up to get by for several months without working, but everyone keeps telling me how terrible it is to quit without another job lined up.
So I guess my questions are:
- what was it about your job that you hated?
- what sort of work did you end up finding?
- how'd you deal with the loss of health insurance?
- do you have any regrets?
Feel free to alter or obscure any details for opsec purposes! I just am really curious because it sounds like you've successfully pulled off the plan I've been daydreaming about for years.
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Everything almost, the hours sucked and there was constant overtime I didn't want but was highly pressured to take. They dangled promotions in front of me and never ended up doing it but I'd still take on more responsibility. I was the work horse, one of them few people who did their jobs well and wasn't a flake. The bosses would just keep adding tasks and over time it was just nothing but stress. We were always understaffed to the point of exhaustion, the bosses just didn't give a shit.
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I got lucky and was able to get into a business that my dying uncle needed help with, extremely fortunate for that but I was doing gig work before I was given that and even gig work was way less stressful but shitt pay.
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The health insurance thing was a problem, i went into some debt when I finally went to see a doctor about depression and anxiety but it was worth it. I'm sure there are better ways to do this but at the time I just didn't care, I could hardly pick up a phone to make an appointment it was so bad. But I somehow made it through it.
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My only regret was not calling the bosses scumbags and pieces of shit to their faces. Everything else could have been smoother but I genuinely was at my wits end so I'm just happy I made it through it all without doing something extremely bad.
If you just up and quit just lie on your resume for the gap period.. say you were self employed or did gig work there is no way for them to verify this shit, there is no one to call. Yeah it probably is better to have a job lined up but not everyone can even take time off to even do interviews if you work certain hours so it's not mandatory. Lying on resumes is fine, fuck em
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I did it the smart way: 3 months stress leave then going on unemployment.
There’s a position waiting for you at the DNC, friend. You’re just the type of broken person we look for!
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P.s. you’re not hopeless. We all get to points like this in life.
Nothing is sacred, and if it is, it is destroyed. Your identity, your values, your family, your religion, your hobbies - everything has to have its distinctions blurred and turned into a commodity of which the Market can make use.
:marx-hi:
This guy wanted to have a normal private life. For that I fired him.
Clearly shifting the blame of not hiring enough people and poorly managing "deadlines" and "passion projects" so they aren't completed within the required timeframe. The mental gymnastics required to conclude that isn't your fuckup is insane.
"workday was determined not by his work, but by his hours" Uh huh, so you paid him based on his work not his hours right?
"From each according to their ability, to each according to the time clock"
"I can tolerate a guy generally being not very good at basic skills, but wanting a work-life balance is too far!"
I guarantee you that the boss in the article would not be happy if you went home at 2:30 because all your work was done.
Work as a performative cruelty to reinforce the aesthetic of domination.
'Middle manager' is one of the most useless positions ever created, cmv
I work with a mixture of normal humans and absolute brainwormed automatons that pour themselves into their work, are constantly work-stressed, and think "the work" will offer one day absolution for wasteland of their personal lives. they are not recognizing that when their health decays and they burn out, the organization will move on from their carcass and onto the next dispassionately.
like, no joke, one of their number, a bright star in the prime of their well paid career committed suicide less than a year ago.
anyway, when one of the automatons tries to humblebrag about choosing to work 50+ hour weeks while only getting paid for 40, I just roll my eyes and say "sounds exhausting. probably shouldn't do that."
Even the people who want to work their ass off young and retire at 40 are out of their minds. How many fun things are more enjoyable at 45 than 25? How many things (e.g., anything active) are off the table for a lot of people by 45? What if the economy does an oopsie again, or you get sick and a health insurance company takes all your money, and now you're 60, haven't worked in ~20 years, and you're running out of money?
