Not Boomers or Millennials at fault here. The wealthy corporations, capitalism and your government. They love it that they rarely feature in the debate. But one suggestion. Every other generation has had to fight (hard) to get what they want. Not preaching, but social media doesnât seem to be doing it. That Swedish girl going on about the climate distracted most millennials for a long time while her family got wealthier off the back of it. Maybe stop following the distractions, ask the boomers for advice and take on the real people that are to blame, things might get done.
Ahh, Fuck off twat. If you donât think it is the government and the corporations to blame then you are as sad as you sound. It wouldnât matter who is voted in. They all take the envelopes. It started with the boomers, yep. But history shows that many boomers tried to fight it when it started happening. No fucking âconspiraciesâ about Thunberg, read the fucking post. âOpenly criticizeâ oh wow. Thatâs getting shit done, isnât it? Most should probably buy a house tomorrow knowing that. Your post is shit as fuck. I openly criticise and point at the older gen (not called boomers this side of the Atlantic) for the way things have gone, but i donât blame them. Because if you dig deep enough, you will find it is always the same people that are to blame, yet the public outrage always blames the wrong ones. How my post is sus as fuck is beyond me, when I gave a valid target to blame and abuse to fix things, yet you try to u-turn it to blame the boomers again? Keep blaming them and see where it gets you. It will allow the real people to blame to make it even harder for us to buy houses while we are distracted.
Who do we blame for the USâs current involvement in a genocide, or do you think that they are not complicit? Should we blame the general tax payer, or the government? Why would the general tax payer care about helping the US attempt Genocide for a 2nd time? Or should we just keep blaming the boomers?
This points out why the idea that boomers (as a whole) caused many of our modern problems upsets me
I sincerely doubt you voted for the situation youâre in now
This in-fighting and blaming does nothing but detract from the real issue of whoâs doing this to us (spoiler alert: itâs the politicians and it always has been)
Yeah some dude has a failed acting career, and now I have to hope my for profit insurance will cover a doctor or Iâll be eating ramen for the rest of my life
âfailed acting careerâ is apparently ending up the chair of the Screen Actors Guild, parlaying that into Governor of California and then the presidency, after being a known talent in the 50s.
Okay, I canât actually get work at the moment, Iâve ended up in the âprecariatâ despite my MSc because I didnât understand what would be helpful in the labour market when I was younger. Didnât have a supportive family, to make something of an understatement. So my question is, shall I kill myself? Iâve worked very hard in physical jobs so itâs not laziness, the labour market is just very cruel and is happy to kill me.
Deaths of despair, you know? I just want something productive to do that doesnât destroy my mind and body and actually pays a proper living wage. I feel like Iâve got a lot to offer but Iâm not able to work the system like some people. Or even navigate it.
iâm reading your comments and i donât have an answer for you. you sound really discouraged. i hope you will find a reason to stick around, and i hope it gets better for you soon. â€ïž
Most everyone has been to this point some time in their life. The question is how you handle the answer.
The world is cruel and doesnât care. Thatâs why YOU must care for yourself, not kill yourself.
My suggestion for you is to take stock of all that you have to offer and then list what you like. Interests, hobbies, skills, knowledge (like can you do your own taxes or expert at filling out student loan forms, you can do construction or plumbing, etc.). Anything goes.
Now see what lines up from column A and column B and write down a list of jobs that needs/uses those things. Now you know what kind of work you can do and wonât hate.
Next list what you like and dislike about your personality. Then, do the same for everyone else. You should see a pattern (i.e. I like intelligent conversations/ I dislike loud people) of things that go hand in hand. Like the loudest person in a room is usually the dumbest too.
Anyway, once you know all these things, you should be able to tell if a job is for you and if the people youâll be working with are a match.
The key is to like what you do and the people you do it with. The money will eventually come if you donât hate going to work or the people you work with. At the very least, your life wonât suck. Also, never stop looking for a better job or opportunity.
A perfect job doesnât exist (unless you are your own boss) and the good ones donât always stay that way. Adjust to that reality and always be looking ahead. That is how you navigate/work the system. I am a sore loser and never back down so letting the system win is not an option. It shouldnât be for you either.
There will be more jobs. Or we march in the streets. Donât let the capitalists win. They want people to take the easy way out. Every time they see an article about working class suicides they smile because it means nobody will quit their jobs just for the abuse.
now, iâm not saying you should kill yourself, but in the way i view suicide, and in the way that society tends to exist as a functionalist unit.
I think there is a point where suicide does actually productively benefit society. But thatâs only under a very specific set of circumstances. It begins with being involved with a group of people fairly intimately, such that you are important to them. Since most people view suicide as an individualistic failing rather than a societal one (seriously, fuck you if you think this) they will inevitably be more upset that you killed yourself, rather than the fact that you were pushed to suicide. (really fucking weird take on that concept btw, can we stop doing that?)
If you exist around a group of people that believes that suicide is a societal failing, and can appropriately reflect on it in a manner to inflict societal change. Then perhaps there is a benefit to committing. The problem is, you will almost never find anybody that thinks like this, aside from me, and maybe like 5 other people. Most of which probably arenât here right now.
Suicide is a weird scenario when looked at through the social context of life. It can be a tool of change under very specific circumstances. But it also be the bearer of itâs own downfall, shielding the truth behind itâs grim exterior without people realizing what lies behind.
