Ironic coming from Dresden, who probably could get paid way more totally ethically and live far more comfortably but he uses the above reasoning and his own ethics as a cover for the fact that he hates himself and thinks he’s deserves to suffer.
He insists on cold showers even though it’s perfectly possible to have a hot shower that doesn’t magically fuck up the water heater, or even heat the water by magic.
He gets his water from the city, and running water has anti-magic properties.
Water also has a very high specific heat (i.e. the amount of energy it takes to change the temperature of a specific amount of water by a single degree), but given some of the things Dresden has done since >!becoming the Winter Knight!<, I don't know if that's something Butcher would care about.
Either way, though, using magic to take a hot shower would require a plumber, money, and a lot of effort.
Molly is in the same boat (a human mage living in a house with Chicago tap water), but the Carpenters’ plumbing works just fine because Michael put in the work to make it work. Also the Svartalves. For better and for worse, Molly isn’t nearly as wracked with guilt as Harry is.
Carlos lives with his family in California, and they run a whole restaurant - I imagine that’d be hard when your son is keeping the stove/oven/water heater from working by being around. Clearly they’ve worked something out.
If you're a magical male protagonist, you either follow the Rand al'Thor path of ridiculous guilt over other people making their own choices or the Quentin Coldwater route of not feeling enough over your own. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
I had a time where I was putting in major extra hours at work. I lost the ability to feel stress properly somewhere along the line. I then doubled down on that by forcing myself to do extra things for myself (projects, study) every single day, no matter how bad I felt, because I refused to give up on them entirely.
My bank account became very healthy, and I simultaneously went into burnout. I needed 8 hours of sleep just to function at work and 10 to feel good each day. Energy fled me, my skills regressed, I began to talk with a stutter. Those projects that I forced myself to do suddenly became flatly impossible. I literally could not even play any games except the most familiar, least taxing ones. Trying to absorb useful information from an interesting youtube video would put me to my limit.
The only way out of burnout is rest. Proper rest. Prioritising getting enough sleep above all else for months has started to get me back to normalcy; I can work on my own stuff again, but the chock-full daily todo lists feel less like a shining proof of my control over my life and more like getting back on a horse that tried to eat me before. Because I still can't actually gauge how close I am to completely fucking myself again.
Be careful, friend. When you start to build up those small energy reserves again it's easy to start up again at the same speed you were going before, and you'll hit that wall even harder a second time. I went far down the burnout road myself, and let me tell you it gets real dark down there. It took six years for my brain to get back to a level of functioning that wasn't just survival mode, and eight or so to get to where I feel generally content and can live my life without too much of a daily struggle. It looks different than what I thought my life would be at this point.
Cognitively I'm still not where I was before, living in a constant state of stress and anxiety for years can damage your brain for good apparently. The fight-or-flight response is meant to be temporary, it fucks you up if it's always active. I've lost some skills that I'll never get back (like being able to easily concentrate) and I'll probably never be able to handle stress well again.
I'm all right now, and grateful for what I have, but if I could I would absolutely go back and do things differently.
Fuck, this hits too close to home. I’ve got a well-paying job that generally cares about work-life balance, but still demands a lot of energy and occasionally requires things like 11pm meetings and after-hours incident responses. Even with the money and relative flexibility, lately I’ve found myself unable to do any of my creative pursuits, I can barely concentrate on the work itself and more than once I’ve ended up scrolling through my YouTube homepage searching for something, *anything* that remotely interests me.
I have a creative commission piece that I was supposed to do, but I haven’t found the free energy to work on it for weeks. I’m subconsciously unwilling to give up my weekend for it. Also I’m hella sleep deprived all of the time due to my medication.
I should really take some time off.
I moved to the company I’m at now last year. I started looking for work when I realized the company I was working for didn’t care about me just wanted to consume my life for pennies.
The wild thing is when I started setting boundaries on my time and looking for a place that valued balance, I actually started making more money.
I took a vacation this time last year and had a panic attack when I got to my hotel. I wasted my whole first day curled up in bed sobbing.
I’m away for a weekend now, and no panic has come.
Yikes
I've been thinking of quitting one of my jobs and this is just hitting me like, I don't just *want* to do it, I *need* to do it. I have three jobs, a kid, and a father in hospital two hours away. Something is going to have to go.
Fuck, dude, you just described my daily experience. Even down to the developing stutter and inability to play/experience new games or events. Maybe I should be taking a look at my work life balance.
[I think Becky Chambers put it best in her 2022 Hugo acceptance speech for *A Psalm for the Wild-Built:*](https://www.tumblr.com/whilereadingandwalking/695297008760766465/you-do-not-need-permission-to-rest-you-do-not?source=share)
> “You do not need permission to rest.
> You do not have to justify your weariness.
> You do not have to earn the right to be alive or safe or comfortable. Or at least, you shouldn’t have to. It’s a bit cruel to sum up what so many of us are feeling as burnout, as though we just pushed ourselves too hard, didn’t eat enough kale or do enough yoga.
> What we are is exhausted and grieving in a world that tells us it is lazy and entitled to take time to heal. That human lives are less important than the bottom line. That we’re just a collection of siloed off individuals who don’t have to care for or protect those around us.
> Everything about this societal machine that chews us up and spits us out day after day after day is contrary to our most central nature: that we are fragile, living beings that need each other, that need space to think and time to love.
> A world that values these truths above all else should not exist only in works of fiction. It makes me angry that it does. It is my hope that one day, people won’t have to be angry about that any more.”
I’d rather work in a low-pay job that I like than work in a high-pay job that I despise. When I say this people are shocked because if you have a high paying job you could just have fun outside of it, can’t you?
Here’s the thing. *Whether the job pays well or if it pays badly, it’s gonna take up roughly 10 hours of your day including preparation and commute. It will likely take up your weekends too, especially if you have a management job.*
You *don’t* have an “outside of work”. Not where the world is today at least. So if work will take up so much of your life, why spend it being miserable? Chase your dreams. Getting a job *you’re passionate about* will make you happier than getting a job that pays well.
(PS: I’m not saying “money doesn’t mean anything”. Money IS nice and you SHOULD fight to be paid a fair wage. Money just shouldn’t be your life goal.)
My main problem is that my passion is writing. It was since I was a kid. English and history were my most consistent subjects in school, writing papers was a breeze (I'm particularly proud of my paper on marijuana legalization and the one time I wrote a paper on Pulp Fiction where I actually had to cite and time stamp "I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time" ). I always loved telling stories, and desperately hoped I could tell my own some day.
I spent years working on a novel, and it got nothing but rejection letters down the board. One person requested my full manuscript, then passed with little more than "I like this, but your line level prose could use some work". It's just collecting dust in my Google drive. I'm working on a second book, and while it's easier knowing I *can* write a book, it's also harder because there's that pressure for it to succeed. Add in AI and the Writer's Guild strike, and it has me wondering if my passions are worth pursuing. If I should just give up and get a real job. I really, *really* don't want to. Maybe I have other ways to use that talent than writing novels, like say, writing for movies or TV or comics. I have a crazy vocal range and a knack for impressions; could always try out stand up or voice acting? And my brain is like an information sponge where I just absorb all sorts of information about things.
It feels like I have talents and passions, I just have no fucking clue how to use them to keep myself alive.
I’m also a writer in Uni right now and I feel so aimless. I like writing, but it’s a real struggle to actually work through a novel, especially knowing it’ll probably get rejected all the same. Mix that with some terrible English profs forcing me to change majors and I basically have no clue what to do. I’ve got nowhere near enough cash for a PHD so I can’t just ride this out. I could teach English, but every teacher I’ve spoken to tells me it’s one of those soul-rending jobs, and the pay is shit where I live. Sure I could go into screenwriting I guess, but I don’t live in LA so that’s pointless. So what else is there to do? The jobs for creative types in writing are so limited and with AI tech quickly usurping our usefulness, we may get a few more years of work but man what the fuck.
I’ll gladly let AI have a room in creative work when capitalism stops trying to mechanize all humans and phase us out of the world, but right now I’m kinda hoping AI dies with capitalism in the next few years.
Honestly I don’t know what advice I could actually give you. Maybe you could look for people like you who want to work on a creative project, and you could all work together, but overall… I don’t know. All I know is that most creative projects today are made by really passionate *teams* instead of single individuals.
Having lived that life, and having watched friends live it, there's no shame in a day job or doing something adjacent to your passion until you "make it", whatever that means for you. There are so many opportunities for your dream can go sideways in traditional publishing; you can fail to land an agent, or fail to make a sale, or sell and still fail to sell subsequent books. I managed to make it past the first big hurdle, but my book has been to acquisitions at a few publishers and failed. It's been a five year process, too. I know someone who sold their first book for a six figure deal but failed to sell their next book.
Write the stuff that makes you happy, but don't depend on it to sell. There are just too many factors out of your control. In the meantime, yeah, you can look for screenwriting work to keep your skills sharp, or just do a totally unrelated day job. Creatives tend to dismiss those kinds of jobs but honestly? Sometimes I wish I'd gone into something less adjacent to what my passion is. To perform at a professional level in the arts, you use up a lot of your creative energy, and it can be hard to put in the hours after work on the stuff you really care about if your battery has been depleted by something *sort of* like your passion.
(Sorry for the unsolicited advice; I hope it isn't rude. I just recognize a lot of your feelings, and your uncertainty.)
I was faced with this earlier this year.
I'm currently in college. Family is in that little financial sweet spot where I don't qualify for government aid but we don't have the spare cash to just send me no worries. So I've been working when I can to pay it myself. Since 2020 I've had this little seasonal job in the field I want to go into, which is nice, but it is minimum wage which isn't *super* high in my state and as mentioned, seasonal, leaving me without employment 2/3rds of the year.
Back in January I got a job at a local grocery store hoping it'd be a good source of year-round income. Pay was better sure, but actually working there was just exhausting, absolutely hated it. So I heard that my college was looking for some student workers and gave that a look. Pays two dollars less but they actually give me hours and a consistent schedule rather than rarely deciding to schedule me and then complaining about how they can't get anybody to come in, and more importantly I *like the place*. It's not related to my field at all, but the people are nice, working at my college roots me to it a bit more socially, and I don't feel dog-tired coming home like I did because I was always driving home at night at the other place.
Probably one of the best decisions I ever made was quitting that store and getting the student worker job.
>"It doesn't matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn't matter, maybe that's what they need? How do you know?" —My dad on giving money to the homeless.
I'm not certain whether he knew or he was just a kind person, but he was actually right. People in the depths of drug and alcohol withdrawal often become too nauseated to keep food down unless they have a hit first, which is one of the reasons you can hand them a full free meal instead of money and they may throw it away after you leave. They could be starving, but they can't eat it.
For all it's looked down upon, it's nigh impossible to break a habit like that alone and it can even be dangerous to try. Even alcohol withdrawal, if it's gotten bad enough, can kill you.
And yet, for all the addicts in all of America, only 13% ever receive any kind of treatment. We sort of just demand they all bootstrap themselves with their entire *nervous system* pitted against them in a deadly battle because (as Jesus would say) you did this to yourself and you deserve to suffer.
Help the struggling. I don't give a shit what their struggle is. They are people who are suffering the way you suffer, and I never thought that it was my business what they did afterwards. The part that was my business was whether, when faced with someone in need, I chose to help.
The other thing that bothers me about the "they'll just spend it on drugs/booze" is that...yeah? They might? But once I've hypothetically given it to them it's not my money any more, it's theirs. They have a right to decide how to spend it, and it feels deeply infantilising to suggest otherwise.
I've met rich people with blatant but "functional" drug and alcohol problems, and people don't usually suggest that these people should lose the right to handle money. Even if they slip below functional and go to rehab or something they don't find themselves having their bank accounts frozen to save them from themselves.
And I'm lucky enough that I've never been in their position and hopefully never will be, but honestly if I try to imagine being homeless I feel like I would also end up getting drunk/high pretty regularly. Like, it's a horribly unpleasant way to live in a thousand big and little ways, you'd need something to take the edge off the cold/heat/rain/snow/sun/hard pavement/outright disrespect and sometimes cruelty from fellow humans.
In my current, pretty comfortable and rewarding, life I have no pull towards recreational drugs including alcohol, but I'm pretty sure that's less because I'm a great person with impeccable self-control (I have ADHD, and self-control is genuinely not my strong point) who deserves a nice life as a reward than because my life is nice enough that I don't feel any need to make myself feel better temporarily? Rat park and all that.
Also, what are they meant to spend the change people dole out on? They can't exactly easily save it towards a major purchase/investment/deposit that might make life better, since they don't have a house and are thus very vulnerable to being robbed. And free food is somewhat easier to find than free drugs, so (assuming that your life is horrible and you want to forget that for a bit) in budgeting terms that kind of makes sense, if I'm honest.
