Author: Olivia

In the past year, I have been using a personal diary to express my negative thoughts about life, the influence of society on me over time, and how money and religion impacts my mental health. While I won't go into detail about my desire for death or my disillusionment with humanity, I do hope for positive changes as I age. If circumstances permit, I aspire to gather enough funds to establish a new life elsewhere in a different country and start afresh. My suicide diary is an intensely private outlet exclusively meant for my eyes until my passing. At that time, you have my permission to read it, or perhaps I will find the courage to share it with respectful and understanding individuals who can grasp the depth of my struggles. Within its pages, I delve into the disarray of my work-life balance, the foolishness and dishonesty of politicians who…

Two key features of economic development are specialization of labor and destruction of labor. By separating production into simple, repetitive tasks, economic output can be increased and optimized to maximize returns to capital. Adam Smith said of specialization of labor, “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” The corporate capitalist system is designed to create increasingly specialized roles and processes through which discrete tasks can be done by increasingly less discretion from an employee, thus requiring less skilled, or simply less, labor.…

I work teaching an orientation class for new hires at a very large company. At the beginning of this year, our corporate decided to try to restructure how the content is distributed to the new hires. All around I think the whole thing is good but one thing really bothers me. The job I train people for is a part time job. The class is only supposed to last 3.5 hours and covers everything from policies and procedures to basic training. The class goes on for 4 days and has a “theme” to each training day. Every week I feel like I don’t have enough time or that we aren’t moving fast enough through the materials. This made me want to go through the corporate outline yesterday and added up how much time corporate thinks should be spent doing what training. Every. Single. Day. Adds up to OVER 3.5 hours…

I just started a new job. I had high hopes: it's in my field of expertise, the working conditions seemed quite nice, the pace was going to suit my preference. Instead, I am left doing ungrateful tasks and get talked down to (for idiotic reasons). Every emergency is due to poor time management and communication from the higher ups, who also refuse to let me take initiative. I am bored and angry at work. I am just so dissapointed. Will work ever not suck?

I most likely don’t have the right vocabulary for this, but anyone else have experiences where a person of authority asks for ‘emotional intelligence’ after an incident of microaggression against you? It’s like, they have been less than professional towards you, and as the lower ranking employee, you (or in this case I) already have to measure your response. Then, when you’re minimizing your interactions with said person and/or distancing yourself as much as possible professionally to prevent future instances, you are asked to let it go/ be the bigger person/ learn emotional intelligence. It feels like manipulation. I can’t respond with the freedom said person has because I run a higher risk of losing my job as a consequence. But then, I’m also asked to continue to work and collaborate with said person without the boundaries I have set in place, because said boundaries are uncomfortable. What is the…

My previous employer (PE) really did a number on me and my mental health. I quit suddenly with no notice after being treated like garbage. (Added bonus, it was the day my immediate supervisor left for vacation.) I took time off work to focus on my mental health. My medication had quit working. I had unresolved grief from a parent passing. My self esteem was shot because of that job, too. If I'm honest, the job was a poor fit. Part of why I quit is because I asked for a parity raise to match a new hire and they made up BS excuses why they couldn't. They blamed me for things that were the result of a poor manager. The usual stuff they do to get you to quit rather than admit they made a mistake. I got offered a new job today making $7 an hour more than…