Iâve always found it weird how humans tend to have a particularly clocked response to suicidal ideation. Maybe Iâm just too autistic or something, but itâs always confused me. I have an appreciation for people who will entertain my thoughts, i find it also helps me to comprehend certain concepts better.
and for some parting rambles, it seems rather disrespectful to the individual to consider suicide an âindividualistic failureâ doesnât it? Isnât it weird how we always look at these scenarios as tragedies, that never shouldâve happened âif only they were doing betterâ we think. Rather than actually being concerned about them as a collective. I realize the difficulty of doing this, it may be an impossible task in fact, i donât deny it. But i think itâs a productive way of thinking about this scenario.
And some boards of canada as a parting message. Give it a listen, or donât, iâm not telling you what to do. just giving you some information.
You canât predict the future, you are not a far seer, you are not a fortune teller. You donât know if life gets better or not. The only way to find out is to keep hanging on.
I cannot buy healthy, tasty, food. I can work less hours, buy ingredients in the marker and make that food.
I will never be able to buy a house, never. Even saving over half my income by living in shit neighborhoods. The cost of houses goes up too fast. Even after investing, and getting good returns, on the little I managed to save, it is not enough.
So working a little less, and having healthy food it is.
After understanding the ongoing ecological collapse, I donât care much about a house anymore, rich or poor, we are all dead in less than 10 years anyway.
If you can, work less, play more. And I actually love what I do at work, but fuck that scam.
Every system is going down faster than expected. Food sources are already taking hits.
This will accelerate exponentially.
Unless we get unlikely, easily sacked, breakthrough energy source quickly or fucking aliens come down and save us, we are doomed.
Climate change was stoppable around 1980, the worst of it was preventable around 2000, now? We may survive if we put our resources toward adaption. Which we donât, and cannot unless some magic happens.
So unless you believe in fairies, donât bring children cus they wonât grow old. If you do believe in fairies, you are too delusional to raise children.
We donât, scientifically, know which one of us is right. We can only go based on gut feeling and anecdotes.
My job is in bioinformatics, from the computational side. The measurements we took were assumed to be wrong due to how far they were out of the expected. Sadly, the equipment did not malfunction, the temperature of the environments we measured shifted drastically causing a reduction in community complexity.
My fun-time is partially in small scale farming, while some of my family members work full time in the agriculture. Iâve seen both small scale collapse, meaning a tree or a bush die from extreme weather. Members of my family now drink more, as they witnessed fields ruined in a few hours. Hail out of session, a once in a hundred years wind that blew day after day for a week, extreme cold (for the region), extended dry spells in winters with floods between. Each one of those events reduced the agricultural output of a given area to zero for that season.
I live in a western country, we have no technology to stop that and it will become more frequent and global. We have no technology to save our own food supply.
We know how to grow food in building. If we have energy to replace the sun. We donât. So we are going the route of food collapse, leading to population collapse, extinction will follow a few years later.
No need to be ashamed. Youâre doing a great job creating shareholder value. Just keep your head down and make doo with the scraps youâre given. Youâve realized that itâs not possible for this earth to provide 8 billion people with affluence and fulfilment. Your sacrifice is making a small percentage of people very happy. Keep up the good work.
If you want, say, a boat; its probably less work to build it from scratch than to âearnâ it for the overwhelming majority.
Which is wild: Even with modern tools, economies of scale, and specialized master craftspeople (or more likely; enslaved teenagers halfway across the world chained to a shop bench, similar effect here) its easier to DIY than go through âsocietyâ, unless the thing has been made deliberately difficult to DIY-which more and more things, especially repairs and retrofits, are.
It takes more work, more coordination, and orders of magnitude more time to get the government to raise your taxes to half assedly feed the hungry with food that was gonna get thrown away than it does to just find a patch of land nobodyâs watching and do it yourself from Fucking scratch. Every Fucking time.
All the big decisions, decisions about Commons, and decisions about the future, including habitability of the planet, are being made in what we can all agree is the dumbest fucking way possible, and regardless of our disagreements, 999/1000 random people off the street would find it difficult to make worse ones.
So, communist or individualist, insurrectionist or moderate, what kind of brain dead fucking moron would participate in this on purpose? Would follow the rules of this on purpose?
So, what the fuck is to be done?
P.S. If you say âvoteâ I swear Iâll fucking scream.
Stand for election. Voting doesnât work unless people who arenât benefiting from system stand for election. Join a party. Fake loyalty to that party. Fake moderate beliefs. Fake everything until you get selected to stand. Keep faking until youâre elected. Once elected, wield whatever power you have for the good of all mankind. Prioritise the future, not the present.
Thatâs one tac. More in line with the Great Man theory of history. If I had to guess Iâd say we have hundreds of people in politics who are exactly like this. And itâs maybe a part of making things better.
But those people will be powerless to do anything until collective and direct action gives them the political capital to point out in a room full of chuds, âlook weâve got to give them something.â
This is just to say, donât wait for your heroes to save the day for you. Even if theyâre there, dormant, they need your action to do anything.
You act like walking into your masters house and politely asking, even with friends, is gonna get you jack shit.