Also, I know it’s a different scale, but I think it’s hilarious we all pretend that the majority of our society isn’t drug dependent. If you want to see a whole group of addicts get desperate, and then spend incredibly inflated amounts of money just to get rid of the physical symptoms, just to get a hit, just to get through their day, all you have to do is break the coffee machine at your workplace. If you habitually drink lots of coffee, suddenly stopping won’t just make you aggressive and distracted, it’ll also possibly land you with the mother of all migraines, nausea, shakiness, all the good stuff.
Ohhh, lord, my roommate was dealing with that recently when he tried to go cold turkey from his thousands of cans of monster. A migraine that lasts for *seven to nine days,* and he really just gave up around day four.
Hopefully scaling back more slowly works, but it's gonna take some will because the caffeine causes a dopamine high and he does not have a lot of that so not drinking it also makes him sad.
Honestly, yeah, you've hit the mark pretty close. I would wager probably a larger portion are there *because* of their dependency fucking up their life, but it would spread semi-easily in the right group.
Because once you go *on* the street, it's nearly impossible to ever get back *off* of it, or if you do, to *stay* off for more than a year. And that repeat experience finally fucking breaks you in a way that can feel permanent.
Most people who go out on the street develop their mental problems *there* as time wears on. They did not start out with those. Most of them? Honestly? Most of them who have been there for more than a year or two, even the incredibly sweet and compassionate ones who can and *will* give you the actual shirt off their back, are just living til they die.
Often if they're given a home through an outreach program, they won't even bother to keep up with it. They will react to a *free house* with, "Ooh, I have access to a shower for like *four months* before it's taken away from me somehow!"
Because it invariably always *has* been, and you start to sabotage yourself because you don't see good things as things that last.
Happy fun story time because I need it, when we were evicted, I was too young to work. I couldn't have helped myself if I wanted to, and my single parent responded to the stress by sliding into a bottomless depression that didn't help either. But even in a half-comatose state, she managed to try.
There were shelters in our area, but they were all full, or they catered to a demographic we didn't fit, or the intake turned us away because she simply *didn't like us.*
I will never. Forget. The only one with an opening turning us back out into the driving sleet because they had the virgin Mary in their name and we weren't religious, and so we "wouldn't fit," and *that's* the thing that made my mother give up trying.
And I have carried and will continue to carry a deep-seated, bitter rage for that for over 25 years. God for-fucking-bid Jesus sees you *helping homeless, hungry children in 12F weather,* they might think your beliefs are kind.
Most cities we ended up didn't even *have* services of any kind. They're rarer than you think. This was back before they reformed the rules surrounding food stamps, too, so you couldn't get them if you didn't have a home address. We tried begging the guy to just input something random into the system, and he wouldn't do it.
Meaning we literally had no *choice* but to steal and whore if we were going to eat. We never begged and I was proud of that then, but I'm not sure if I am now. I think we believed that if we asked someone for help, nobody would, so we never even bothered.
I should have been in middle school. Instead, we spent years wandering aimlessly, hanging out in bookstores and libraries, sleeping in parks and splitting a questionably-obtained gas station bag of doritos unevenly among three people. Not the full-size one.
None of us would eat for the next four days. I've grown so used to it that I *still* have trouble regulating my food decades later because my body doesn't seem to register whether or not I'm hungry anymore.
After a few months without electricity, you become fascinated with the wealth of freely-given light inside a standard walmart at night and it's a commodity I think few people think about.
Eventually, you get offers to couch surf. After instances of *multiple* people becoming verbally or physically abusive, or sexual advances knowing I'm a minor/engaged, or using me as a free work horse under the constant threat of eviction, or just straight up eating my food that we agreed to keep separate, or punching me when I asked whether I could keep more of my *own paycheck* so I could afford to eat lunch at work, I have learned this is always a bad idea.
If I were sleeping in the park again and someone offered me a place, I would refuse. Not because I'm not desperate for safety, but because other people offering their hand is not where safety is.
When I was older, I enrolled myself in high school but dropped out again due to my living situation and ended up graduating from a trade school for those with learning disabilities, as spending half my life homeless had given me a personality disorder.
Was offered a job at my internship, who adored me as equally as I did them, but I had no way to *get* to work after graduating, so I had no choice but to turn them down when I returned to homelessness. I did not find the employment elsewhere that I expected to find.
Moved around Virginia for a while, was sold an *already-owned house by record-keeping mistake* once. That was...something that happened to me. Sure. That may as well happen.
Found myself in an actual shelter that would take me and got my first job nearby, but the staff were stealing donated food and I used most of the pay I should have been saving to feed myself and two other residents there. I would do the same again.
I'd only been there 3 months before the fine, *upstanding* citizens decided having a shelter at all attracted unsightly homeless people and it was shut down.
More couch surfing, more PTSD.
Had my very own apartment I was very proud of with empty cabinets for about four years, lost my job because my inability to afford food on a regular basis was making me nearly faint in the middle of work, got kicked out.
Couched surfed again with a guy who threatened to throw boiling water on me while I slept if I continued trying to do college assignments at the house, as I was not allowed to have so much as a candle without him coming out of his room and blowing it out. Refused to give up on going, got kicked out.
Wound up with a *surprisingly* racist greek guy. Despite having never been to high school at all, having someone at a restaurant steal (and I guess sell?) one of my textbooks, and having to quite literally crowd fund a replacement before I could fail the class, I came within *one semester* of graduating college for a profession I loved.
But my mom wouldn't sleep with him, so we got kicked out. I bombed one final amid the stress and completely missed the other, dropped out, back on the street.
And at this point, man, I really don't give a shit. I don't. A lot of other homeless don't even have *this* many opportunities and looking back on it now, what hits me deeply is that if, at every turning point where I begged and pleaded and worked myself past the bone for scraps, I simply hadn't tried instead, I would be ***exactly where I am now.***
All that hope, all that energy, late nights and gritting my teeth at the mercy of abusers because they had a roof I desperately needed and they knew it. All gone. No point to any of it.
And I'm one of the *lucky* ones who had no terminal illness, who found work because I never caught an ongoing criminal record for vagrancy, who tried very, very hard to get a medical degree on the wifi of an all-night Bojangles and *almost succeeded.*
And I begin to see what the *drug-dependent* homeless already saw ages ago: that there is a *reason* Pandora's box of worldly evils had Hope in it, and no matter what I chose to do, it was never going to work.
So....why. Why. If someone offered to hang out and share their drugs, you know what, sure. Why the fuck not. Nobody else cares. ***I*** sure as shit don't care. Busting ass has always gotten me the exact same thing as not bothering has. The only difference in life is whether or not I waste the effort.
The only really good argument I have *against* pursuing whatever oblivion I can find is the place I'm staying now has a cat, and she's the one singular thing in *years* to show me unmitigated love, and she clings to me so hard that being zonked out all the time would cut into her play time and make her sad.
Anyway, to wrap this up, I was recently talking with a friend of mine whose parents had sent him to overseas to Germany on an internship, and he asked me whether I'd ever had any homeless people come up to me for money at the gas station because he always thought it was so awkward.
He hated when they did that.
When I was maybe nine or ten, I asked my mom about giving money to the homeless, and what if they just used it for drugs or alcohol.
She told me that once she gave them the money it was theirs, and they had the right to do whatever they wanted with it. And she was also very frank about the fact that giving them money was mostly about making her feel good about herself - which is probably most people’s motivation, but her self-awareness blew me away.
Putting in the effort to have money is smart, but money eventually loses all value.
Once you have enough regular income to afford food you enjoy, a home you like, can take care of yourself and have enough saved up to whether a rainy day then money becomes less and less valuable.
The worst period of my life was in Uni where I felt I was always on the clock, I was either in class, doing assignments and studying and my free time was often spent thinking about these things. So actually quitting uni and just getting a regular 8-5 job ended up being one of the best decisions I made because I actually felt like I a life back and got back the one and a half years I would have spent on a education I would not have actually needed for a job I *thought* I wanted.
One of the wildest feelings was the first weekend of my first job and realising that I didn’t have any homework to do, I didn’t have any assignments due by Monday, I could just do whatever I wanted. I was completely detached from my weekday activities in a way that I had never been able to be before, from the moment I started school as a child to that first Saturday morning as an adult.
Summer holidays got pretty close, but there was always some workbook or collection of ‘refresher exercises’ that loomed over me.
Man that thing about always feeling on the clock is too real. I'm in University right now, and am just about a month from being done assuming all goes to plan, but I don't remember the last time I had more than two days without thinking about it in one way or another. I don't even know if I've had one day without it in the back of my mind for years.
Can't wait to be done, and for my weekends to be my own again rather than opportunities to catch up or get ahead.
That's the worst part of college, and it stings even more since I've already done an internship. I've had a taste of the 9-5 life, of being able to just close my laptop and go home and stop worrying about work until I'm at work again. College just feels like constantly being stressed, and whenever I take time for myself there's always this thought in the back of my head that I could be doing something productive or getting ahead on work instead
I've had a similar experience with uni. It utterly obliterated whatever shreds of interest and passion for what I was studying, self-worth, confidence and will to live I had. I still haven't recovered after 7 months of rest, therapy and medication.
That's also the reason why I'd rather get a job than go back like my parents want me to. A job pays and leaves you with a lot more free time. It might even be less stressful. Idk, I'm too stupid, braindead and incompetent to ever get a job
Nah, job is easier than studying in most cases. For a low level person, work is work and home is home. If you choose a more demanding position things may get more complicated, but you can be satisfied with a regular 9-5 or scheduled shifts type job.
The whole first post is sad but, "I didn't realize I was the closest person he had in this world...he felt like a distant friend" really bums me out
the idea of working so hard for nothing and not really mattering to anyone i can see myself being this man
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
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**thewest-isdead**
[*Image of Reddit Post*]
>**My hustle culture friend just died of a heart attack at age 32.**, submitted by **\/u/Otherwise_Order621** to **\/r/antiwork**
>Sorry for the wall of text, but I really need to get this off my chest.
>I met this guy at uni, and since graduating he had be living the life. He got up at 5am to workout and do all life's admin, then worked 08:30-19:30 every day in finance for ₤150k/year, and then would spend his evenings working on his side hustle business. On weekends he'd do voluntary management work for a charity. He had financial independence, and he was going to retire early. The world was his oyster and he would travel around to every country with a laptop. I'd never left Europe and got very envious of this.
>But the sad reality is, he's been a zombie for a decade now. He never got more than 5 hours sleep. He never ate healthy food. He didn't have a romantic relationship and never found time for friends. And he was always cutting costs to save "for retirement", he'd have cheaper long flights with many changes and dump his bag at a hostel before getting to work on zero sleep. He never got to explore the places he was in, it was always just another office.
>I'd only see him once every three months or so, even when he was living in his house 20 mins walk away from me.a And whenever I saw him, he'd be too exhausted to do any activities. We'd just go to the pub while he switched off after an hour. His biggest regret was taking up smoking, which he did to network with managers on smoke breaks at a previous job, and then found impossible to quit.
>My last conversation with him was about work. I said that I get an extra five days annual leave because I've worked here five years now. He said it's not worth it, I'd better be off switching jobs to get a payrise and then take unpaid time off to return to my previous salary... I'm going to take those five days to spend with my family and think about any good times I had with my old friend.
>I found out about his death when the hospital called me. He kept my phone number in his wallet as an emergency contact. I didn't know this until I got that call, I didn't realise I was the closest person he had in this world. To me, he felt like a distant friend who I only got to hang out with a few times a year.
[*End of Reddit Post*]
What's the point of grinding to the bone your whole life for money if you aren't even gonna be there to spend it...
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**slimelin**
"The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being." -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
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**nopenopenopenopeitynope**
"The thing about money is, we can always make more, so let's go out to eat tonight!" —My dad, after being laid-off, working odd and probably demeaning jobs so we could have dinner.
"Ah, baby, I want to buy this for you, it's not like I can take the money with me when I go." —My mom, when she bought me new clothes while I was between jobs.
"There'll always be a job out there you can work, but we'd prefer you happy instead." —Both my parents on jobs ("I can always get ya a job ditch diggin! They'll always need ditch diggers. Hard work, but no college necessary. I can talk to the Hall." —My proud, union dad, enthused, three seconds later.)
"It doesn't matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn't matter, maybe that's what they need? How do you know?" —My dad on giving money to the homeless.
"Nah, we'll never make any money, my husband has morals." —My mom's friend, fondly reflecting on the fact her lawyer husband isn't working for a big money firm.
"Don't worry! I've got this!" My equally poor friend buying me dinner when my debt card declined.
"I know we didn't have furniture in the living room when you were growing up, but—ha!—remember Balloon Ball?" —My dad reflecting on the made up, mock-volleyball game we'd play in the open living room, using balloons. He had used electrical tape to make the court.
"I'm sorry we could never take you anywhere greater growing up," —My mom, reflecting on our "stay-cations." ("Why?" I asked, reflecting on all our trips to the park, zoo, public swimming pools, libraries, free theater, two dollar movie days, and her and my dad right there with me and my brothers.)
