Antiwork

I have an upcoming “mandatory meeting” at my job that I'm being told we're not being paid to attend it. It feels weird that they can make me drive almost 30 minutes to a meeting that im not even being compensated for. Is this legal for them to do?

I think when human beings are sitting at the desk, sitting on a screen for 40 hours a week, every single week, we yearn for more leisure. Our emotions want us to go on an adventure with our friends, travel, experience, appreciate music and art, help out in our communities, meet people, find a significant other we are interested in yet our society has become very isolating. It's harder than ever to meet people, find something you are passionate about outside of work, or just do stuff you always wanted to do. The grind and the reason why we are unmotivated is not because we are lazy but our brains are forced to pay attention to and be efficient in something we aren't necessarily interested in like working at bank, or being an electrician or an engineer. That requires 40 hours of our time every single week and our brains…

I got randomly laid off right before Thanksgiving because the company I work for wanted to take my role “in a different direction.” They were kind enough to allow me 3 months to find another job before my last day. I tried to keep a brave face and push forward, but I’d given up 6 years of my life to this place. Getting pushed aside like this is taking a severe toll on my mental health. The job responsibilities are hard and aren’t letting up. On top of that, I’m working two other part time jobs to keep income flowing bc the search for a full time gig hasn’t yielded any fruit yet. All the hours I’m working, plus job searching and interviewing has made me a shell of myself. I’m a strong employee but now I can’t even muster up the bare minimum with only two weeks left of…

so, I have an office job where I work with 8 people, 3 males and 5 females. I sit next to this girl in her mid 20s, attractive, but very uptight and kind of rude sometimes. She went out to lunch and I had this little toy on my desk I was messing around with and the toy slipped out of my hand and rolled under her desk. So, I went down on my knees and sort of crawled under her desk to get the toy and as I'm getting up, I put both my hands on her chair for support and at that exact moment, all I hear is “OH MY GOD, ARE YOU SNIFFING MY CHAIR YOU SICK BASTARD!”. I was not sniffing her chair! The first thing she does is she puts her stuff down and leaves the room, she is gone for an hour. Next thing…

So I might have some authority or pride issues I need to sift through, but to me, emailing a thank you after a job interview seems so unnecessarily fake, sycophantic, and logically unnecessary. I cringe every time I write one. Let's be real, an interview is not a one-sided favor to the interviewee. They need your labor as much as you need their money. I've just never gotten why this is now apparently part of interviewee etiquette, and why basically every “how to get the job” article acts like you'll absolutely be blacklisted if you don't write one. Personally, I've written relatively few thank you emails post-interview over the years. I've also completely forgotten to write them, or opted out intentionally. The follow-up seemed overwhelmingly contingent on how the actual interview went. If I dropped the ball/was off my game in the interview, writing a thank you didn't help my…

A thought I had on the way to work today. The first person who worked for someone else traded their labor for something the other person had an excess of. Work has always been created by someone with more than they need or can maintain for themselves trading at or less than fair value for someone else to help them maintain or increase the excess they have. Probably not an original thought, but one I had and frames work in a different perspective for me. In that I mean, food security is a wonderful thing to have and in earlier societies I can understand having a larger farm than you can use or maintain yourself and trading with your neighbors for help bringing in large harvests might benefit the community overall in times of famine. The runaway wealth inequality we see today is a completely other animal, I think driven…