But if he doesnt see you as human (amd the oligarchs dont) If you donât put a gun in his mouth, it means nothing. At that point, why not just clean off the ceiling and do the thing you were asking permission to do (because its not like they actually do anything) anyway.
Oh my god do you think nobodyâs Fucking tried this? It doesnât work. The elections are fake, my dude. Remember 2000? Remember 2016 dem primary? Remember 194âŠ4(?)? 2020 dem primary?
And I live in California. My vote literally does not count.
Fuck your bullshit elections, I canât respect that shit
Gotta respect your choice of home Lemmy tho. I feel ashamed for not thinking to do the same.
The issue isnât lack of effort, itâs lack of scope. If everyone whinging online signed up to a party today, started attending every single local meeting from tomorrow onwards, put themselves forward for roles within that party, actually put in time and effort to get selected, get elected, move up, keep moving up, keep aiming higher, weâd have a completely overhauled political system in 5 years.
Granted it might be harder in the States (UK here), but for us, we have 650 members of parliament. That means we only need 326 individuals, members of any party, out of nearly 70 million people, who will vote in favour of any policy that will benefit future generations, be it climate related, electoral reform, workers rights reform, anything beneficial, and the country and world would start to get better. Instead hopelessness is pervasive, very few people try and as you point out, if they do try, they find themselves alone. Well now, how about we all just agree to do it? There are thousands, possibly millions of people who are under 30 and sick of all of this crap and follow pages on reddit, Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, any of the random new social media that I stopped keeping up with once I turned 25, pages dedicated to âantiworkâ, political reform, climate issues, the general decline of western society under late stage capitalism.
If even 10% got off their asses and actually did something about it, everything would be fine. If YOU get off your ass and do something, it will help. Iâm literally an elected politician at the local level in the UK. I tell anyone who asks that Iâm only involved because I hated the idea that the climate crisis was raging and nobody was doing anything, so I may as well do something myself. I have seen that things can change at the local level because Iâm there, changing them. Iâm one person. In this mid-sized town, there are probably hundreds or thousands of others who are also scared that nobody is doing anything, but theyâre lazy, or apathetic, or just not aware of the possibilities, so Iâm alone for the moment.
You asked what anyone can do, but youâre complaining that you donât like the answer. Live in California? Move. Itâs expensive as hell anyway, so move to Arkansas or Missouri. Pretend youâre a republican. Infiltrate. Change that party from the inside. Or move to a smaller town. Join the town council. Then run for mayor. Then for governor. Just do something. That is the only answer. There is no quick fix, no easy path. The solution is simple - make sure every decision you make for at least the next 5 years will get you closer to your goal of attaining political power so you can change things. That is the only way anything will ever change. Left to the hands of the âdefaultâ political classes, they wonât do anything. They wonât change anything. They have it easier than you. They have connections at prestigious universities, they have more money, they have better access to internships and people of influence. Tough luck, but that isnât an excuse for you not to try. You will be alone at the start. Be the example. Bring people with you. Constantly encourage anyone you know who feels the same as you to get involved. Things can be changed for the better, but the first step is on you. Stop waiting for other people to make things better.
So Iâm in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism⊠Well hereâs how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didnât vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because hereâs the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I donât mean âhe won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshitâ (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections donât count. Theyâre not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Donât get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I donât mean sucking some aristocratâs dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that arenât worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you canât even see what itâs for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with â(residential) for rentâ signs on them so old theyâre barely legible, whatâs your first thought? Do you think every politician doesnât fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
If everyone whinging online signed up to a party today, started attending every single local meeting from tomorrow onwards, put themselves forward for roles within that party, actually put in time and effort to get selected, get elected, move up, keep moving up, keep aiming higher, weâd have a completely overhauled political system in 5 years.
yes, if the system was built for people this would work. Currently itâs built for people with money and incumbency. The new guy in the race is going to need one hell of a financial backing to get his name out there. Do you think they just mail shit to people for free?
While I did misunderstood the goal of your comment, sry for that, it still holds some truth and might be applied concept wise to what you meant.
Refusing to pay taxes is, as much as refusing to vote politically, a refuse to participate. Why should someone get a say in something that they refuse to be a part of?
We are on the same side, even if itâs not directly obvious. You showed that with you second point. By voting with you wallet for corporations that fulfill your values, you choose to give them more power over other corporations that donât.
The same concept applies to voting politically. You give your vote to a party that fulfills your values over a party that doesnât.
I the real world not paying taxes is not an option, as much as itâs not an option to not spend any money on any corporation, if your part of the society. We are able to choose in a given context, that for sure has its limitations.
Letâs say your not happy with the possible options that you can vote for, be it a financial or a political vote, you are free to fill the niche you think is missing. Start being active politically or economically and if there are more people that think like you and act according to this, things can change.
But if nobody does this, things will definitely move in the direction of the values from people that do the things above.
There is the famous phrase. âInsanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.â
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Donât let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
But whatever you do, if its not just useless theatrical bullshit (which isnât to say all theatrical bullshit is useless; just the useless kinds) its going to be illegal, and will face state retribution, even if its explicitly legal and protected in your local constitution.
Slightly less obnoxious, but equally ineffective; vote with your hands, your eyes, your feet. Donât let them steal your labor your attention your time your anything. You can be passive and hold a strike. You van be active and strike back. I think a mix of both would be a lot more effective than just one.