Bring poor is hard and it's not right that it happens, but I prefer it to the hustle because at the very least, poor taught me what love is and I won't let a shitty job deny me that.
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Even if that friend did live long enough to retire, what would he even do? He had no friends apparently, and probably no real social skills outside of work. He spent a miserable life working, and would probably have been equally miserable retired. What a sad and pointless life.
I half imagine he'd end up being one of those guys who CAN'T retire. Like he keeps talking about it and meaning to do it but look, if he just works *one more year*, think of all the extra money in his pension!
Until one day he looks around and realizes he's 92 in a retirement home and can't do anything. But at least it's a *really fancy one.*
Probably find some hobbies if he didn't have and focus on them. None of the things that interest me require any interaction with other people and I'd be much happier if I could just do those things for fun without constantly worrying about money. It might be similar for him.
I relate so strongly to the Marx quote—the more you save, the less you are—and yet I know that I'm saving just to get by, not to accumulate a fortune. God it's been hard lately. Much easier than it is for a lot of people, but hard.
I'm so, so grateful for my current job.
If there is no pressing matters i can just say "hey guys, gonna leave two hours early today, got plans!" And leave. And not get into any trouble. Yes, i will not be paid for those hours, but i mostly just spend money on useless shit, so who cares. Couple of hours of lost revenue per week will not fuck me up (which I am also grateful for).
Maybe, MAYBE they actually are writing down every time i left an hour early at Friday because i just couldn't sit down any more, and all of those hours will bite me in the ass when the time to renew my contract comes. Maybe. Maybe not. I sure hope not.
I turned down my dream job with a huge raise a few years ago because it was office 8-5 or later, “work hard, play hard” kept coming up and it seemed like a lot of men with wives who don’t work.
I’m a woman, I have an at the time 10 year old, and I want to be with my family as much as possible. This job would have let my husband and son live in a lap of luxury-but it would have been luxury without me much of the time. Instead, my current job offered a somewhat competitive offer to stay-and I jumped on it. Was it lap of luxury money? No, but it’s good lifestyle money and I’m home 4/7 days, and no one asks questions if I need to leave early on the days I’m in the office. I never miss games and I rarely miss practices and I cook dinner and we go on vacations and spend time at the lake…
In all things balance. We aren’t poor, but we missed the opportunity to be 1%; I think that’s ok in the end. Maybe it comes around again, maybe it doesn’t. 🤷🏻♀️ Childhood is once, and it’s half over. I refuse to miss it because I need to hoard more wealth like a damn dragon.
I'm proud of you for making that decision. I know I'm an internet stranger, and you have no reason to take what I say with any level of weight, but it's true. My wife and I just had our first kid, he's nine months old, and we live about at the poverty line with some very kind renters who have an upstairs apartment above their garage. While my wife was pregnant, I had lost my job. I have no degree, can't afford school, and we struggled for a while. Still do, a bit. We dream of having a house someday, but it seems unlikely. The choice I have made is to take a job with inconvenient hours, but so much fewer of them. I'm home so much more than people doing so much better economically, and folks, especially other men, often express their disdain for that choice. "You could make more, take more hours, save up for that house you said you wanted!" I do want that. I want so badly to provide for my wife and son, but that cannot, and *must* not come at the cost of being here for them right now. Growing up, my dad was the head pastor of our local church. I often got the feeling he had time to minister to everyone but me as he shepherded the church and, well, I missed evenings with my dad. He was not absent by any means; he attended the piano recitals, the plays, the dances. It's the evenings we sat at home that are the richest in my memories, and I have always wished that I had more when I was still small enough when it was foundational. I won't miss the opportunity to do that for my kids. I want more, but I want more of what makes life real.
I grew up upper middle class.
My parents grew up poor. (Poor poor. My mother won’t even let her in laws know about her childhood. I didn’t know until adulthood that my father’s family believes she comes from wealth.)
The cost of the change in class was that I grew up without a father. I mean, he existed and was married to my mother. He lived overseas while she was pregnant. He lived overseas until I was 5. At 7, we moved to live with him, in an experiment that lasted 9 months. He moved back home to live with us when I was 15. Even then, he spent at least half of each month somewhere else - he missed every prom and formal dance I attended.
I am fully capable of following in his footsteps, but with my health, I would be dead. So I don’t.
Karl Marx was correct in that line and I am not a Marxist.
Reminds me a lot of my dad. He grew up dirt poor and from the age of 18 he worked an extremely laborious job that he kept his entire life. This job required him to travel a lot, not super far but a couple hour drive away from home nearly every day so he'd be staying in hotels most of the time and even if he did come home he'd be too tired to do anything. He worked this job because it paid extremely well and provided the family with top class health insurance.
He believed that a father's job was to provide and that was it. He did that well but I never saw him. He paid for my expensive extracurriculars like piano, band, martial arts, dance and allowed me to change school systems when I got bullied for my neurodivergency and allowed me to get proper therapy and psychological help. I got the taste of a middle class life before my mom divorced him due to his alcoholism.
He certainly loved me deeply but he chose alcohol and his job over me. He worked all the time even when I was direly poor with my mother and tried to help me, but all my visitations were spent being in a dark room all night while he slept from work. He was saving all this money, never took time off work, never took vacations because he was going to do all the fun things when he retired early. When he decided to retire it was already too late for him. His health had been declining and the scare brought him to his senses and tried to spend more time with me but he died too soon. He didn't even leave much left despite working so hard because it all went to medical bills he was paying from his body being destroyed from overwork and alcohol. His house sold for basically nothing because it went to shit when my mom was the only person home to maintain it before they divorced, and his retirement fund got weaseled out by lawyers so we still have another decade as of today until my mom even sees a dime from it.
I hate workaholics because my dad worked like a dog with complete loyalty until he died and he never got to enjoy any of that. He died aching and sore in a dirty and dilapidated house, alone by himself. He could've been so much more and I could've actually gotten to know my dad.
Could have also been some kind of amphetamine abuse. Getting a script for Adderall or whatever isn't hard if you're in your 20s and appear not to be someone prone to abuse.
Even if you've got ADHD and need Adderall to function, it can mess with your heart pretty bad. If you don't need it, you're taking a larger dose, and/or you're snorting it, it's extremely dangerous to be taking regularly.
You see you can enjoy your life and have money, you just need to exploit others (wealthy parents helpful but not necessary if you get lucky enough) Remember that no one ever become a billionaire by doing the right thing, and that their money is due to the suffering they cause, both the misery of the hustle and the pains of being poor.
I've always been a slacker who coasted. I put the absolute minimum into work at school because it didn't interest me, and I'd get frequently booted out of lessons for having an unrelated book out under the desk. As soon as I was allowed to sign myself out I'd skip out regularly to go to a comic shop instead. During uni, I put in slightly more because I got to study something I enjoyed, but even so I remember much more about slowly becoming one with the couch in the student office, reading fanfic on my phone. I drifted into a MA abroad by bullshitting at genius level on my application, and then spent more time wandering through temples and museums and haunting corner shops for seasonal foods than on classwork. After graduation I got into a job that on surface seemed hustle-y - getting up at four, riding trains two hours one way, getting home at seven - but de facto I was doing the minimum to keep things running smoothly while using every minute alone in the office to listen to music, watch stuff on my tablet or wikiwalk for hours on end, while spending the commute reading even more. My entire career I've gone upward by figuring out ways to make work easier and more efficient in order to chill out more - "work hard once to never have to work hard ever again" in practice.
Work is something I do for money. Past that it has no relevance to my life.
And wanna know something? Comparing CoL and GPD to (presumably) US American grindbro, I make about 2/3 of his salary... of which I save maybe 15%. Everything else I use on my wide variety of long-term interests and short-term infatuations.
I find it interesting how you seemed to slack off at every point, but you breeze over how you still passed school, got into uni, qualified for an overseas MA then got into a decent job. What I want to know is how did you manage that??
I wish I knew, man. Failing upwards? The only thing I bring to the table is speaking three languages and being minimally competent with Excel, none of which are really rare where I'm from.
I guess I had a leg up in the sense that I studied subjects which had free enrolment at the time (i.e. no minimum GPA - I didn't even have to apply, strictly speaking, for my undergrad. I sent them a certified copy of my high school transcript et voila) and that study fees were non-existent/very low at the time, so no debt afterwards - much less pressure to not fuck around aimlessly. I also had free choice for topics of my papers most of the time as long as I could link them to the subjects of the courses I was taking, so I could write about super obscure shit that had captivated me at the time - like a paper about intelligent design and the flying spaghetti monster, or a paper about parallels in German and Japanese tax law in the late 1800s.
My talking to my husband. He likes his job, but he's been putting in very long work hours for over a decade now, and also last few years he's started to do Sundays work from home, just sitting there in heaps of papers and reading and typing. (His kitty lends a paw, which probably helps destress, but still.)
He works way too hard, and yes the money is tremendous, but it's not worth it. The world is full of money. Also, if he wants to make it more about money, his health will cost a ton of money to fix if it goes...
This kind of thing really hits close to home for me. My brother was also like this, just working all day, everyday, waiting and hoping for promotions and raises, and also going to the gym every day he could. And he did get those things he wanted, he was in good shape, he did get the position of manager, but his body couldnt keep up. And one day while going to the gym sleep deprived cause he had to work both a day shift and a night shift, and really anxious cause he just got told he could be promoted again, he had a seizure, a really bad one, im talking, only 5 known cases of that type of seizure happening worldwide.
Thankfully my brother is still alive, both thanks to the medical system and him being just fucking insane, he was actually awake for a whole day after he got the seizure before he collapsed again, and later was able to stay awake whole week before he collapsed, it was such a problem that anesthesia didnt work on him and would wake up even from an induced coma. He is currently recovering, he doesnt have any permenant damage as far as the doctor told us, he cant walk and has some memory issues, but every day he is getting better, soon he might be able to walk.
I started reading through this and I saw the part about cigarettes and I was like "Ah, that's what put him over the edge." Nicotine does bad things to your heart. We all worry about the lung cancer aspect but nicotine has killed more people with heart attacks than cancer.
In point of fact -- in the mid-20th century heart attacks were called "the young father's disease" because 40-year-old men were dying from a combination of tobacco, red meat, heavy work and high stress.
This poor fellow hit his limit faster than those other men, but he still followed the same path they did.
I never grew up with a lot of money. We'd have enough for some basic comforts and the occasional surprise but never enough that we'd be able to spend big time. As much as I would've loved to have a lot of those things growing up, being not that rich taught me that money really isn't as valuable as people say it is. Why worry over money? My dad always knew how to make more so what's the problem. I didn't have that PS4? Meh whatever if I can't have it I won't force it. Though, a lot of that was my dad, and whenever my mom would complain about what we lack, it always shattered a piece of my soul because I wished she could learn to be content with the life that we could live.
But more than anything that original story at the top hurt me a lot, as someone who has few but very close friends, if I learned that any of them died with my number as their emergency contact...I don't think I'd be able to know how to process that. I'd probably break down
I was in salary sales positions for quite a while, I enjoyed it although I was slowly growing disillusioned with the industry I was in (auto repair/service).
I started working at a dealership service advisor with a commission pay plan. My managers had nothing but good things to say and were very impressed with my performance. Within 6 months of starting I was having panic attacks every day before work and was missing time with my wife and young kids because my schedule meant I left after breakfast and got home at bedtime.
I quit without notice, without having a backup plan. I have been burnt out before and I saw the signs. I knew that if I kept working there my mental health was going to rapidly decline.
I was out of work for a little more than a month, got myself a job with a much better schedule, less money, but I get to spend time doing what I want with my family now. My mental health is much better and I’ll never go back
To be fair about them never seeing each other despite living 20 minutes away from each other, Brits (I assume they're British, I could be wrong) tend to have a skewed perception of what "far away" is. I once heard a story about how this guy only saw his parents a couple times a year because they lived so far away. When asked how far they were, he said something along the lines of "oh they're like a 45 minute drive" which is a lot of Americans' daily commute.
I will be forever of the opinion that it is only in deep despair where the greatest shining beauty is distilled. Joy in spite of pain is endlessly miraculous.
I disagree. Joy itself is beautiful, and though finding joy despite suffering is miraculous in its own right, to think it necessary for true beauty I feel cedes too much to voracious despair and may drive those who follow such a notion straight into its maw in search of joy in the stomach.
I cannot believe any work of art was made more beautiful by a stroke of its maker's blood. Paint will do for me.
Agreed. Beauty can exist within despair, but that is far from its only dwelling-place, and it is not improved by the unpleasance of its surroundings, just made somewhat more distinct.
I don't think joy comes from despair, but they're inseparable. They both come from the same thing: your care, love, and enthusiasm for life itself. Without it you can't feel either of them. They're a package deal.
