I feel like this sub needs more international community discussions, as it is one of the most informative, active and decent places to talk about anti-work struggles for the unification of the common workers. I think it would benefit the general narrative if you, people from countries other than US, could share your perspectives, your grievances and your problems that led you to becoming curious in the antiwork movement.
Guess I'll start?
I'm a young (gen Z) office worker from CIS country where the usual monthly pay is around 400 to 500 USD and GDP per capita hovers just below 10k$. The minimum wage in my country is essentially 150$ a month, and people actually live on it here. I got lucky as I was born to a well-off family and could get a decent education, even had opportunity to travel abroad extensively, and now have nice career prospects. For most of my life, I have been fed with two equally misleading promises: A) working hard will get you an even better life, B) you shoud focus on migrating to the West (especially to the US) if you wish to reach the paradise. As you might guess, reality hits hard.
Things started falling apart when my family fell out of grace with authorities and we had to cut our spendings by a lot. I've started working since first year into university to pull my weight and that's when I started to suspect something is not adding up. I now make roughly x3 of what a median worker makes, and I have no idea of how to get back to even the fraction of life I had with my parents as a child. My mother, bless her heart, had the opportunity to show me the world when she made roughly two times less than I do now. I dread the prospect of moving out of my parent's place. If I'd wanted to buy the flat I live in right now, I'd have to save for 24 years straight without spending a cent (that is considering the prices don't go up any more). Suffice to say, not even my parents can now afford anything within the city. The official inflation rate the govs pretend to see is around 7%, the real inflation for just the past 6 months surpasses 40%. The food on the shelves becomes more expensive each day, the quality keeps diminishing. The universal healthcare praised by my country is so bad I'm literally afraid of going to a local hospital (I can't blame the staff though – they often have to survive on 300$ a month). The payment inflation adjustments are literally nonxistent in the majority of companies I know of, mine included (and I actually love the place I work in as I get full health coverage and plenty of benefits). Getting another education? Having kids? Moving out? Having a car? Might as well dream of owning a phallic rocket.
Then I encounter this subreddit. At first, I'm livid. “They must be mistaken”, I think, “They must be lazy pricks who do nothing in life and want everything for free”. I was promised the American dream. I was told life would get better if I just made it to the other continent. If I was lucky or smart enough, or both. I have to admit, I hated this sub and every little post made here. I couldn't accept the fact that my dream was somebody else's nightmare. Still, I stick around, I read more, and with each post, each comment thread, I become more and more infatuated with the ideas spread here. I start normalizing common things like labor condition discussions and payment discussion in workplace (actually helped my colleague to negotiate a better deal not so long ago), I start standing up to my parents, who continue to preach their outdated capitalist mantras while steadily ruining their health for the sake of staying afloat, I start to indulge myself in political and economic discussions with my friends again, start re-reading Marx, Weber, Kant.
I feel helpless, I feel derailed, I feel as though I'm denied a fraction of hope I had up to this moment, that somewhere across the ocean there is the perfect paradise for future rich hardworking me (ha-ha-ha). Turns out, it sucks being just a normal person no mater where you go. At the same time, I see that I'm not alone. I know I'm not mad, lazy or stupid. I know there is a big community of people who share my disdain with the rich and the powerful running this helltrain down the cliff for a quick buck – no matter the country you name. Most of all, I feel that this desire for change that unifies me with more than a million people across the world keeps growing and keeps getting stronger.
Whether intentionally or not, this sub has become more than the sum of it parts. I'd like to thank each of you for making, keeping and growing this community. For saying out loud that we are not alone. That would be all from me.
What about you?