You can also strike without striking. Thereâs a huge fuss over âquiet quittingâ/âwork to ruleâ, where people are striking by only doing exactly what theyâre paid for, rather than adding in the extra that has become the norm. Theyâre not adding extra hours or pulling extra duties.
Like in what case? Even just in terms of material and ignoring the cost of oneâs own time and the tools required, itâs usually cheaper to buy.
There is legit only a few things where it makes sense from an economic point of view to make on your own. Most hobby craftsman donât do it for the money. Thereâs something to be said about quality but that takes practice and hence, more money.
idk man, iâve found it vastly cheaper to buy lumber and build tables from that lumber, which are going to be vastly more durable than anything you can buy for that price.
You do need tools of course, but you might know someone that has some, or you can simply get into wood working, and start saving more money. Theyâll pay for themselves eventually.
PCs? You can often build those specifically to your needs, much cheaper than what can be found on the existing market. Especially for servers. Sure i spent 600 dollars on 36 TB of hard drives. How expensive is 18TB of cloud storage over the period of 5 years? (you might say 36TB* actually, but itâs redundant for backup purposes. Trust me, itâs worth it.)
itâs more work, but you can absolutely do it for less money. You need to have a realistic scope and be able to meet your own needs, and nothing more. You probably donât need the shit that exists in a suburban home for example. So donât build one. Build something to specifically serve you.
Itâs a little different for boats naturally, but that was just an example.
I bought a 12 year old thinkpad laptop to be used as my daily driver laptop. Itâs not fast, itâs not small, itâs not light, but itâs a fucking trooper of a machine, and i love it. It does exactly what i need a machine to do. And all in, including the screen upgrade which i got from another used machine iâm probably about 200 dollars in. And have two batteries that i managed to get from either machine. Did i get lucky? sure, unrealistically lucky? No, i was just eyeing ebay every now and then. And i have a spare parts machine.
Okay maybe boats were a bad example. I probably should have used something I know about, but thatâs all shit everyone thinks they canât do.
Still, compare the effort you put in, keep in mind youâre being gouged on materials (because youâre being gouged on everything), and figure out how many hours at minimum wage to buy the sameish quality.
Boats are weird. Iâve looked at buying kit from CLC to build a 15â Pocketship: about $12,000 US. Buying a used one, a couple years old? $15k.
Meanwhile, my local yacht club had a 26â 1969 Westerly Centaur one step away from being crushed. Prior owner stopped paying storage fees and refused further contact, so the club put a lien on it. I picked it up cheap, $500. Nobody bothered cutting the lock off the companionway; it was chock full of tools and supplies the prior owner was using to refit it.
Iâve dropped some cash into finishing the refit, but nowhere near what I would have spent on a 15â Pocketship, and Iâve got a much more capable boat. There are deals out there.
Very much the point. Building a boat is labor intensive. The materials are relatively inexpensive, compared to the time invested in building. The person selling that used Pocketship was likely the builder, and sees value in their time spent building it.
That ~50 year old Westerly? That labor is long gone. The previous owner did invest his time in a partial refit, but relinquished his interest when he stopped paying storage fees and let a lien be placed on it. The club has no time invested, just the lost storage fees, but would rather minimize future loss; an abandoned boat takes up space that would otherwise be generating revenue for them. The club members (nearly all power boaters) see little value in the boat itself. Any revenue gained from scrapping it would likely exceed the cost to scrap the fiberglass hull (again, a labor intensive process).
She really is a cool boat, though. Iâm having a great time completing the refit, and I donât see my labor invested as lost when Iâm enjoying the process as much as I am.
But generally things are made to not be durable, excess commodities are destroyed(at a cost, they pay to destroy them), and vintage goods are at a premium.
Yes exceptions exist, but this is a known exploit, mostly patched.
So Iâm extra glad you found this. And I meant it when I said âfun projectâ. I do love me one of those.
this is genuinely my plan. Work in trades to pick up a skill (and hopefully make a decent bit of coin) buy some land, and build it out. Spend as little as possible, and enjoy it as much as possible.
I feel like itâs viable. Maybe iâm hopeful, idk. Weâll see.
itâs certainly not radical, i agree with that. Personally i just donât really care about others. So itâs not like it would really bother me one way or the other.
I do have foundational beliefs on a lot of this shit, but if i donât have to think about it, then i wonât, and i see no other reason others couldnât follow in suit.
It can look like thereâs an outside, but thatâs a lie our masters tell, so people whoâre fed up walk away instead of fighting back, violently or otherwise.
i donât consider it outside, i consider it to be the corner of a large room with a lot of people in it. But that corner just so happens to have very few people in it.
iâll be around, itâs not that i wonât, it just depends on how important it is to me really. If weâre talking fundamental individual freedoms, iâll be there.
So Iâm in the united states. The second (or third) major step towards fascism⊠Well hereâs how I remember it:
It was the year 2000, first election I was remotely politically conscious for. I, uh, didnât vote. Had opinions tho.
So there was this fascist piece of shit-his dad was a former CIA director, his grandpa was point man for a failed fascist coup (thank you smedley butler. Not that I knew about this at the time, being a literal child), and the guy running against him was kind of a bland milquetoast wonk-but his credentials and rep were, in retrospect, pretty perfect. Conscious and cautious about global warming, knew about the internet, kind of all the right shit for the moment.