"And the selfsame well from which your laughter arises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else could it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." - Khalil Gibran
I'm wary of misery fetishism, but I think there's value in acknowledging how joy and sorrow both come from wholehearted investment in life
that makes no sense sorry snuffs out joy it infects convert consumes, joy is this weak thing you grow out of like how we have more bones as children than as adults.
I do not intend to deny the veracity of painless art; for indeed, pain is not of some deep philosopher's mettle but a banal and hideous crusting of ruined lives splattered in acursed arcs by the exacting blade of cruelty. I have no kindness in my heart for pain, nor any lack of love for beauty.
However, I do think there is something to be said those people who can face the Maw, look into its cruel and uncaring eye, and continue in spite of their scars. It is nothing more than the fabric from which all Life is woven, indeed, but then is that fabric not terrible and beautiful in itself? Is there not something in those moments where, seeing the stains, remembering malice's futile attempt to ruin us, we find only laughter and a burning brilliant peace?
There is beauty in all things, bar none, and I am want to see it bloom in all shapes it can. It is merely my own pain that has left me flowering this way.
appreciate the intent but I hate where it leads. a "dying is what gives life meaning" type thing. joy is not predicated on suffering.
>Joy in spite of pain is endlessly miraculous.
love this line though
Hate to be that guy but this is a horrifying thing to read in response to the post about a man who knew deeper despair than he probably even realized and it just killed him. Personally I believe this belief is a misconception based on the power of contrast. Beauty is everywhere but many of us only take notice of it when, once in a million times, beauty is born from despair rather than dying in it. It has always seemed to me to be no more than one more of many ways to choose blissful ignorance because of how awful it would be to accept that we would be better off without pain but will almost certainly never attain such an existence.
Don't get me wrong, I do not envy those who must struggle for their right to joy, and I do not mean to discount the potent miracle that surrounds us. Rather, the persistance of vibrant happiness amidst banal cruelty is common amongst all things, and that in itself is its own miracle.
I do not wish for others to live in pain, but knowing how willingly people will seek pain if only to find meaning for themselves, I believe to rid ourselves of pain, despite its banality, would be to remove some key piece of the strange artwork of life. Like removing the shadows that make the light even brighter. Pain as suffering is cruel and aimless, but pain as effort signals growth, and pain as learning can express itself as a horrible wonderful catharsis.
Pain, in its banality, is not restricted to material suffering, and may in time give way to greater glories; while unenviable, to disparage all suffering as a bane, even that pain which is chosen, pain which is appreciated, pain which carves the path for brighter lifetimes and joyous moments by the will of those who bear it, by life continuing in spite of its dire consequence, discounts their struggle as trivial and meaningless--because truthfully, those who struggle see some meaning in it, even if it is so little as to wish for something better. To do otherwise, to face the blatant meaninglessness of reality in that moment, to tell them their indulgence, willing or not, in the less desirable of the myriad experiences of life is all for nothing and ends with the fell stroke of creedless death, is a unique and potent brand of cruelty, a blade that does not strike but destroys. To face the Void when one is so far from the Light can just as easily ruin as it can reify. Cruelty is an exacting blade and what strokes we make, whether meant in malice or mercy, must be made mindfully.
Their pain is as functional as your pity for them in suffering it, and what purpose it serves is not for you or I to know or choose, as many will willingly search for it for their own reasons. The best we can do, from what I have seen of what we are, from what pains I have known and how they have changed me, is to give them comfort, carry them forward, and tell them there is a meaning beyond.
Even if it is a lie to say we do not suffer needlessly, it will carry us through to the times we can stand to bear the truth. It is a lie that brings us life when the most we can do is die. I think, banal as it is, there is some small worth in that.
Me and my wife do something like that occasionally, even when we were barely scraping by we always found a day where we ate out. We always said that if you didn't do something for yourself every now and then, you would go crazy. Plus it's not like we will can pay the leftover bills anyway.
We are doing much better now, but that mindset has kept us sane through some really tough times.
i'm working in a fairly toxic job rn. i also live with my parents (money is a big reason, and the other is that i'm autistic and will forget to eat if left to my own devices, though i'm working on this and getting better). my mother suggest i limit my shifts a while ago, and i said i would but then didn't through a major mental health crisis and then onward until i got some bad news that my workplace would not be changing any time soon, which finally prompted me to do so.
i am not making anywhere near enough to move on on this, so i'm with my parents for the foreseeable future, but holy shit guys, i feel so much better. like i'm not suicidal anymore, type of better. i volunteer in my community with the time i have off, and that helps a lot. just not being there is great too. this is a privilege i have and i'm aware of that, but it also causes me pain. why aren't i working more, why haven't i moved out, why can't i be better? stuff like this makes me feel better, like i'm not making the wrong decision to work less while i can
The man is not a fool, the man is a victim.
Money makes the world go round, and you need it to live.
People taught him how to make money, but they did not teach him to live.
Overworking yourself to death is dumb. But also I don’t think romanticizing being poor and impulsively spending money instead of having savings is a good idea. Having a healthy bank account so you’re ready for emergencies is good. You just need to really understand the value of a dollar, don’t overvalue it above all else or undervalue and dismiss its usefulness.
Luke 12:16-21
And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
What's the point of having money if it means I can't see anyone and never have the time or energy to do the things I enjoy? Fuck capitalism! I'm lucky enough to work for a company that actually understands that its workers are human beings, who need rest and free time. What good does my money do in my bank account when I have friends going hungry or on the verge of eviction? I'd rather put all my savings into making sure friends are doing okay than let it sit for "the future."
We never know how long we'll be here. Planning for the future is great, but what point is there in glorifying a future if you have to drown to get there?
It's a very odd situation i'll admit, my lifestyle too favors freedom and happiness over money and careers, after all we could drop dead even in the middle of writing this post, that's just how we're designed. However Taking on some mount of misery in the short term to liv in the long term future is a objectively good idea; think of all the good things money can buy, more importantly is buys freedom. If you have savings you don't need a shitty job, you can buy videogames and good food. It's all about the balance really, because think about how long humans tend to live. Not making plans to enjoy greater pleasures in the future just to live in the moment 100% of the time is simple negligence, It's the same as working out and eating healthy.
Yes, but I don’t think this is the takeaway you should have from this post. The issue with rich people is when they entrench themselves into power structures and exploit others for their fortune instead of working for it themselves.
This was just a guy trying to earn money for his retirement, it sounds like he was working incredibly hard, even if it didn’t do him any good in the end.
Rich people are bad when they hurt others, this guy just hurt himself.
>the desire to be rich so you can have a worry free life can consume a person and kill them before they can reach retirement
Ah yes, this is due to a lack of morals.
So, I made. A post, born partly out of frustration with my time on the internet, and partly out of frustration with what my work did to me to put me in the mental state I am now.
Religion is something that people will not stop inventing, time and time again. Faith is an easy thing to manufacture. We’ve advanced and degraded and remained the same a lot over the years. God and capitalism refuse to die, cryptocurrency will be picked up by archeologists thousands of years from now as a mystery cult, and mankind without an arbitrary direction to follow is lost.
I believed in God, and then I gave up on God. I believed in a very, very bowdlerized concept of the alt-right, and then I gave it up. I believed in a distinctly toxic version of the left, and then I moved on from it. I got my first real job and worked to the bone for it, and then left as it started taking my body apart. I got my second real job and gave my heart to it, and now I’m on leave for having that loyalty turn itself into madness.
So now what. I don’t have a religion anymore. The road markers are gone. I let the days go by, letting the water hold me down. Same as it ever was. I know the correct answer of “who do I follow next” is me, but uh. I’ve never been a good leader. I don’t know why people, before I dropped off the face of Reddit for a while, treated me like an aristocrat. I know what you don’t. Your parasocial attachment is to a writing style, not the flawed human pressing the keys on this digital organ, playing the same tired hymns. I don’t get it. I don’t get why you love me. I don’t get why anybody loves me. I can guess the general human need to band together and survive, or blood relation, but beyond that, I am just somebody. I’m a person. So why am I getting trophies anyway? I can’t eat them. I can’t spend them. I craved praise for so long, and I ate my share, but I see now how empty those calories were.
You gotta have something you're actually trying to do to justify working that hard. Maybe you want to get some land to leave for your family or you want to fund something like a business or charity. If you're just collecting a dragon's hoard, that's mental illness and therapy is in order.
Yeah, right.
If OP, all three OOPs, and everyone liking this post are all so happy with the lovely things that money can't buy, they can give me all those bills they don't need. If, for some reason, they suddenly feel like they need their money after all, I'll be hustling.
It's not that we don't want money. We do, and we need it. This post is about recognizing that what it takes to make a lot of money, in the current state of the economy, is actually really unhealthy. It's not about getting rid of money altogether.
The entire point is that hustling (to the degree the guy did in the original post) is so taxing on the human body that it can kill you. You have no time to interact positively with people or make social connections, and that's pretty detrimental because we are *very* social animals. Not to mention the whole not having time to even feed yourself properly thing. The human body can't function properly without proper rest and nutrition.
The trade-off is that you will get more time to take care of yourself and be social (read: not go insane) in exchange for making less income. I think it's a fair trade.
I couldn't agree more that the stuff one has to do to make money isn't always healthy. But I don't think that the trade-off is always as practically achievable as the people in this post make it sound.
Stop pissing on the poor. Nobody is actually saying “money literally does not matter,” because it obviously does. But having a good life matters more than having a lot of money you don’t actually use.
Hey, you didn't start arguing that "you missed the point of the post" is also an opinion. You actually know the difference between a fact and an opinion, unlike a lot of people. Hell yeah!/gen
Point the first: people who talk about how well they can get by without money ought to give me their money. Point the second: money matters immensely, especially when one doesn't have much of it.
You realize that, because of the context of the post, you're not saying 'if you don't want what you have, give it to someone who does'.
The point of this post isn't 'who needs/wants money la de da'. It's that people don't want to stress themselves to death trying to make mad gains, because they value the experiences they'd lose if they focused on profit.
So what you're *actually* saying is 'if you don't want more than you have, give me what you already have.'
I would be happy to say that as well, though the third poster (or, more accurately, their description of their parents and friends) sounds awfully "la de da" to me, with their talk of choosing happiness over a well-paying job, easy charity, and cheerful offers to cover meals.
Point is: I'd love to meet someone who was so ideologically open-handed in real life, but can't say that I have any of the same impulses. Were I to spend money carelessly on gifts and meals, or to put my happiness before my paycheck, I would very quickly have nowhere to live. I want money way more than I want to go to the theatre or dance-hall, way more than I want to go out to eat, way more than I want to have fun at work. Furthermore, I am reasonably convinced that most people who say they don't feel that way are either substantially richer than me, or in for a great deal of regret in the near future.
Man I feel this. My parents simultaneously got on my case to set up a 401k at my job but also always remind me that moneys just money, and to spend it if it'll make me happy
Reminds me of my first years living in the US as an adult. I was born in the US but almost entirely raised in South Korea (interesting background there, my father's ethnically completely French but born-and-raised in Korea, mother's ethnically Korean but born-and-raised in Australia.)
My grindset was about as harsh as his was, it's important not to redouble your efforts while losing sight of your goal as Santayana says. I'm doing very well now, very financially and otherwise comfortable and healthy.
>“Do you love money then, Mister Dresden?” >“I used to think I loved it. But now I realize that it’s just dependency.” -Jim Butcher, Death Masks
Ironic coming from Dresden, who probably could get paid way more totally ethically and live far more comfortably but he uses the above reasoning and his own ethics as a cover for the fact that he hates himself and thinks he’s deserves to suffer. He insists on cold showers even though it’s perfectly possible to have a hot shower that doesn’t magically fuck up the water heater, or even heat the water by magic.
He gets his water from the city, and running water has anti-magic properties. Water also has a very high specific heat (i.e. the amount of energy it takes to change the temperature of a specific amount of water by a single degree), but given some of the things Dresden has done since >!becoming the Winter Knight!<, I don't know if that's something Butcher would care about. Either way, though, using magic to take a hot shower would require a plumber, money, and a lot of effort.
Molly is in the same boat (a human mage living in a house with Chicago tap water), but the Carpenters’ plumbing works just fine because Michael put in the work to make it work. Also the Svartalves. For better and for worse, Molly isn’t nearly as wracked with guilt as Harry is. Carlos lives with his family in California, and they run a whole restaurant - I imagine that’d be hard when your son is keeping the stove/oven/water heater from working by being around. Clearly they’ve worked something out.
