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Antiwork

Child Labor Epiphany – Am I crazy?

Ok so I'm just trying to see if this strikes anyone else on here as weird and wrong. So today, I was talking with a friend of mine whose boss called her during her birthday celebration. She basically had to stop celebrating her birthday and solve a work thing on her computer. I told her “If my boss pulls that, I'll quit, I'm too old and jaded”. She went “you're 28, that's an absurd thing to say”. She's not wrong. I'm not old. But in MY head, I thought “I started working 12 years ago, I've been doing this crap for over a decade now”. I feel old because I started working at 16. So I really started to think about it, and it's sort of mind-blowing that no one thought it might be a bad idea for a child to work for 8 hours at school, leave school and…


Ok so I'm just trying to see if this strikes anyone else on here as weird and wrong.

So today, I was talking with a friend of mine whose boss called her during her birthday celebration. She basically had to stop celebrating her birthday and solve a work thing on her computer. I told her “If my boss pulls that, I'll quit, I'm too old and jaded”. She went “you're 28, that's an absurd thing to say”.

She's not wrong. I'm not old. But in MY head, I thought “I started working 12 years ago, I've been doing this crap for over a decade now”. I feel old because I started working at 16. So I really started to think about it, and it's sort of mind-blowing that no one thought it might be a bad idea for a child to work for 8 hours at school, leave school and work for another 4 hours or so, and then work for another 2 hours on any assignments. That's 14 hours of labor a day. That can't be healthy.

Chronic exposure to stress is proven to weaken synaptic connectivity in the prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex isn't even fully developed until you're 25. Like am I completely nuts to think that letting kids work like that would mess up their higher cognition and working memory?

Idk if this even the right sub for this, but it just struck me as a labor issue and a health issue

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