So when the fascist piece of shit took office, everyone gave my mom shit, because she voted for a third party and allowed it to happen. Nevermind that we live(d) in CA, where votes in federal elections are between like 1/5th and 1/500th of a full citizen, and the electoral votes for CA still went to the bullshit wonk. She caught shit for years. And it kind of confused me.
Because hereâs the thing; the bland milquetoast wonk won the election. I donât mean âhe won the popular vote; the electoral college is bullshitâ (although he did and it is) but he won in college votes too. He won by every metric.
Nobody cared. Because elections donât count. Theyâre not real, and you will never win begging. It was entirely a wasted effort. The aristocracy just appointed the guy they wanted. Donât get me started on 2008, the first one I did vote in, and how that bastard betrayed every single fucking thing he promised.
You tell me to get off my ass and do something, have you ever actually done anything in your life? I donât mean sucking some aristocratâs dick, so you can beg them for scraps later, that arenât worth 1/10 of the effort you spent doing the lobbying, much less getting them their throne, but actually fixing building solving something with your own fucking hands abd organizational capacity?
Ever? Or are you so obsessesed with being in a fucked up machine you canât even see what itâs for, what its doing, and what purpose you serve within it?
When you see someone dying on the street between five buildings, all of them with â(residential) for rentâ signs on them so old theyâre barely legible, whatâs your first thought? Do you think every politician doesnât fucking know? Is your first thought to beg all the people who are profiting off this poor fuckers death? This isnt a hypothetical BTW, I saw this enough times this week that I straight up stopped fucking counting. So what should I have done, according to you?
Yes, donât try to fix it all alone. Organize. Change. But the systems that allowed these Fucking oligarch shit stains to ruin it so bad? The âgoodâ people when they do take the reins in a system where their only levers are âtaxesâ and (ratcheted)âcopsâ? What century are we on of prison reform? 2? 10? I know itâs been nonstop since before the steam engine. Still seems pretty bad.
Direct action doesnât mean âgo it aloneâ. Bring your friends. Collab with strangers. Make new friends. Actual democracy can actually be pretty fucking fun, but it gets a lot sweatier.
Definitely me. I just went several months interviewing and when they asked what my financial requirements were, I started saying Iâd just like to be able to buy a house with my masters degree and 15 years experience.
They laughed not because your expectations were laughable, but because they expected you to state a dollar range, therefore when you made a blunt relatable reply, it had a comedic effect. Their laughter was a compliment of your wit.
adjective Pompous or pretentious. Affectedly genteel; pretentious; haughty; snobbish. Similar: grandiosehifalutinhoity-toityla-di-da Self-important, pompous; arrogant or egotistical; tending to show off or hold oneself in unduly high regard. The American HeritageÂź Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition âą
This just puts a huge spotlight on the thing I hate the most about my line of work. Iâm sure itâs not just my line of work with this problem, but thereâs plenty of examples of workplaces that do not have this problem.
My career is in IT support. Whether doing systems administration or networking or something else related, itâs my lifeblood.
Almost every job Iâve ever had in this field works on the basis of tickets. A concept which, isnât in and of itself a problem, nor is it unusual. Similar systems exist in many careers; theyâre similar to a chit in the restaurant industry, which contains an order, which is passed to the kitchen for the cooks/chefs to complete. Same thing. And thereâs examples of this same idea across many careers, called all kinds of things from a requisition, to a work order, theyâre all variations on the same idea.
The trouble begins with how tickets are worked and completed. In other industries, you pick up a task, whether a chit or work order, you finish the task, and you mark it as complete, but in IT, itâs very different in one key way. We have to not only justify and report everything we do, but also mark down exactly how long it took. Itâs this last point thatâs the problem. I am under continual scrutiny, every minute of every day to justify what Iâve done, and when I did it. In every job Iâve had, my ability to fill every second of my day with records of what Iâve done and how long it took to do is praised, or the lack of that ability can create some significant issues with maintaining my employment status.
There are good reasons to keep these records, to have a record of changes, and coordinate with coworkers, in the event they need to continue work Iâve started, or vice versa, and to note when something changed so that if issues arise, those actions can be examined as a potential cause. But this requirement has become weaponized by every employer to keep a stranglehold on productivity. If you take too long on a task that they think should have taken less time, youâre suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient. If you excel and youâre able to complete your tasks quickly, that faster pace becomes the new standard, and anyone who isnât capable of keeping up gets reprimanded for dragging their heels and wasting time.
The goal posts continually move. I canât so much as take an extended shit without someone taking notice.
Meanwhile, so many jobs are simply focused on being present and looking busy. Before I went into IT, I worked at a grocery store, and short of clearly and obviously standing around doing literally nothing, no manager even took notice of you. If you were doing something, literally anything that looks even remotely productive, you were left alone. Which isnât to mention all the down time, when there isnât anything to do, and you just go and adjust the products on the shelf needlessly because it made you look busy. That same concept can be applied to a lot of different jobs, but with IT, itâs not sufficient to simply look busy. Your time must be put into a ticket.
When youâre too busy to actually get your time in and you look like a damn slacker, theyâll use it as evidence to say that you donât need any additional help. Iâve been through this song and dance several times.
