Antiwork

The stock market just crashed 5% in one day. Experts are warning of a catastrophic 80-90% implosion in 2022. What will happen in Great Depression 2.0? It will be worse than the first one for sure. Are we going full blown mad max apocalypto? Because honestly that would be more fun than 9-5 wage slavery.

My job decided to lay off about 1/4 of the staff today with no warning. This is the first time experiencing layoffs in my 15+ year career. We all joined a company-wide Zoom (chat disabled, all participants forced to stay on mute) where we were told about the layoffs, and about 15 minutes later, a lot of people didn’t have a job anymore. While I was not laid off (this round), this really makes me worry about my future at this company. It also reminds me that despite all of the relationships we might think we’re building at work, we are ultimately in a transactional relationship with our employers, and that relationship can end at any moment, in either direction, without warning and in a way that can up-end your life.

I graduated from nursing school recently and I've been doing my first few months on the job as a nurse. I am so excited to be getting paid more. I used to work at multiple shitty food service jobs like Dunkin Donuts. In all of these jobs, we constantly had to be doing something even though there were no customers, everything was already clean and tidy, all the food prep had already been complete, and there was genuinely nothing to do. The shift leaders would tell us to take a cleaning rag and pretend to wipe the counters while we stood there and had conversation because the owner would look at us through the security camera to make sure we are actually working. One of my managers even made us get on the floor with a magic eraser sponge and filer type tool to scrape the dirt (grout?) from between…