It's ridiculous even assuming no major changes will be forced upon us by climate change.
getting a promotion by doing all that extra shit is basically taking Pascal's wager
absolute brainwormed automatons that pour themselves into their work, are constantly work-stressed, and think “the work” will offer one day absolution for wasteland of their personal lives
One of my earliest radicalizing points in this regard was watching how my dad's company fucked him over. Now, my father is a dick.; but he is an incredibly competent chemist in what he does (crop science), and won several awards, was constantly getting good raises, etc. Well, after 20+ years of working there and nowhere else, they stuck him in a position he absolutely hated, and a few years later moved the lab he worked in out of state, over 1000 miles away, and he was not going to make that move. Now that isn't totally abnormal in and of itself, but they tried HARD to stiff him on his severance pay, despite everything else.
Really solidified to me early on that it doesn't matter how capable you are, you will always be considered as completely replaceable.
A work/life balance that truly divides the work and life components of a person’s experience may be okay for a job. But for a career? It simply won’t fly. There’s no disputing it—sometimes emails need to be sent at night. Sometimes calls need to be taken early in the morning. Sometimes a Monday deadline necessitates a few hours of work on a Saturday.
And what’s more, this “balance” implies a strict tradeoff between the two constituent parts, a polarizing schedule of on/off. At work, you’re all on. After work, you’re all off. But this mindset is problematic in that it puts an undue amount of pressure on us to be all on when, in reality, sometimes we can’t be. It also bases one’s day around an arbitrary time frame that measures productivity by hours spent behind a desk as opposed to the actual work product put out.
Our careers are a part of our lives. And try as we might to leave work at the office, the expectation is just as unrealistic as leaving home at home. Inevitably, sometimes things bleed into one another. If we are at work and receive a phone call from our crying child, would we not take it? If we are in a meeting and discover there is a leak in our house, would we not rush out?
This writer thinks that by not being available 24/7 we are hampering productivity while mentioning that the working day is indeed an arbitrary set of hours.
Instead of imagining a better allocation of work during work hours (or reducing the hours) it’s about spreading work to beyond work hours since we can spread “life” into work.
I’ve seen this a lot in the last 17 months of WFH. Management will pay lip service to burnout while actually slowly dropping the work-life balance discussion.
I think that with so many different fields attempting to integrate “agile” (it’s a buzzword at this point) management techniques and workflows, they’re attempting to quietly extend the working day and effectively do away with even the idea of work-life balance.
This goes back to Marx's Capital, where he talks about how Capitalists want to push for night work/24-7 operations because machines don't make money if they are idle.
Flex hours is really just a way to make you work 24/7 because that's the nature of "knowledge" work - it's large periods of downtime with sporadic big outputs. The point of answering emails at all hours of the day is eliminating the slack inherent in the process and pushing things through as quickly as possible, just in terms of white collar work vs literally making widgets in a factory.
It also bases one’s day around an arbitrary time frame that measures productivity by hours spent behind a desk as opposed to the actual work product put out.
i've had a manager openly tell me that when you're more productive you don't get more free time you get more fucking work - he didn't say this as criticism of the workplace, the dumb fuck actually thought this was reasonable ("be a good worker to your company" or whatever) and didn't understand what this incentivizes me to do, which is to procrastinate and to be the worst, most inefficient wage slave i can be
so yea of course we have to measure it by fucking hours because productivity is an useless measure as the capitalist just wants to suck every single inch of my energy regardless of how efficient i am
That's the whole crux of the contradiction of a non-democratic work place. Your boss wants the most work with the least pay and you want the inverse. How how how how can libs be so fucking stupid as to not understand this??
because work itself is virtuous so overextending yourself for no reason is good
Because liberals are craven dogs ready to sacrifice their own children on the altar of Capital if someone will just tell them that they're a Good Boy for doing it at the end of the day.
Shitheads like this annoy me. I put up tasks on the board every Monday, and if they're done by 10:30 that day they can go home or play MMOs or mine bitcoin on the company network.
Whatever as long as I can occasionally wrangle one or two of the ones playing eve 25 hours a day to pretend to listen at upper management meetings.
I have the most productive department in this branch of the company.
It also bases one’s day around an arbitrary time frame that measures productivity by hours spent behind a desk as opposed to the actual work product put out.
OK cool then you'll let me go home after I finish all your bullshit work at 1:00
Lib camp should be fun for her. I hear central park has lots of passion going around