Mechanics at your local car dealer likely get paid on flat rate. That means they get paid a set amount of hours based on the time estimate for the job, regardless of how long it takes. Also, manufacturers set lower times for warranty repairs than you would get paid if the customer had to pay. Also, if there is no book time, you have to guess ahead of time. If the vehicle comes back, you have to work on it for free. You also get service writers and managers breathing down your neck while youâre trying to troubleshoot and not understanding how long things take and also pressuring you to upsell unnecessary services and repairs. Anyway, I donât work on cars anymore.
I write software for car dealerships so have been aware of all of what you said by proxy for some time simply by virtue of having to write time tracking code which handles all that.
I understand why. I have had a bit of insight into how all of that works and short of being a prodigy, you canât really get ahead.
This is why I do a lot of my routine maintenance on my own car. If all I need is a wrench, some materials and a few hours, Iâll do it myself. Iâve become quite skilled with mechanics over the years; Iâm sure itâs nothing compared to what an actual mechanic knows, but brakes, tire changes/rotations, battery replacements, even coolant changes and thermostat replacements, totally do-able. I could go on with minor repair crap Iâve learned but you get the picture.
I did a brake job on my SILâs car and discovered that the last person in there didnât lube anything up, I had to beat it with a hammer to get the damn brake pads out. I put the right lubrication in the right places and put everything back together better than I found it. I even did the slide bolts, which I had to break out the torch to get loose. New pads, rotors, slide bolts, slide bolt boots, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everything short of doing the calipers and brake fluid.
I suspect the last few techs that touched her vehicle were trying to move so fast that they didnât bother doing anything to the side bolts even though they would have been obviously in need of maintenance/replacement.
The thing that bothered me is that she sold the car a few months after I spent 10+ hours fixing the stupid brakes. So next time I have to go look at her vehicle, itâll be a surprise for what things were not done, or were not done right.
In order to avoid that kind of situation many shops will simply quote a âloaded caliperâ for each side. It includes the caliper, hardware, brake pads, and bracket. You simply disconnect the brake hose and take out two bolts that hold the caliper bracket on. Give the rotor a couple of slams from the hammer, clean up the hub, reassemble everything and bleed the brakes. It might cost $600, but it saved a ton of time for the shop and prevents a comeback when the old caliper decides to get stuck anyway.
Yeah, she needed it on all four. I think I needed to torch out at least three of the slide bolts around the car. We saved a bunch of money by having me do it, but I broke my cheap torque wrench in the process, snapped the socket connector right off the end of it trying to loosen the lug nuts. I only used the torque wrench for loosening things because I didnât have another tool long enough to pull them off (aka a breaker bar, I think itâs called). So, RIP. I told her that if she wants me to do another wheel/brake service, sheâll have to buy me an impact wrench, and Iâll send her the link to one I found that will fill the purpose (which is both compatible with the stuff I already use and was tested and recommended by the torque test YouTube channel). Because Iâm not dealing with getting, and breaking, any tools to get her tires off because some crackpot at the shop decided to torque her lug nuts with an impact.
I only want to reduce my workload and not sit there standing on a breaker bar, unable to get the damn lug nuts off⊠Iâm not light, over 200lbs, so if I need to stand on a bar to get the lug nuts to loosen, someone probably did something wrong.
I have one of those âcompatible withâ Milwaukee impacts and it works great for most things. I also have a couple of really cheap 1/2" breaker bars that I bought years ago that just wonât break. I have a 3â cheater bar that fits over them and Iâve had to put some weight into that a time or two.
The impact wrench Iâm looking at is one of the newer lineup from DeWalt. I have DeWalt everything already (impact driver, hammer drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw⊠Even my hedge trimmer, string trimmer, lawnmower and snowblower), all using the 20v MAX or compatible batteries, except the snowblower, which uses the power flex 60v (which can be used in 20v tools, but 20v MAX batteries cannot be used in it). The impact wrench uses the same 20v batteries. So I just need the tool. Itâs still something like $200 for it, but I donât think Iâll need anything more for power tools for a long assed time after that.
We picked most of this stuff up over the past year starting with a kit (impact driver, hammer drill, circular/reciprocating saws, even a small light, with some batteries and a few extras) about a year and a half ago, and weâve been steadily adding to it. I chose DeWalt because I have an old, 12v drill I used for like 10 years and it still works. The original battery has left us but the second battery I bought when it was new (it came with one and I bought an extra so I could have one in the drill while one was charging) is still kicking. I got a replacement for the original battery that shipped with it, so I still have two for that unit. It still works, and itâs fine, but there were a few times I really needed a hammer drill and the puny 12v was all that I had⊠But that was literally my only real gripe about it. Given that history, I wanted to keep with DeWalt because they clearly make tools that can last.
I wanted to go with one brand so I didnât require several different battery chargers for different tools. DeWalt was only missing a snowblower, but they released one late last year and we obtained it shortly after it hit the market, which completed our large tools. Thereâs only a small number of handheld tools in the DeWalt lineup that I still want to get. The impact wrench is one. Another is a brad nailer (IIRC), because I have to install some baseboards/trim, but itâs hard to justify buying a $500+ tool for the job.
