101–110 of 466 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might enjoy a fella named marx. Labor is labor, my friend. It should be mostly devoted to things that enrich the lives of us and those around us. It is normal to want to work. It is the alienating nature of selling our labor for a pittance that ruins our lives.
Then sell your labour for more than a pittance, if you're just haggling over the price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For context, the OP is in the EU and UK, where none of the above is true. In the EU many protections -- depending on the member state -- only apply under certain conditions. For example, employees in companies with less than 10.25 FTE do not enjoy any termination protection beyond very short notice periods (between 1 and 7 month) in Germany.
> do not enjoy any termination protection beyond very short notice periods (between 1 and 7 month) in Germany. Not sure if that's a typo because several months of notice sounds long to me!
So there's simply no place for loyalty in employer-employee relationships. One side pays money or whatever, the other is delivering the job being done. That's all.
You should be loyal to your craft, not to your employer. You might have a job as a developer at some company that could get terminated at any time. Your skills and reputation remain irrespectively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The loss of work for its centering, routine, mental challenges, socialization across the generations, and sense of accomplishment is harmful to mental and even physical health. Sure, a construction worker can't be climbing the rafters at 80 years old, but this idea that we just transition to leisure and getting together with friends at a certain point is both fairly novel and of dubious value.
The idea of retirement is literally thousands of years old at this point. Hell the Roman Empire even had the idea of pensions though it wasn’t that common at the time. Aging inherently means being unable to be an independent productive member of society at some point. (Ed: well past what we consider retirement age.) Historically in agrarian societies few people reached this point so it wasn’t generally a significant…
This isn't true.
https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/08/15/three-scor...
> ...in England, average life expectancy at birth varied between 35 and 40 years in the centuries between 1600 and 1800. It is a common misconception that, when life expectancy was so low, there must have been very few old people. In fact, the most common age for adult deaths was around 70 years, in line with the Biblical three score years and ten.
> “When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I’ll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved.” I saw a Reddit thread the other day on r/startups or r/entrepreneur where the OP was talking about how they'll be working until the day he or she dies. I immediately wondered if this individual had a family, friends. Had this person already seen the world and its m…
I've never seen someone staying at a job for 10+ years explain it by loyalty.
For some it's pure habbit and no need to move on, for others it's an equilibrium and they get better benefits from staying than the money they'd get leaving.
And in so many places, the people who were staying there their whole life just loved the job. They loved what they were doing either for society or for themselves. Some actually hated their employer, but it was a price to pay to do the job (I'd expect a ton of the Publix service people to be in that bucket)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even if it is more expensive (relative to your assets) A lot of this is relative to one's standards and objectives. You are certainly right that it is expensive relative to assets in one's youth, but it can still be quite attainable if backpacking, hostels, and street food are options. When we went to Tokyo recently, the room we booked was tiny! The bed was only 6 or so inches away from the walls on each side. But…
years ago i stayed in a capsule in tokyo with shared bath house for something like $20!
We lost long-term planning. When companies and employees both view their relationship as inherently limited to just a few years before one or the other tires of them and trades in for a new model, we lose the ability to envision a real, tangible future for the organization. We stopped building institutions meant to withstand the tests of time, and built an armada of startups solely designed to cash out as quickly as possible, sold to corporate conglomerates leaping from fad to fad without any inkling as to how everything comes together or integrates. We deluded ourselves with maths, formulas, models, spreadsheets of information demonstrating that this attitude was the most valuable approach, tacitly admitting that long-term planning and execution was so difficult that the only viable approach is making more money tomorrow than we did yesterday, and everything else will work out fine because that's someone else's job.
Not related to OP's article (which is excellent and concise, highly recommended in general), but just a personal mourning of a lost future by someone who thrives in said environments, but can't find any that exist in this world. I'm a literal dinosaur in that regard, I guess: thriving through consistent adaptation and execution on long-term strategies and plans, built for a fifty-year tenure but living in a society where gig work doesn't even last fifteen minutes.
Alas.
I got it pretty early in my career that loyalty for a company is concept to make you work harder without asking anything in return. And the moment the company shifts focus and you are out of it, then suddenly you understand that this loyalty wasn't kind of a credits account which you've been saving all this time. It's simply nothing. You are on your own and can fuck off. So there's simply no place for loyalty in empl…