I am in my mid 20's and have worked minimum-wage retail my entire adulthood thus far, since I haven't gone to trade school or college and have no marketable skills otherwise. I have rather disruptive and untreated mental conditions, as well as several physical ailments that I'm working out with a doctor like early-onset Arthritis, and am neurodivergent. I work five to seven days a week, night shift every day, and it's been like that every job I've been at for the greater part of 6 years. Just got done doing five consecutive seven day weeks, actually.
I am tired and have been tired of daily existential dread about my life going nowhere, spending my mortality at a meaningless job that is getting me nowhere. The extra money is nice, but not necessary.
My partner, mid 30's, makes more than enough to support both of us, and loves her job. When we first got together, I quit my job to move in with her. After a little over a year of outside pressure, I have re-entered the work force at the only job available in my commute range. Its been several months and I've been painfully reminded why I quit.
I am being horribly abused at my job who violates OSHA and health regulations on a daily basis, but my employers (and the rest of town according to the local rumor mill) get away with it by bribing local agents. It's the only job in town I qualify for, and I'm underpaid with the shittiest possible schedule. I never see my partner anymore, and she constantly complains that I was nicer, kinder, and more ambitious when I was unemployed, not to mention we would see eachother frequently before our opposing work schedules. She has even tried to push me to quit to support me financially again. But I rejected it, electing to keep working so we can achieve our goals faster, and so everyone who keeps harassing and threatening me about my employment can shut the fuck up.
Her family, my own family, and a few people in my own friend group, keep attacking me even after I got a job for my so-called laziness and entitlement. I even lost a friend recently after telling them, in confidence, that I was thinking about quitting. They told me they didn't want to associate with someone as selfish to their partner as I, and cut contact.
When either I, or my partner, make the argument that I don't make nearly enough for the amount of suffering it puts both of us through, we're met with the same arguments: “At least you have a job,” “you need some kind of income even if it's not enough,” “we all have to work,” “you just want to use [partner] for money,” and the kicker, “a woman should never have to provide financially for her man.”
I don't want a sugar momma, I just want to work on our future through my own independence. I want to be an entrepreneur, I have been educating myself for years toward that goal, I just need the time and energy to invest. But now I find myself too exhausted to even take care of my own health, let alone work on my projects at all. But nearly everyone in my sphere of influence seems to agree, that keeping the gears of the market turning is more important than any family's future, and that it's my responsibility to be content, or even emphatic, (my mother loves asking why I can't just love my job) about a future of drifting from retail job to retail job whenever I “need a change of scenery” aka tired of being abused by the same group of people for too long.
It just feels like the philosophy is “if you're too tired to start your own business, that's because your purpose in life is to serve someone else's dreams.”
Well if I was born to eternally serve others, why do I feel an overwhelming, incurable frustration about my lack of autonomy and freedom? If God or the Universe or Ronald Reagan put me on this Earth to work and to like it, why is it so impossible for me to like it?
Our families and my friends paint it as a moral failing, that I wasn't raised well enough to be “grateful for opportunities to work,” as a choice to not fulfill my end of my partner and I's “bargain,” when we never wanted money to be any focus of our relationship in the first place. And these people are persistent. I would have cut them all out if they weren't people I or my partner were extremely close to. I just want to make money doing what I love, even if it's not that much. I just don't want to spend my limited time on Earth busting my ass for pennies from some asshole I don't even like and will never hear from again after a few months or years. I want to do something impactful, something thet contributes to building a world where people don't have to suffer like this just because. But not having an income makes me a “toxic, parasitic freeloader” if I'm not living in a homeless shelter, I guess.