My entire automotive kit probably needs to be replaced. I have a complete socket set with ratcheting wrenches, and not a whole lot besides that at the moment. I will need to get a new torque wrench, breaker bar⊠Probably a lot more that Iâm not thinking about right now. I have access to my brotherâs Jack and Jack stands, so Iâm ok there. For the impact wrench, Iâll need to add a small set of impact ready sockets for it, otherwise Iâm going to rip my sockets to shreds.
I have a ton of electrical testing stuff for my other hobbies, so Iâm good on that front, but I notably donât have a CCA tester, which I would like to get. Among my more electronic things I have a fairly crappy, and old, OBD2 reader, which has come in handy plenty of times.
As you can imagine, Iâm the âhandyâ guy in the family. I just find it all fascinating, but I wouldnât want to make it my job. After working on a vehicle for a few days, I donât even want to look at a wrench for several weeks.
By day, I work in IT, so Iâm generally sat at a computer pushing buttons until the screen dots show up in the right order.
I have several socket sets and wrenches from harbor freight that are perfectly fine. The 1/4" set, the open ended ratchet set, the short impact set, and the long metric wrenches, these cover 99% of everything. If you donât abuse your tools, then they wonât break. I even have a second 1/4" set from Aldi of all places and never had an issue with it. Iâm not using them all day every day, so Iâm not that worried about buying expensive stuff.
The point is never expensive. The point is always that it lasts. Sometimes that means more expensive, but not always.
DeWalt is a special case, because no matter what we buy for wireless tools, itâs going to need batteries and the batteries are not cross compatible. So thatâs more about total cost of ownership. My TCO goes down if I stay within their battery ecosystem.
Iâll have a look around for cheap-but-good impact sockets when the time comes. Iâm not in a position to need them quite yet.
The problem is your boss. I work with tickets and just have a maximum for the average amount of time to be under for the quarter. Itâs very relaxing.
You need to explain to your boss that different tasks take different amounts of time. Explain that you may be able to do things faster at the risk of larger issues taking up more time later. Then when they tell you to work faster, reiterate that it will cause bigger issues.
Literally give them what they want: fast solutions at the expense of quality. Then donât worry about it when things eventually break.
Literally give them what they want: fast solutions at the expense of quality. Then donât worry about it when things eventually break.
Youâre not wrong, but the problem with this is that the worker will be blamed for the bad quality, not the manager.
In fact, itâll be the manager rating the worker poorly because of the quality at review time, and they just wonât care or wonât connect the fact that the worker is not being given enough time to have a level of quality that would be acceptable to the manager.
Thatâs not how reality works. If your goals are time-based and you hit your goal, then you did a good job. Quality is different. Itâs the managers job to balance speed and quality.
You just say âI achieved my time limit for ticketsâ and leave it at that. If they give you incompatible goals, thatâs the managerâs fault. Just tell them itâs not possible to do a good job quickly.
Iâm not talking about the literal whoâs right or whoâs wrong/fault, Iâm talking about the politics, about who has the power, who doesnât, and who can get away with mistakes by putting the mistakes on others.
Thatâs not how reality works.
Iâve literally seen what Iâve described happen, on multiple occasions, throughout my career. /shrug
Literally every boss Iâve had has been like this. I donât think thereâs a whole lot of IT jobs that arenât at this point. Iâve worked several and if theyâre not call centers (a few have been - where call time is factored in), this has been the primary time system, required by all employees.
The IT world is chock-full of this garbage, and all it really forces people to do is A. Provide lesser service so that it âtakes longerâ, inflating their time metrics, and B. Causes people to make shit up, or submit their own BS tickets to make it look like theyâre doing stuff to justify their existence.
Ultimately holding people to a metric-based system like this leads to worse service, and make people hate their jobs.
The job I had before my current one, I was site lead for Field Services. Luckily we were sort of a start up/experimental program, so the technician metrics werenât tracked at all. MAN it was nice. Nobody felt stressed out needing to justify every second of their day, they wound up doing the work in an appropriate amount of time because it didnât matter how long an individual took (be that long, or short). We only had an SLA to meet for the customer, which was easily hit.
I even took it a step further and didnât really pay much heed to the corporate timekeeping rules⊠If someone needed to run an errand or âteleworkâ for a day; fine by me. The company didnât give anyone sick time, or enough time in general, OR a big enough salary, so they can eat my whole ass. Lo and behold, our section had the lowest MTTR, and highest amount of tickets closed, all with 100% SLA met. Crazy what you can achieve when you treat people like adults and actual human beings instead of soulless automatons.
Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when Iâm too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesnât happen. Iâm moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.
Compounding this, when itâs that busy, Iâm often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, Iâm off trying to chip away at something else. When itâs slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so itâs easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when itâs busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05⊠Yeah, Iâm not entering all that time⊠At best Iâm going to guess, at worst Iâm just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: âfixed problemâ done.
The task of entering time takes more time to do. If Iâm too busy trying to put out fires, I donât care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.
This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldnât just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now Iâm not putting out a fire instead Iâm taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.
I dunno Sally, why donât you fucking Google it? Iâm not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit thatâs not broken. Iâm currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and Iâll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my âattitudeâ towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corpâs file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sallyâs feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldnât meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because Iâm lead technician on that account.