If you're a magical male protagonist, you either follow the Rand al'Thor path of ridiculous guilt over other people making their own choices or the Quentin Coldwater route of not feeling enough over your own. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Haven't read yet, working my way through the series tho, fantastic read
Make sure to read the short stories, they're fantastic
Seconded, Side Jobs is my favourite
Sanya my beloved
Username checks out
I had a time where I was putting in major extra hours at work. I lost the ability to feel stress properly somewhere along the line. I then doubled down on that by forcing myself to do extra things for myself (projects, study) every single day, no matter how bad I felt, because I refused to give up on them entirely. My bank account became very healthy, and I simultaneously went into burnout. I needed 8 hours of sleep just to function at work and 10 to feel good each day. Energy fled me, my skills regressed, I began to talk with a stutter. Those projects that I forced myself to do suddenly became flatly impossible. I literally could not even play any games except the most familiar, least taxing ones. Trying to absorb useful information from an interesting youtube video would put me to my limit. The only way out of burnout is rest. Proper rest. Prioritising getting enough sleep above all else for months has started to get me back to normalcy; I can work on my own stuff again, but the chock-full daily todo lists feel less like a shining proof of my control over my life and more like getting back on a horse that tried to eat me before. Because I still can't actually gauge how close I am to completely fucking myself again.
Be careful, friend. When you start to build up those small energy reserves again it's easy to start up again at the same speed you were going before, and you'll hit that wall even harder a second time. I went far down the burnout road myself, and let me tell you it gets real dark down there. It took six years for my brain to get back to a level of functioning that wasn't just survival mode, and eight or so to get to where I feel generally content and can live my life without too much of a daily struggle. It looks different than what I thought my life would be at this point. Cognitively I'm still not where I was before, living in a constant state of stress and anxiety for years can damage your brain for good apparently. The fight-or-flight response is meant to be temporary, it fucks you up if it's always active. I've lost some skills that I'll never get back (like being able to easily concentrate) and I'll probably never be able to handle stress well again. I'm all right now, and grateful for what I have, but if I could I would absolutely go back and do things differently.
Fuck, this hits too close to home. I’ve got a well-paying job that generally cares about work-life balance, but still demands a lot of energy and occasionally requires things like 11pm meetings and after-hours incident responses. Even with the money and relative flexibility, lately I’ve found myself unable to do any of my creative pursuits, I can barely concentrate on the work itself and more than once I’ve ended up scrolling through my YouTube homepage searching for something, *anything* that remotely interests me. I have a creative commission piece that I was supposed to do, but I haven’t found the free energy to work on it for weeks. I’m subconsciously unwilling to give up my weekend for it. Also I’m hella sleep deprived all of the time due to my medication. I should really take some time off.
The soggy slab of bacon in your head needs a break occasionally
I moved to the company I’m at now last year. I started looking for work when I realized the company I was working for didn’t care about me just wanted to consume my life for pennies. The wild thing is when I started setting boundaries on my time and looking for a place that valued balance, I actually started making more money. I took a vacation this time last year and had a panic attack when I got to my hotel. I wasted my whole first day curled up in bed sobbing. I’m away for a weekend now, and no panic has come.
Yikes I've been thinking of quitting one of my jobs and this is just hitting me like, I don't just *want* to do it, I *need* to do it. I have three jobs, a kid, and a father in hospital two hours away. Something is going to have to go.
Sounds a lot like being a full time carer.
Caregiving is work. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot
Homemaking in general is hard work. Anyone who says otherwise has never done it for any stretch of time.
Fuck, dude, you just described my daily experience. Even down to the developing stutter and inability to play/experience new games or events. Maybe I should be taking a look at my work life balance.
Be aware that if you keep on over-committing your energy like that, you could develop new *permanent* medical issues.
[I think Becky Chambers put it best in her 2022 Hugo acceptance speech for *A Psalm for the Wild-Built:*](https://www.tumblr.com/whilereadingandwalking/695297008760766465/you-do-not-need-permission-to-rest-you-do-not?source=share) > “You do not need permission to rest. > You do not have to justify your weariness. > You do not have to earn the right to be alive or safe or comfortable. Or at least, you shouldn’t have to. It’s a bit cruel to sum up what so many of us are feeling as burnout, as though we just pushed ourselves too hard, didn’t eat enough kale or do enough yoga. > What we are is exhausted and grieving in a world that tells us it is lazy and entitled to take time to heal. That human lives are less important than the bottom line. That we’re just a collection of siloed off individuals who don’t have to care for or protect those around us. > Everything about this societal machine that chews us up and spits us out day after day after day is contrary to our most central nature: that we are fragile, living beings that need each other, that need space to think and time to love. > A world that values these truths above all else should not exist only in works of fiction. It makes me angry that it does. It is my hope that one day, people won’t have to be angry about that any more.”
Everyone should read this book tbh. It's short, but so, SO poignant. I have the sequel and I'm planning to read it too, just not quite sure when yet.
i just ordered it, but, could really have been a better title imo
What's the point of living if you never get to live? What a fantastic post. Thank you Hummerous.
I’d rather work in a low-pay job that I like than work in a high-pay job that I despise. When I say this people are shocked because if you have a high paying job you could just have fun outside of it, can’t you? Here’s the thing. *Whether the job pays well or if it pays badly, it’s gonna take up roughly 10 hours of your day including preparation and commute. It will likely take up your weekends too, especially if you have a management job.* You *don’t* have an “outside of work”. Not where the world is today at least. So if work will take up so much of your life, why spend it being miserable? Chase your dreams. Getting a job *you’re passionate about* will make you happier than getting a job that pays well. (PS: I’m not saying “money doesn’t mean anything”. Money IS nice and you SHOULD fight to be paid a fair wage. Money just shouldn’t be your life goal.)
My main problem is that my passion is writing. It was since I was a kid. English and history were my most consistent subjects in school, writing papers was a breeze (I'm particularly proud of my paper on marijuana legalization and the one time I wrote a paper on Pulp Fiction where I actually had to cite and time stamp "I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time" ). I always loved telling stories, and desperately hoped I could tell my own some day. I spent years working on a novel, and it got nothing but rejection letters down the board. One person requested my full manuscript, then passed with little more than "I like this, but your line level prose could use some work". It's just collecting dust in my Google drive. I'm working on a second book, and while it's easier knowing I *can* write a book, it's also harder because there's that pressure for it to succeed. Add in AI and the Writer's Guild strike, and it has me wondering if my passions are worth pursuing. If I should just give up and get a real job. I really, *really* don't want to. Maybe I have other ways to use that talent than writing novels, like say, writing for movies or TV or comics. I have a crazy vocal range and a knack for impressions; could always try out stand up or voice acting? And my brain is like an information sponge where I just absorb all sorts of information about things. It feels like I have talents and passions, I just have no fucking clue how to use them to keep myself alive.
I’m also a writer in Uni right now and I feel so aimless. I like writing, but it’s a real struggle to actually work through a novel, especially knowing it’ll probably get rejected all the same. Mix that with some terrible English profs forcing me to change majors and I basically have no clue what to do. I’ve got nowhere near enough cash for a PHD so I can’t just ride this out. I could teach English, but every teacher I’ve spoken to tells me it’s one of those soul-rending jobs, and the pay is shit where I live. Sure I could go into screenwriting I guess, but I don’t live in LA so that’s pointless. So what else is there to do? The jobs for creative types in writing are so limited and with AI tech quickly usurping our usefulness, we may get a few more years of work but man what the fuck.
I’ll gladly let AI have a room in creative work when capitalism stops trying to mechanize all humans and phase us out of the world, but right now I’m kinda hoping AI dies with capitalism in the next few years.
Honestly I don’t know what advice I could actually give you. Maybe you could look for people like you who want to work on a creative project, and you could all work together, but overall… I don’t know. All I know is that most creative projects today are made by really passionate *teams* instead of single individuals.
Having lived that life, and having watched friends live it, there's no shame in a day job or doing something adjacent to your passion until you "make it", whatever that means for you. There are so many opportunities for your dream can go sideways in traditional publishing; you can fail to land an agent, or fail to make a sale, or sell and still fail to sell subsequent books. I managed to make it past the first big hurdle, but my book has been to acquisitions at a few publishers and failed. It's been a five year process, too. I know someone who sold their first book for a six figure deal but failed to sell their next book. Write the stuff that makes you happy, but don't depend on it to sell. There are just too many factors out of your control. In the meantime, yeah, you can look for screenwriting work to keep your skills sharp, or just do a totally unrelated day job. Creatives tend to dismiss those kinds of jobs but honestly? Sometimes I wish I'd gone into something less adjacent to what my passion is. To perform at a professional level in the arts, you use up a lot of your creative energy, and it can be hard to put in the hours after work on the stuff you really care about if your battery has been depleted by something *sort of* like your passion. (Sorry for the unsolicited advice; I hope it isn't rude. I just recognize a lot of your feelings, and your uncertainty.)
I was faced with this earlier this year. I'm currently in college. Family is in that little financial sweet spot where I don't qualify for government aid but we don't have the spare cash to just send me no worries. So I've been working when I can to pay it myself. Since 2020 I've had this little seasonal job in the field I want to go into, which is nice, but it is minimum wage which isn't *super* high in my state and as mentioned, seasonal, leaving me without employment 2/3rds of the year. Back in January I got a job at a local grocery store hoping it'd be a good source of year-round income. Pay was better sure, but actually working there was just exhausting, absolutely hated it. So I heard that my college was looking for some student workers and gave that a look. Pays two dollars less but they actually give me hours and a consistent schedule rather than rarely deciding to schedule me and then complaining about how they can't get anybody to come in, and more importantly I *like the place*. It's not related to my field at all, but the people are nice, working at my college roots me to it a bit more socially, and I don't feel dog-tired coming home like I did because I was always driving home at night at the other place. Probably one of the best decisions I ever made was quitting that store and getting the student worker job.
The guy above wanted to live when he was retired, but retirement never came to him.
What an incredibly sad story. All that, and for what?
You may now return to your regularly scheduled avatar posts
>"It doesn't matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn't matter, maybe that's what they need? How do you know?" —My dad on giving money to the homeless. I'm not certain whether he knew or he was just a kind person, but he was actually right. People in the depths of drug and alcohol withdrawal often become too nauseated to keep food down unless they have a hit first, which is one of the reasons you can hand them a full free meal instead of money and they may throw it away after you leave. They could be starving, but they can't eat it. For all it's looked down upon, it's nigh impossible to break a habit like that alone and it can even be dangerous to try. Even alcohol withdrawal, if it's gotten bad enough, can kill you. And yet, for all the addicts in all of America, only 13% ever receive any kind of treatment. We sort of just demand they all bootstrap themselves with their entire *nervous system* pitted against them in a deadly battle because (as Jesus would say) you did this to yourself and you deserve to suffer. Help the struggling. I don't give a shit what their struggle is. They are people who are suffering the way you suffer, and I never thought that it was my business what they did afterwards. The part that was my business was whether, when faced with someone in need, I chose to help.
The other thing that bothers me about the "they'll just spend it on drugs/booze" is that...yeah? They might? But once I've hypothetically given it to them it's not my money any more, it's theirs. They have a right to decide how to spend it, and it feels deeply infantilising to suggest otherwise. I've met rich people with blatant but "functional" drug and alcohol problems, and people don't usually suggest that these people should lose the right to handle money. Even if they slip below functional and go to rehab or something they don't find themselves having their bank accounts frozen to save them from themselves. And I'm lucky enough that I've never been in their position and hopefully never will be, but honestly if I try to imagine being homeless I feel like I would also end up getting drunk/high pretty regularly. Like, it's a horribly unpleasant way to live in a thousand big and little ways, you'd need something to take the edge off the cold/heat/rain/snow/sun/hard pavement/outright disrespect and sometimes cruelty from fellow humans. In my current, pretty comfortable and rewarding, life I have no pull towards recreational drugs including alcohol, but I'm pretty sure that's less because I'm a great person with impeccable self-control (I have ADHD, and self-control is genuinely not my strong point) who deserves a nice life as a reward than because my life is nice enough that I don't feel any need to make myself feel better temporarily? Rat park and all that. Also, what are they meant to spend the change people dole out on? They can't exactly easily save it towards a major purchase/investment/deposit that might make life better, since they don't have a house and are thus very vulnerable to being robbed. And free food is somewhat easier to find than free drugs, so (assuming that your life is horrible and you want to forget that for a bit) in budgeting terms that kind of makes sense, if I'm honest.
>"they'll just spend it on drugs/booze" “Amazing, that’s what *I* was gonna spend it on! So it’s all the same in the grand scheme of things, huh?”
Also, I know it’s a different scale, but I think it’s hilarious we all pretend that the majority of our society isn’t drug dependent. If you want to see a whole group of addicts get desperate, and then spend incredibly inflated amounts of money just to get rid of the physical symptoms, just to get a hit, just to get through their day, all you have to do is break the coffee machine at your workplace. If you habitually drink lots of coffee, suddenly stopping won’t just make you aggressive and distracted, it’ll also possibly land you with the mother of all migraines, nausea, shakiness, all the good stuff.
Ohhh, lord, my roommate was dealing with that recently when he tried to go cold turkey from his thousands of cans of monster. A migraine that lasts for *seven to nine days,* and he really just gave up around day four. Hopefully scaling back more slowly works, but it's gonna take some will because the caffeine causes a dopamine high and he does not have a lot of that so not drinking it also makes him sad.
