Month: May 2024

“Nobody wants to work anymore”; “But if you give people UBI, they'll sit around and do nothing”. Nah, I think almost everybody wants to work. I think people naturally want to spend their time doing something useful or meaningful or challenging. I look at my friend's list and see people writing novels and playing music, doing art and making stuff, gardening and cooking and canning and pickling food, restoring old cars and houses, volunteering for a hundred different causes, contributing to dozens of open sourced tech projects, teaching, raising children, and doing all kind of work that benefits themselves, their loved ones, and their communities. What we don't want is to sacrifice all of that to “earn a living”. We don't want to spend 40+ hours wasting our lives for someone else's benefit just to prove that we deserve to survive, while all of the important work goes undone because…

I’ve been in corporate America for 6 years. There’s nothing quite like being your department’s top performer for years only to see some lazy, borderline incompetent coworker of yours get promoted over you. The person always happens to be friends with the boss outside of work, their kids are best friends, something like that. I’ve seen this twice now with different bosses. I’ll be at or even below the level of another person, and he/she appears to have less responsibilities than me. When there is “level loading” this person gets off easy and their responsibilities are never equal to mine, even if I’m paid less. The person still underperforms and makes things more difficult for the rest of the team, yet the person gets a 15-20k promotion because the boss loves them personally. Just one of many demotivating factors in today’s work world, but it’s not discussed nearly as often…