131–140 of 144 posts
Exactly a decade ago I found myself talking to my mother in foreign languages on the phone, thinking I was talking to my clients. I even got used to lucid dreaming as it happened at least once per week.
Took me three weeks to get back any desire to (even think to) code again.
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Slavery is not voluntary, and any individual job is. They are absolutely not comparable. You can always quit and go home. It is insane to compare the two. This is an inaccurate comparison with an agenda.
I agree that the comparison is horrible, but I have to disagree with you also. My job is not voluntary. Within a relatively short period of time, I could go broke without it (and I have pretty robust savings). I may not be a paycheck away from homelessness, due to my cushy job, but a few months and/or an emergency or two... It could get really bad, quick. Losing employment is perilous for your career. It looks bad to…
It’s not opinion but fact: you are free to quit your job at any time. You are also likely free to move to any number of different cities that have different job prospects.
That is an important freedom, and you should use it whenever you want.
A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model. Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it w…
You had a really solid post up until the slavery bit. You really need to educate yourself on the history of slavery if you think we are anywhere close to moving to something worse then slavery.
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> Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. When I was at Amazon, this was the feeling with some employees around me: The stack-ranking meant they were made to a rat-race every year. I can't seem to recall who, but someone higher-up let it slip when quizzed about higher attrition rate (back in 2010s) that Amazon believed in evolution , and that that meant the slow would eventually give the way for the fa…
In my first job back in the 80's a VP sent out a memo to everyone about the importance of reusing paperclips. Naturally it had the opposite effect of us dumping boxes of them in the trash.
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> raped, beaten, and denied all freedoms. Towards the later stages of slavery, the first 2 were outright illegal, and the third is somewhere on par with wage slavery today. It sounds like a hot take on the surface, but modern wage slavery is objectively worse than late-stage actual slavery in some regards. We have not really progressed as society. The only thing that has really advanced is the availability of enterta…
I'm in favour of making slavery legal again for the sole purpose of making people like this slaves for a year just so they figure out how fucking stupid they are.
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In history, was torture a preferred approach compared to treating them relatively well, considering the absurd circumstances?
Read Huckelberry Finn, Jim was treated relatively well, however his family was sold away from him, he did not get to see his wife or daughter because it was valuable to the Widow to sell them. Finally he was going to be sold anyway, to somewhere where he would have the high probability of not being treated relatively well. To be treated relatively well as a slave was a living hell, or as it is generally called, slave…
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There is a difference between being a slave i.e. being owned and being a "wage slave" i.e. operating under significant coercion. We are all coerced to some degree; that's part of being an organism (coerced by nature) and living in a society (coerced by the crushing weight of social interactions). But we aren't owned . Though it's not your intention, this blurring of categories justifies real slavery. If everyone is a…
In Byung-Hul Chan's book, "Burnout Society," he lists this self-delusion of freedom as a foundational component of the emergence of burnout. It's a good book, I'd recommend it, and you can draw your own conclusions from reading it. It's like 80 pages, too. > But we aren't owned. This is a weird subjective/objective thing. While people may not be chattel slaves to a slaveowner, there is a case to be made of bonded/ind…
I felt like this, thought for a long time it was work. It wasn’t. Turns out I had a tumor on an adrenal gland, that was over producing aldosterone. That cascaded into a bunch of other weird health issues. Don’t assume it’s work, get checked out. Connect the dots.
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In my first job back in the 80's a VP sent out a memo to everyone about the importance of reusing paperclips. Naturally it had the opposite effect of us dumping boxes of them in the trash.
That seems a bit odd. Maybe he’s not an effective manager, but why would you go out of your way to not do what he asked?
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Don't forget if you stop working for any reason, you're now a failure, met with suspicion, and expected to explain that for the rest of your life. It's not even about the financial aspect, our society is very punitive to people that want to leave their cages for a while. What you wanted more than this office for one year out of your 30+ year career? There must be something wrong with you.
This happened to me. At the end of a long and stressful divorce, I realized that I needed to take some time off (or else). Took about six months and then discovered that it's very difficult to get rehired after such a gap. (Being "old" doesn't help either.) You have to play the cards you're dealt, though, and if you really need a break, it's way better than the "or else".