My cousin called me a few hours ago and said he got fired today (they always do it on Fridays). He had been working for a very large accounting firm that will remain nameless, and he regularly had to come to the office for a full day on Saturdays, and sometimes a half day on Sundays. Over the past eight months the stress was getting to him, so last week he told his boss that he no longer wanted to work weekends. He offered to restructure his Monday-Friday schedule to make sure he got his work done, but he told them he needed the weekends to unwind. Well his immediate supervisor really didn't like this, and told him he was in no position to make an "ultimatum" like this, especially because he was childless and unmarried. A week later my cousin was "forced to resign" (i.e. terminated) after not coming in the Saturday before.
Before I went to graduate school, I had a job in a very intense work environment after college. I was an analyst who spent about 12-16 hours a day reading little screens with numbers and writing recommendations and analyses for people above me. I didn't have to come in on the weekends because the markets were closed for trading, but the analysts had so much work that if we didn't want to get fired for incompetence, we had to work almost every weekend. That year is an absolute blur to me; I don't remember most of it because ninety percent of the days were the same. I was miserable, but also too afraid to quit a job that paid relatively good money. I was also afraid of disappointing my family. Then, the financial crisis happened in 2009 and I was laid off, which in retrospect was a godsend.
But the point of this thread is this: anytime I made a comment about my long hours to people in my life or on internet forums, I was told to stop being "lazy". My family and friends said that because I was young, I didn't have any other responsibilities and should work extra hard. If I wanted to get ahead, I needed to "put in my dues" during my twenties. When I mentioned becoming a school teacher, I was laughed at and admonished.
Online, the criticism was much harsher. Supposedly I was a Marxist socialist who hated capitalism. I was lazy and looking to sponge off of the government. I was told to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. They said if everyone was like me, this country would be nothing more than a giant third-world shithole. I was told multiple times to move to France. I was told to shut up and be grateful I was even employed, because people in India would do my job for a quarter of the wages and double the hours, all with a smile on their faces.
Is this really all that matters: money and more money? What's the point, just so I can buy more expensive shit I don't have time to use anyway? Growing up, I saw so many people who were stuck in an endless cycle of buying themselves into debt, working hard to pay down the debt, then buying even more. So many people I know absolutely hate their jobs, but they just continue with the grind because the devil they know is less frightening than the one they don't know. And above all, income and net worth are the most prominent ways by which we measure a person's value in American society.
This culture of work and money can really get exhausting sometimes and wear you down. But I can't even mention this kind of stuff outside the anonymity of the internet, lest I get blacklisted in my profession and ridiculed by my peers.
Before I went to graduate school, I had a job in a very intense work environment after college. I was an analyst who spent about 12-16 hours a day reading little screens with numbers and writing recommendations and analyses for people above me. I didn't have to come in on the weekends because the markets were closed for trading, but the analysts had so much work that if we didn't want to get fired for incompetence, we had to work almost every weekend. That year is an absolute blur to me; I don't remember most of it because ninety percent of the days were the same. I was miserable, but also too afraid to quit a job that paid relatively good money. I was also afraid of disappointing my family. Then, the financial crisis happened in 2009 and I was laid off, which in retrospect was a godsend.
But the point of this thread is this: anytime I made a comment about my long hours to people in my life or on internet forums, I was told to stop being "lazy". My family and friends said that because I was young, I didn't have any other responsibilities and should work extra hard. If I wanted to get ahead, I needed to "put in my dues" during my twenties. When I mentioned becoming a school teacher, I was laughed at and admonished.
Online, the criticism was much harsher. Supposedly I was a Marxist socialist who hated capitalism. I was lazy and looking to sponge off of the government. I was told to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. They said if everyone was like me, this country would be nothing more than a giant third-world shithole. I was told multiple times to move to France. I was told to shut up and be grateful I was even employed, because people in India would do my job for a quarter of the wages and double the hours, all with a smile on their faces.
Is this really all that matters: money and more money? What's the point, just so I can buy more expensive shit I don't have time to use anyway? Growing up, I saw so many people who were stuck in an endless cycle of buying themselves into debt, working hard to pay down the debt, then buying even more. So many people I know absolutely hate their jobs, but they just continue with the grind because the devil they know is less frightening than the one they don't know. And above all, income and net worth are the most prominent ways by which we measure a person's value in American society.
This culture of work and money can really get exhausting sometimes and wear you down. But I can't even mention this kind of stuff outside the anonymity of the internet, lest I get blacklisted in my profession and ridiculed by my peers.