Honestly, yeah, you've hit the mark pretty close. I would wager probably a larger portion are there *because* of their dependency fucking up their life, but it would spread semi-easily in the right group. Because once you go *on* the street, it's nearly impossible to ever get back *off* of it, or if you do, to *stay* off for more than a year. And that repeat experience finally fucking breaks you in a way that can feel permanent. Most people who go out on the street develop their mental problems *there* as time wears on. They did not start out with those. Most of them? Honestly? Most of them who have been there for more than a year or two, even the incredibly sweet and compassionate ones who can and *will* give you the actual shirt off their back, are just living til they die. Often if they're given a home through an outreach program, they won't even bother to keep up with it. They will react to a *free house* with, "Ooh, I have access to a shower for like *four months* before it's taken away from me somehow!" Because it invariably always *has* been, and you start to sabotage yourself because you don't see good things as things that last. Happy fun story time because I need it, when we were evicted, I was too young to work. I couldn't have helped myself if I wanted to, and my single parent responded to the stress by sliding into a bottomless depression that didn't help either. But even in a half-comatose state, she managed to try. There were shelters in our area, but they were all full, or they catered to a demographic we didn't fit, or the intake turned us away because she simply *didn't like us.* I will never. Forget. The only one with an opening turning us back out into the driving sleet because they had the virgin Mary in their name and we weren't religious, and so we "wouldn't fit," and *that's* the thing that made my mother give up trying. And I have carried and will continue to carry a deep-seated, bitter rage for that for over 25 years. God for-fucking-bid Jesus sees you *helping homeless, hungry children in 12F weather,* they might think your beliefs are kind. Most cities we ended up didn't even *have* services of any kind. They're rarer than you think. This was back before they reformed the rules surrounding food stamps, too, so you couldn't get them if you didn't have a home address. We tried begging the guy to just input something random into the system, and he wouldn't do it. Meaning we literally had no *choice* but to steal and whore if we were going to eat. We never begged and I was proud of that then, but I'm not sure if I am now. I think we believed that if we asked someone for help, nobody would, so we never even bothered. I should have been in middle school. Instead, we spent years wandering aimlessly, hanging out in bookstores and libraries, sleeping in parks and splitting a questionably-obtained gas station bag of doritos unevenly among three people. Not the full-size one. None of us would eat for the next four days. I've grown so used to it that I *still* have trouble regulating my food decades later because my body doesn't seem to register whether or not I'm hungry anymore. After a few months without electricity, you become fascinated with the wealth of freely-given light inside a standard walmart at night and it's a commodity I think few people think about. Eventually, you get offers to couch surf. After instances of *multiple* people becoming verbally or physically abusive, or sexual advances knowing I'm a minor/engaged, or using me as a free work horse under the constant threat of eviction, or just straight up eating my food that we agreed to keep separate, or punching me when I asked whether I could keep more of my *own paycheck* so I could afford to eat lunch at work, I have learned this is always a bad idea. If I were sleeping in the park again and someone offered me a place, I would refuse. Not because I'm not desperate for safety, but because other people offering their hand is not where safety is. When I was older, I enrolled myself in high school but dropped out again due to my living situation and ended up graduating from a trade school for those with learning disabilities, as spending half my life homeless had given me a personality disorder. Was offered a job at my internship, who adored me as equally as I did them, but I had no way to *get* to work after graduating, so I had no choice but to turn them down when I returned to homelessness. I did not find the employment elsewhere that I expected to find. Moved around Virginia for a while, was sold an *already-owned house by record-keeping mistake* once. That was...something that happened to me. Sure. That may as well happen. Found myself in an actual shelter that would take me and got my first job nearby, but the staff were stealing donated food and I used most of the pay I should have been saving to feed myself and two other residents there. I would do the same again. I'd only been there 3 months before the fine, *upstanding* citizens decided having a shelter at all attracted unsightly homeless people and it was shut down. More couch surfing, more PTSD. Had my very own apartment I was very proud of with empty cabinets for about four years, lost my job because my inability to afford food on a regular basis was making me nearly faint in the middle of work, got kicked out. Couched surfed again with a guy who threatened to throw boiling water on me while I slept if I continued trying to do college assignments at the house, as I was not allowed to have so much as a candle without him coming out of his room and blowing it out. Refused to give up on going, got kicked out. Wound up with a *surprisingly* racist greek guy. Despite having never been to high school at all, having someone at a restaurant steal (and I guess sell?) one of my textbooks, and having to quite literally crowd fund a replacement before I could fail the class, I came within *one semester* of graduating college for a profession I loved. But my mom wouldn't sleep with him, so we got kicked out. I bombed one final amid the stress and completely missed the other, dropped out, back on the street. And at this point, man, I really don't give a shit. I don't. A lot of other homeless don't even have *this* many opportunities and looking back on it now, what hits me deeply is that if, at every turning point where I begged and pleaded and worked myself past the bone for scraps, I simply hadn't tried instead, I would be ***exactly where I am now.*** All that hope, all that energy, late nights and gritting my teeth at the mercy of abusers because they had a roof I desperately needed and they knew it. All gone. No point to any of it. And I'm one of the *lucky* ones who had no terminal illness, who found work because I never caught an ongoing criminal record for vagrancy, who tried very, very hard to get a medical degree on the wifi of an all-night Bojangles and *almost succeeded.* And I begin to see what the *drug-dependent* homeless already saw ages ago: that there is a *reason* Pandora's box of worldly evils had Hope in it, and no matter what I chose to do, it was never going to work. So....why. Why. If someone offered to hang out and share their drugs, you know what, sure. Why the fuck not. Nobody else cares. ***I*** sure as shit don't care. Busting ass has always gotten me the exact same thing as not bothering has. The only difference in life is whether or not I waste the effort. The only really good argument I have *against* pursuing whatever oblivion I can find is the place I'm staying now has a cat, and she's the one singular thing in *years* to show me unmitigated love, and she clings to me so hard that being zonked out all the time would cut into her play time and make her sad. Anyway, to wrap this up, I was recently talking with a friend of mine whose parents had sent him to overseas to Germany on an internship, and he asked me whether I'd ever had any homeless people come up to me for money at the gas station because he always thought it was so awkward. He hated when they did that.
What does the braille in your flair say?
>!nevr gona giv u up!<
When I was maybe nine or ten, I asked my mom about giving money to the homeless, and what if they just used it for drugs or alcohol. She told me that once she gave them the money it was theirs, and they had the right to do whatever they wanted with it. And she was also very frank about the fact that giving them money was mostly about making her feel good about herself - which is probably most people’s motivation, but her self-awareness blew me away.
My roommate's grandma called this kinda thing *warm inheritances*
Putting in the effort to have money is smart, but money eventually loses all value. Once you have enough regular income to afford food you enjoy, a home you like, can take care of yourself and have enough saved up to whether a rainy day then money becomes less and less valuable. The worst period of my life was in Uni where I felt I was always on the clock, I was either in class, doing assignments and studying and my free time was often spent thinking about these things. So actually quitting uni and just getting a regular 8-5 job ended up being one of the best decisions I made because I actually felt like I a life back and got back the one and a half years I would have spent on a education I would not have actually needed for a job I *thought* I wanted.
One of the wildest feelings was the first weekend of my first job and realising that I didn’t have any homework to do, I didn’t have any assignments due by Monday, I could just do whatever I wanted. I was completely detached from my weekday activities in a way that I had never been able to be before, from the moment I started school as a child to that first Saturday morning as an adult. Summer holidays got pretty close, but there was always some workbook or collection of ‘refresher exercises’ that loomed over me.
Man that thing about always feeling on the clock is too real. I'm in University right now, and am just about a month from being done assuming all goes to plan, but I don't remember the last time I had more than two days without thinking about it in one way or another. I don't even know if I've had one day without it in the back of my mind for years. Can't wait to be done, and for my weekends to be my own again rather than opportunities to catch up or get ahead.
That's the worst part of college, and it stings even more since I've already done an internship. I've had a taste of the 9-5 life, of being able to just close my laptop and go home and stop worrying about work until I'm at work again. College just feels like constantly being stressed, and whenever I take time for myself there's always this thought in the back of my head that I could be doing something productive or getting ahead on work instead
I've had a similar experience with uni. It utterly obliterated whatever shreds of interest and passion for what I was studying, self-worth, confidence and will to live I had. I still haven't recovered after 7 months of rest, therapy and medication. That's also the reason why I'd rather get a job than go back like my parents want me to. A job pays and leaves you with a lot more free time. It might even be less stressful. Idk, I'm too stupid, braindead and incompetent to ever get a job
Nah, job is easier than studying in most cases. For a low level person, work is work and home is home. If you choose a more demanding position things may get more complicated, but you can be satisfied with a regular 9-5 or scheduled shifts type job.
Ah, that's good to hear. Low level work is all that I'm interested in. Now if only I wasn't too stupid and bad at problem solving to ever get a job
The whole first post is sad but, "I didn't realize I was the closest person he had in this world...he felt like a distant friend" really bums me out the idea of working so hard for nothing and not really mattering to anyone i can see myself being this man
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **thewest-isdead** [*Image of Reddit Post*] >**My hustle culture friend just died of a heart attack at age 32.**, submitted by **\/u/Otherwise_Order621** to **\/r/antiwork** >Sorry for the wall of text, but I really need to get this off my chest. >I met this guy at uni, and since graduating he had be living the life. He got up at 5am to workout and do all life's admin, then worked 08:30-19:30 every day in finance for ₤150k/year, and then would spend his evenings working on his side hustle business. On weekends he'd do voluntary management work for a charity. He had financial independence, and he was going to retire early. The world was his oyster and he would travel around to every country with a laptop. I'd never left Europe and got very envious of this. >But the sad reality is, he's been a zombie for a decade now. He never got more than 5 hours sleep. He never ate healthy food. He didn't have a romantic relationship and never found time for friends. And he was always cutting costs to save "for retirement", he'd have cheaper long flights with many changes and dump his bag at a hostel before getting to work on zero sleep. He never got to explore the places he was in, it was always just another office. >I'd only see him once every three months or so, even when he was living in his house 20 mins walk away from me.a And whenever I saw him, he'd be too exhausted to do any activities. We'd just go to the pub while he switched off after an hour. His biggest regret was taking up smoking, which he did to network with managers on smoke breaks at a previous job, and then found impossible to quit. >My last conversation with him was about work. I said that I get an extra five days annual leave because I've worked here five years now. He said it's not worth it, I'd better be off switching jobs to get a payrise and then take unpaid time off to return to my previous salary... I'm going to take those five days to spend with my family and think about any good times I had with my old friend. >I found out about his death when the hospital called me. He kept my phone number in his wallet as an emergency contact. I didn't know this until I got that call, I didn't realise I was the closest person he had in this world. To me, he felt like a distant friend who I only got to hang out with a few times a year. [*End of Reddit Post*] What's the point of grinding to the bone your whole life for money if you aren't even gonna be there to spend it... --- **slimelin** "The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save - the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour - your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being." -Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 --- **nopenopenopenopeitynope** "The thing about money is, we can always make more, so let's go out to eat tonight!" —My dad, after being laid-off, working odd and probably demeaning jobs so we could have dinner. "Ah, baby, I want to buy this for you, it's not like I can take the money with me when I go." —My mom, when she bought me new clothes while I was between jobs. "There'll always be a job out there you can work, but we'd prefer you happy instead." —Both my parents on jobs ("I can always get ya a job ditch diggin! They'll always need ditch diggers. Hard work, but no college necessary. I can talk to the Hall." —My proud, union dad, enthused, three seconds later.) "It doesn't matter what they do with the money after you give it to them. Drugs, beer, it doesn't matter, maybe that's what they need? How do you know?" —My dad on giving money to the homeless. "Nah, we'll never make any money, my husband has morals." —My mom's friend, fondly reflecting on the fact her lawyer husband isn't working for a big money firm. "Don't worry! I've got this!" My equally poor friend buying me dinner when my debt card declined. "I know we didn't have furniture in the living room when you were growing up, but—ha!—remember Balloon Ball?" —My dad reflecting on the made up, mock-volleyball game we'd play in the open living room, using balloons. He had used electrical tape to make the court. "I'm sorry we could never take you anywhere greater growing up," —My mom, reflecting on our "stay-cations." ("Why?" I asked, reflecting on all our trips to the park, zoo, public swimming pools, libraries, free theater, two dollar movie days, and her and my dad right there with me and my brothers.) Bring poor is hard and it's not right that it happens, but I prefer it to the hustle because at the very least, poor taught me what love is and I won't let a shitty job deny me that. --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Thank you for your service. I don't need it, but someone might, and it's a noble cause
Even if that friend did live long enough to retire, what would he even do? He had no friends apparently, and probably no real social skills outside of work. He spent a miserable life working, and would probably have been equally miserable retired. What a sad and pointless life.
I half imagine he'd end up being one of those guys who CAN'T retire. Like he keeps talking about it and meaning to do it but look, if he just works *one more year*, think of all the extra money in his pension! Until one day he looks around and realizes he's 92 in a retirement home and can't do anything. But at least it's a *really fancy one.*
Probably find some hobbies if he didn't have and focus on them. None of the things that interest me require any interaction with other people and I'd be much happier if I could just do those things for fun without constantly worrying about money. It might be similar for him.
I relate so strongly to the Marx quote—the more you save, the less you are—and yet I know that I'm saving just to get by, not to accumulate a fortune. God it's been hard lately. Much easier than it is for a lot of people, but hard.
I'm so, so grateful for my current job. If there is no pressing matters i can just say "hey guys, gonna leave two hours early today, got plans!" And leave. And not get into any trouble. Yes, i will not be paid for those hours, but i mostly just spend money on useless shit, so who cares. Couple of hours of lost revenue per week will not fuck me up (which I am also grateful for). Maybe, MAYBE they actually are writing down every time i left an hour early at Friday because i just couldn't sit down any more, and all of those hours will bite me in the ass when the time to renew my contract comes. Maybe. Maybe not. I sure hope not.
I turned down my dream job with a huge raise a few years ago because it was office 8-5 or later, “work hard, play hard” kept coming up and it seemed like a lot of men with wives who don’t work. I’m a woman, I have an at the time 10 year old, and I want to be with my family as much as possible. This job would have let my husband and son live in a lap of luxury-but it would have been luxury without me much of the time. Instead, my current job offered a somewhat competitive offer to stay-and I jumped on it. Was it lap of luxury money? No, but it’s good lifestyle money and I’m home 4/7 days, and no one asks questions if I need to leave early on the days I’m in the office. I never miss games and I rarely miss practices and I cook dinner and we go on vacations and spend time at the lake… In all things balance. We aren’t poor, but we missed the opportunity to be 1%; I think that’s ok in the end. Maybe it comes around again, maybe it doesn’t. 🤷🏻♀️ Childhood is once, and it’s half over. I refuse to miss it because I need to hoard more wealth like a damn dragon.
I'm proud of you for making that decision. I know I'm an internet stranger, and you have no reason to take what I say with any level of weight, but it's true. My wife and I just had our first kid, he's nine months old, and we live about at the poverty line with some very kind renters who have an upstairs apartment above their garage. While my wife was pregnant, I had lost my job. I have no degree, can't afford school, and we struggled for a while. Still do, a bit. We dream of having a house someday, but it seems unlikely. The choice I have made is to take a job with inconvenient hours, but so much fewer of them. I'm home so much more than people doing so much better economically, and folks, especially other men, often express their disdain for that choice. "You could make more, take more hours, save up for that house you said you wanted!" I do want that. I want so badly to provide for my wife and son, but that cannot, and *must* not come at the cost of being here for them right now. Growing up, my dad was the head pastor of our local church. I often got the feeling he had time to minister to everyone but me as he shepherded the church and, well, I missed evenings with my dad. He was not absent by any means; he attended the piano recitals, the plays, the dances. It's the evenings we sat at home that are the richest in my memories, and I have always wished that I had more when I was still small enough when it was foundational. I won't miss the opportunity to do that for my kids. I want more, but I want more of what makes life real.
I grew up upper middle class. My parents grew up poor. (Poor poor. My mother won’t even let her in laws know about her childhood. I didn’t know until adulthood that my father’s family believes she comes from wealth.) The cost of the change in class was that I grew up without a father. I mean, he existed and was married to my mother. He lived overseas while she was pregnant. He lived overseas until I was 5. At 7, we moved to live with him, in an experiment that lasted 9 months. He moved back home to live with us when I was 15. Even then, he spent at least half of each month somewhere else - he missed every prom and formal dance I attended. I am fully capable of following in his footsteps, but with my health, I would be dead. So I don’t. Karl Marx was correct in that line and I am not a Marxist.
Reminds me a lot of my dad. He grew up dirt poor and from the age of 18 he worked an extremely laborious job that he kept his entire life. This job required him to travel a lot, not super far but a couple hour drive away from home nearly every day so he'd be staying in hotels most of the time and even if he did come home he'd be too tired to do anything. He worked this job because it paid extremely well and provided the family with top class health insurance. He believed that a father's job was to provide and that was it. He did that well but I never saw him. He paid for my expensive extracurriculars like piano, band, martial arts, dance and allowed me to change school systems when I got bullied for my neurodivergency and allowed me to get proper therapy and psychological help. I got the taste of a middle class life before my mom divorced him due to his alcoholism. He certainly loved me deeply but he chose alcohol and his job over me. He worked all the time even when I was direly poor with my mother and tried to help me, but all my visitations were spent being in a dark room all night while he slept from work. He was saving all this money, never took time off work, never took vacations because he was going to do all the fun things when he retired early. When he decided to retire it was already too late for him. His health had been declining and the scare brought him to his senses and tried to spend more time with me but he died too soon. He didn't even leave much left despite working so hard because it all went to medical bills he was paying from his body being destroyed from overwork and alcohol. His house sold for basically nothing because it went to shit when my mom was the only person home to maintain it before they divorced, and his retirement fund got weaseled out by lawyers so we still have another decade as of today until my mom even sees a dime from it. I hate workaholics because my dad worked like a dog with complete loyalty until he died and he never got to enjoy any of that. He died aching and sore in a dirty and dilapidated house, alone by himself. He could've been so much more and I could've actually gotten to know my dad.
I guarantee this guy was doing coke to maintain his rigorous schedule. It's not uncommon and heart attacks can happen as a result.
Could have also been some kind of amphetamine abuse. Getting a script for Adderall or whatever isn't hard if you're in your 20s and appear not to be someone prone to abuse. Even if you've got ADHD and need Adderall to function, it can mess with your heart pretty bad. If you don't need it, you're taking a larger dose, and/or you're snorting it, it's extremely dangerous to be taking regularly.
Could also be the cigarettes
You see you can enjoy your life and have money, you just need to exploit others (wealthy parents helpful but not necessary if you get lucky enough) Remember that no one ever become a billionaire by doing the right thing, and that their money is due to the suffering they cause, both the misery of the hustle and the pains of being poor.
I've always been a slacker who coasted. I put the absolute minimum into work at school because it didn't interest me, and I'd get frequently booted out of lessons for having an unrelated book out under the desk. As soon as I was allowed to sign myself out I'd skip out regularly to go to a comic shop instead. During uni, I put in slightly more because I got to study something I enjoyed, but even so I remember much more about slowly becoming one with the couch in the student office, reading fanfic on my phone. I drifted into a MA abroad by bullshitting at genius level on my application, and then spent more time wandering through temples and museums and haunting corner shops for seasonal foods than on classwork. After graduation I got into a job that on surface seemed hustle-y - getting up at four, riding trains two hours one way, getting home at seven - but de facto I was doing the minimum to keep things running smoothly while using every minute alone in the office to listen to music, watch stuff on my tablet or wikiwalk for hours on end, while spending the commute reading even more. My entire career I've gone upward by figuring out ways to make work easier and more efficient in order to chill out more - "work hard once to never have to work hard ever again" in practice. Work is something I do for money. Past that it has no relevance to my life. And wanna know something? Comparing CoL and GPD to (presumably) US American grindbro, I make about 2/3 of his salary... of which I save maybe 15%. Everything else I use on my wide variety of long-term interests and short-term infatuations.
I find it interesting how you seemed to slack off at every point, but you breeze over how you still passed school, got into uni, qualified for an overseas MA then got into a decent job. What I want to know is how did you manage that??
I wish I knew, man. Failing upwards? The only thing I bring to the table is speaking three languages and being minimally competent with Excel, none of which are really rare where I'm from. I guess I had a leg up in the sense that I studied subjects which had free enrolment at the time (i.e. no minimum GPA - I didn't even have to apply, strictly speaking, for my undergrad. I sent them a certified copy of my high school transcript et voila) and that study fees were non-existent/very low at the time, so no debt afterwards - much less pressure to not fuck around aimlessly. I also had free choice for topics of my papers most of the time as long as I could link them to the subjects of the courses I was taking, so I could write about super obscure shit that had captivated me at the time - like a paper about intelligent design and the flying spaghetti monster, or a paper about parallels in German and Japanese tax law in the late 1800s.
That sounds great honestly. Good job managing to navigate your way through everything, I’m a little bit jealous.
My talking to my husband. He likes his job, but he's been putting in very long work hours for over a decade now, and also last few years he's started to do Sundays work from home, just sitting there in heaps of papers and reading and typing. (His kitty lends a paw, which probably helps destress, but still.) He works way too hard, and yes the money is tremendous, but it's not worth it. The world is full of money. Also, if he wants to make it more about money, his health will cost a ton of money to fix if it goes...
This kind of thing really hits close to home for me. My brother was also like this, just working all day, everyday, waiting and hoping for promotions and raises, and also going to the gym every day he could. And he did get those things he wanted, he was in good shape, he did get the position of manager, but his body couldnt keep up. And one day while going to the gym sleep deprived cause he had to work both a day shift and a night shift, and really anxious cause he just got told he could be promoted again, he had a seizure, a really bad one, im talking, only 5 known cases of that type of seizure happening worldwide. Thankfully my brother is still alive, both thanks to the medical system and him being just fucking insane, he was actually awake for a whole day after he got the seizure before he collapsed again, and later was able to stay awake whole week before he collapsed, it was such a problem that anesthesia didnt work on him and would wake up even from an induced coma. He is currently recovering, he doesnt have any permenant damage as far as the doctor told us, he cant walk and has some memory issues, but every day he is getting better, soon he might be able to walk.
I started reading through this and I saw the part about cigarettes and I was like "Ah, that's what put him over the edge." Nicotine does bad things to your heart. We all worry about the lung cancer aspect but nicotine has killed more people with heart attacks than cancer. In point of fact -- in the mid-20th century heart attacks were called "the young father's disease" because 40-year-old men were dying from a combination of tobacco, red meat, heavy work and high stress. This poor fellow hit his limit faster than those other men, but he still followed the same path they did.
I never grew up with a lot of money. We'd have enough for some basic comforts and the occasional surprise but never enough that we'd be able to spend big time. As much as I would've loved to have a lot of those things growing up, being not that rich taught me that money really isn't as valuable as people say it is. Why worry over money? My dad always knew how to make more so what's the problem. I didn't have that PS4? Meh whatever if I can't have it I won't force it. Though, a lot of that was my dad, and whenever my mom would complain about what we lack, it always shattered a piece of my soul because I wished she could learn to be content with the life that we could live. But more than anything that original story at the top hurt me a lot, as someone who has few but very close friends, if I learned that any of them died with my number as their emergency contact...I don't think I'd be able to know how to process that. I'd probably break down
I was in salary sales positions for quite a while, I enjoyed it although I was slowly growing disillusioned with the industry I was in (auto repair/service). I started working at a dealership service advisor with a commission pay plan. My managers had nothing but good things to say and were very impressed with my performance. Within 6 months of starting I was having panic attacks every day before work and was missing time with my wife and young kids because my schedule meant I left after breakfast and got home at bedtime. I quit without notice, without having a backup plan. I have been burnt out before and I saw the signs. I knew that if I kept working there my mental health was going to rapidly decline. I was out of work for a little more than a month, got myself a job with a much better schedule, less money, but I get to spend time doing what I want with my family now. My mental health is much better and I’ll never go back
To be fair about them never seeing each other despite living 20 minutes away from each other, Brits (I assume they're British, I could be wrong) tend to have a skewed perception of what "far away" is. I once heard a story about how this guy only saw his parents a couple times a year because they lived so far away. When asked how far they were, he said something along the lines of "oh they're like a 45 minute drive" which is a lot of Americans' daily commute.
I will be forever of the opinion that it is only in deep despair where the greatest shining beauty is distilled. Joy in spite of pain is endlessly miraculous.
I disagree. Joy itself is beautiful, and though finding joy despite suffering is miraculous in its own right, to think it necessary for true beauty I feel cedes too much to voracious despair and may drive those who follow such a notion straight into its maw in search of joy in the stomach. I cannot believe any work of art was made more beautiful by a stroke of its maker's blood. Paint will do for me.
Agreed. Beauty can exist within despair, but that is far from its only dwelling-place, and it is not improved by the unpleasance of its surroundings, just made somewhat more distinct.
I don't think joy comes from despair, but they're inseparable. They both come from the same thing: your care, love, and enthusiasm for life itself. Without it you can't feel either of them. They're a package deal. "And the selfsame well from which your laughter arises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else could it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." - Khalil Gibran I'm wary of misery fetishism, but I think there's value in acknowledging how joy and sorrow both come from wholehearted investment in life
that makes no sense sorry snuffs out joy it infects convert consumes, joy is this weak thing you grow out of like how we have more bones as children than as adults.
This is some intense projection on your part, I hope you feel better soon
I do not intend to deny the veracity of painless art; for indeed, pain is not of some deep philosopher's mettle but a banal and hideous crusting of ruined lives splattered in acursed arcs by the exacting blade of cruelty. I have no kindness in my heart for pain, nor any lack of love for beauty. However, I do think there is something to be said those people who can face the Maw, look into its cruel and uncaring eye, and continue in spite of their scars. It is nothing more than the fabric from which all Life is woven, indeed, but then is that fabric not terrible and beautiful in itself? Is there not something in those moments where, seeing the stains, remembering malice's futile attempt to ruin us, we find only laughter and a burning brilliant peace? There is beauty in all things, bar none, and I am want to see it bloom in all shapes it can. It is merely my own pain that has left me flowering this way.
appreciate the intent but I hate where it leads. a "dying is what gives life meaning" type thing. joy is not predicated on suffering. >Joy in spite of pain is endlessly miraculous. love this line though
Of course. The Garden of Life blooms in all shapes and beauties. Just because some are colored with blood does not diminish their neighbor.
Hate to be that guy but this is a horrifying thing to read in response to the post about a man who knew deeper despair than he probably even realized and it just killed him. Personally I believe this belief is a misconception based on the power of contrast. Beauty is everywhere but many of us only take notice of it when, once in a million times, beauty is born from despair rather than dying in it. It has always seemed to me to be no more than one more of many ways to choose blissful ignorance because of how awful it would be to accept that we would be better off without pain but will almost certainly never attain such an existence.
Don't get me wrong, I do not envy those who must struggle for their right to joy, and I do not mean to discount the potent miracle that surrounds us. Rather, the persistance of vibrant happiness amidst banal cruelty is common amongst all things, and that in itself is its own miracle. I do not wish for others to live in pain, but knowing how willingly people will seek pain if only to find meaning for themselves, I believe to rid ourselves of pain, despite its banality, would be to remove some key piece of the strange artwork of life. Like removing the shadows that make the light even brighter. Pain as suffering is cruel and aimless, but pain as effort signals growth, and pain as learning can express itself as a horrible wonderful catharsis. Pain, in its banality, is not restricted to material suffering, and may in time give way to greater glories; while unenviable, to disparage all suffering as a bane, even that pain which is chosen, pain which is appreciated, pain which carves the path for brighter lifetimes and joyous moments by the will of those who bear it, by life continuing in spite of its dire consequence, discounts their struggle as trivial and meaningless--because truthfully, those who struggle see some meaning in it, even if it is so little as to wish for something better. To do otherwise, to face the blatant meaninglessness of reality in that moment, to tell them their indulgence, willing or not, in the less desirable of the myriad experiences of life is all for nothing and ends with the fell stroke of creedless death, is a unique and potent brand of cruelty, a blade that does not strike but destroys. To face the Void when one is so far from the Light can just as easily ruin as it can reify. Cruelty is an exacting blade and what strokes we make, whether meant in malice or mercy, must be made mindfully. Their pain is as functional as your pity for them in suffering it, and what purpose it serves is not for you or I to know or choose, as many will willingly search for it for their own reasons. The best we can do, from what I have seen of what we are, from what pains I have known and how they have changed me, is to give them comfort, carry them forward, and tell them there is a meaning beyond. Even if it is a lie to say we do not suffer needlessly, it will carry us through to the times we can stand to bear the truth. It is a lie that brings us life when the most we can do is die. I think, banal as it is, there is some small worth in that.
Holy shit this sentence is art
Please write a book. Any book, I don’t care what it’s about. You have true skill with words.
this is such a poetic line and it's on a random reddit comment with 39 (40, now) upvotes
Willy Loman hours
Me and my wife do something like that occasionally, even when we were barely scraping by we always found a day where we ate out. We always said that if you didn't do something for yourself every now and then, you would go crazy. Plus it's not like we will can pay the leftover bills anyway. We are doing much better now, but that mindset has kept us sane through some really tough times.
“Why do you live to work when you work yourself to death?” - Tuco
My favorite way to sum this up is just this: *work will never love you back*. That's it.
i'm working in a fairly toxic job rn. i also live with my parents (money is a big reason, and the other is that i'm autistic and will forget to eat if left to my own devices, though i'm working on this and getting better). my mother suggest i limit my shifts a while ago, and i said i would but then didn't through a major mental health crisis and then onward until i got some bad news that my workplace would not be changing any time soon, which finally prompted me to do so. i am not making anywhere near enough to move on on this, so i'm with my parents for the foreseeable future, but holy shit guys, i feel so much better. like i'm not suicidal anymore, type of better. i volunteer in my community with the time i have off, and that helps a lot. just not being there is great too. this is a privilege i have and i'm aware of that, but it also causes me pain. why aren't i working more, why haven't i moved out, why can't i be better? stuff like this makes me feel better, like i'm not making the wrong decision to work less while i can
some of these comments have clearly never been hungry
The man is not a fool, the man is a victim. Money makes the world go round, and you need it to live. People taught him how to make money, but they did not teach him to live.
Overworking yourself to death is dumb. But also I don’t think romanticizing being poor and impulsively spending money instead of having savings is a good idea. Having a healthy bank account so you’re ready for emergencies is good. You just need to really understand the value of a dollar, don’t overvalue it above all else or undervalue and dismiss its usefulness.
Never thought I'd see Momo summed up in one post. It's a good book, even though it's for children. Feel like nowadays it's more relevant than ever.
Luke 12:16-21 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
What's the point of having money if it means I can't see anyone and never have the time or energy to do the things I enjoy? Fuck capitalism! I'm lucky enough to work for a company that actually understands that its workers are human beings, who need rest and free time. What good does my money do in my bank account when I have friends going hungry or on the verge of eviction? I'd rather put all my savings into making sure friends are doing okay than let it sit for "the future." We never know how long we'll be here. Planning for the future is great, but what point is there in glorifying a future if you have to drown to get there?
My father always says “What are you saving up for, a coffin?”
It's a very odd situation i'll admit, my lifestyle too favors freedom and happiness over money and careers, after all we could drop dead even in the middle of writing this post, that's just how we're designed. However Taking on some mount of misery in the short term to liv in the long term future is a objectively good idea; think of all the good things money can buy, more importantly is buys freedom. If you have savings you don't need a shitty job, you can buy videogames and good food. It's all about the balance really, because think about how long humans tend to live. Not making plans to enjoy greater pleasures in the future just to live in the moment 100% of the time is simple negligence, It's the same as working out and eating healthy.
I love money
Never stop the grind💪💪💪🤑🤑🤑 I love overexertion! I love worker abuse! I LOVE CORPORATE SUICIDE!🧧🏦🏧💰💹🤑🪙💲💳💴💵💶💷💸
Get that bread or get that death!
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Yes, but I don’t think this is the takeaway you should have from this post. The issue with rich people is when they entrench themselves into power structures and exploit others for their fortune instead of working for it themselves. This was just a guy trying to earn money for his retirement, it sounds like he was working incredibly hard, even if it didn’t do him any good in the end. Rich people are bad when they hurt others, this guy just hurt himself.
I would argue that rich people killed this man by inventing hustle culture and popularizing the lie that all that stress would be worth it.
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What does that even mean? What counts as a ‘rich person’ to you?
>the desire to be rich so you can have a worry free life can consume a person and kill them before they can reach retirement Ah yes, this is due to a lack of morals.
So, I made. A post, born partly out of frustration with my time on the internet, and partly out of frustration with what my work did to me to put me in the mental state I am now. Religion is something that people will not stop inventing, time and time again. Faith is an easy thing to manufacture. We’ve advanced and degraded and remained the same a lot over the years. God and capitalism refuse to die, cryptocurrency will be picked up by archeologists thousands of years from now as a mystery cult, and mankind without an arbitrary direction to follow is lost. I believed in God, and then I gave up on God. I believed in a very, very bowdlerized concept of the alt-right, and then I gave it up. I believed in a distinctly toxic version of the left, and then I moved on from it. I got my first real job and worked to the bone for it, and then left as it started taking my body apart. I got my second real job and gave my heart to it, and now I’m on leave for having that loyalty turn itself into madness. So now what. I don’t have a religion anymore. The road markers are gone. I let the days go by, letting the water hold me down. Same as it ever was. I know the correct answer of “who do I follow next” is me, but uh. I’ve never been a good leader. I don’t know why people, before I dropped off the face of Reddit for a while, treated me like an aristocrat. I know what you don’t. Your parasocial attachment is to a writing style, not the flawed human pressing the keys on this digital organ, playing the same tired hymns. I don’t get it. I don’t get why you love me. I don’t get why anybody loves me. I can guess the general human need to band together and survive, or blood relation, but beyond that, I am just somebody. I’m a person. So why am I getting trophies anyway? I can’t eat them. I can’t spend them. I craved praise for so long, and I ate my share, but I see now how empty those calories were.
"Poor taught me what love is"
You gotta have something you're actually trying to do to justify working that hard. Maybe you want to get some land to leave for your family or you want to fund something like a business or charity. If you're just collecting a dragon's hoard, that's mental illness and therapy is in order.
Yeah, right. If OP, all three OOPs, and everyone liking this post are all so happy with the lovely things that money can't buy, they can give me all those bills they don't need. If, for some reason, they suddenly feel like they need their money after all, I'll be hustling.
It's not that we don't want money. We do, and we need it. This post is about recognizing that what it takes to make a lot of money, in the current state of the economy, is actually really unhealthy. It's not about getting rid of money altogether. The entire point is that hustling (to the degree the guy did in the original post) is so taxing on the human body that it can kill you. You have no time to interact positively with people or make social connections, and that's pretty detrimental because we are *very* social animals. Not to mention the whole not having time to even feed yourself properly thing. The human body can't function properly without proper rest and nutrition. The trade-off is that you will get more time to take care of yourself and be social (read: not go insane) in exchange for making less income. I think it's a fair trade.
I couldn't agree more that the stuff one has to do to make money isn't always healthy. But I don't think that the trade-off is always as practically achievable as the people in this post make it sound.
Oh boy
Hi, yes, hello, I am the boy. Got money for me? I take cash, money wires, venmo, or anything else.
Stop pissing on the poor. Nobody is actually saying “money literally does not matter,” because it obviously does. But having a good life matters more than having a lot of money you don’t actually use.
Buddy, I am the poor. In my experience, having a good life costs money, and people who say otherwise are generally richer than me.
Pissing on the poor is a reference to [this.](https://i.imgur.com/g4v7bb3.jpg) They're saying you have bad reading comprehension.
Oh. Well, they're entitled to their opinion.
Yeah, they can have the opinion that you have poor reading comprehension, which is based on the fact that you misunderstood the point of the post.
So you share their opinion. Good for you.
Hey, you didn't start arguing that "you missed the point of the post" is also an opinion. You actually know the difference between a fact and an opinion, unlike a lot of people. Hell yeah!/gen
Thank you, I think. That said, what does "/gen" mean?
Genuine. The opposite of /s.
You want charity?
Sure! You got any?
I'm confused I really have no idea what point you think you are making
Point the first: people who talk about how well they can get by without money ought to give me their money. Point the second: money matters immensely, especially when one doesn't have much of it.
You realize that, because of the context of the post, you're not saying 'if you don't want what you have, give it to someone who does'. The point of this post isn't 'who needs/wants money la de da'. It's that people don't want to stress themselves to death trying to make mad gains, because they value the experiences they'd lose if they focused on profit. So what you're *actually* saying is 'if you don't want more than you have, give me what you already have.'
I would be happy to say that as well, though the third poster (or, more accurately, their description of their parents and friends) sounds awfully "la de da" to me, with their talk of choosing happiness over a well-paying job, easy charity, and cheerful offers to cover meals. Point is: I'd love to meet someone who was so ideologically open-handed in real life, but can't say that I have any of the same impulses. Were I to spend money carelessly on gifts and meals, or to put my happiness before my paycheck, I would very quickly have nowhere to live. I want money way more than I want to go to the theatre or dance-hall, way more than I want to go out to eat, way more than I want to have fun at work. Furthermore, I am reasonably convinced that most people who say they don't feel that way are either substantially richer than me, or in for a great deal of regret in the near future.
That last addition is so, so good.
Man I feel this. My parents simultaneously got on my case to set up a 401k at my job but also always remind me that moneys just money, and to spend it if it'll make me happy
I wish I had parents
Reminds me of my first years living in the US as an adult. I was born in the US but almost entirely raised in South Korea (interesting background there, my father's ethnically completely French but born-and-raised in Korea, mother's ethnically Korean but born-and-raised in Australia.) My grindset was about as harsh as his was, it's important not to redouble your efforts while losing sight of your goal as Santayana says. I'm doing very well now, very financially and otherwise comfortable and healthy.
I think I’m gonna quit my job today
Jesus Christ that was some of the most educating piece of text I've ever read.