Then thereâs the IT support team I have to design systems for in my org that are COMPLETELY useless. They canât be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage, documentation, or careI wish their management would put even a semblance of accountability on them.
I think a middle ground would be fantastic for everyone.
They canât be bothered to do their job, and escalate tickets randomly to Tier 3 without any triage
Level 1 support teams are universally useless. I think Iâve ever worked with one thatâs actually effective.
Can you imagine that in a hospital? âOh this guy came in with a broken finger, Iâd better call the lead surgeon.â Now of course the lead surgeon can fix it, of course they can, everyone can fix it, but you canât send the patient back down to accident and emergency because then you get complaints about why youâre passing this poor guy around.
And the mentality youâve described is extra bullshit in an IT or support role, as Iâm sure youâre aware.
This is paraphrased in the âDoom talkâ I had to have with my boss back when I was working in systems maintenance. As in, heâd come into my office and complain, âEvery time I come in here youâre just playing Doom. You need to justify your salary or otherwise maybe we donât need to pay you.â
What MBAâs and PHBâs donât realize is that IT and systems maintenance is not a production-oriented operation. Youâre not making widgets. The metric is not how many tickets do we generate and how fast are they solved. The metric is, how can we have as few tickets as possible? Because by and large what youâre doing in support and IT is fixing stuff thatâs broken. The ideal state for the business to be in is not to have anything thatâs broken at all, on a minute-to-minute basis.
Boss, you want to see me in my office playing Doom. Because that means none of your millions and millions of dollars of mission critical infrastructure which your engineers rely upon to generate billable hours is on fire. If any of it catches fire today, I am on site to put it out. If anyone has a problem or a question, I am on call to solve it. If there is maintenance to be performed or new equipment to be rolled out, Iâll be doing that. But otherwise Iâm not going to invent busywork just to placate middle management which, as a whole, canât reliably remember which of the two mouse buttons to click.
That said, as someone in software development, wouldnât there be some optimization work you could do? Keeping up with the technology? Preparing training material? Figuring out the next steps for the next improvements to be done to the system? Looking at solutions to better monitor what is going on? Scripts to automate tasks?
I find it hard to believe that things are so static.
Absolutely! Those things are known to management as, variously, âwasting time,â âspending all day surfing the internet,â âsubmitting frivolous RFQâs,â and heaven forbid if you want to attend training or a trade show, âaccruing unnecessary travel expenses.â
Yep. Iâm in the midst of that. Weâre in a âbusyâ season for my clients (mostly finance/accounting people), and Iâve reduced my output hours per day to a lower amount because I want to be more available for more time so that I can jump on critical issues as they arise. For the most part, you want to jump on critical things regardless of the situation, but right now itâs more critical because of the busy season, so minor gripes get sidelined, all of my maintenance and other duties, like projects, scripting, etc, are all on hold, favoring time to resolution over almost everything else. So if I can be free more than normal so that I have the bandwidth to take care of things when they arise, so much the better. I donât want to be distracted writing a script when a critical ticket drops and I miss it by a few hours while the customers are unable to work because I was debugging a PowerShell function.
So my logged hours are down because I refuse to pick up dormant unimportant tasks while Iâm idle. I use the time to review all tickets and just patrol the service tickets for critical issues. I have absolutely no reservations about doing it.
I agree, the goal should always be to play doom. Not because you ignore your work, but because thereâs nothing to do since everything works. IT support isnât here to justify their existence by staying busy. Weâre here so that when you need help, we can help. If thereâs nothing to do, then weâre standing ready, and if we play doom, or Halo, or literally any other game/distraction/whatever, while we wait, as long as it doesnât impact our ability to respond when needed, then thatâs fine. Thatâs what everyone should want. If the hardware is so unreliable that youâre constantly having to work on it to keep it running, then, as IT, you fucked up.
Iâll also mention that thereâs a paradox in IT: weâre expected to do so much and if you just do all the work by hand, youâll be busy all the time. If you leverage scripts and scheduled tasks, you can significantly cut down on your workload. The paradox is that when you donât have those scripts and scheduled tasks, and youâre doing everything by hand, you donât have enough time to create the scripts to reduce your workload.
Iâll give an example. At a previous workplace, the bossman was very much in favor of doing things by hand, the original business model was T&M. He later moved to a more MSP model, where people are paying regardless of how much time was spent, so my focus shifted to automate everything and drop the ticket load as much as possible. In one such case, we kept getting issues related to a service failing. I donât recall what the issue was, nor what problem it created, but I remember that simply restarting the service fixed the problem. So instead of fielding dozens of tickets a year to restart the stupid service, I added a scheduled task to run a script that would restart the service automatically every week at (some godawful hour) AM, on a Sunday or something. Once that script was scheduled for weekly runs, we stopped getting those tickets.
I have dozens of other examples along the same lines. One of my most proud moments was a script to fix a service where, if another service was running before it, the service wouldnât load properly. The program service just wouldnât start if a system service was running. It was a non-critical system service, but both had to be running after boot time. I had already tried every combination of delayed start, and every time, the program service would fall because the system service ended up running too quickly. So I made a script to shut down the system service, start the program service, and then restart the system service, and scheduled it to run 15 minutes after boot, anytime the system restarted (usually overnight for patching). Once that was in place, complaints of (program) not working after patch day, went away.
I hate repeating process because nobody thought to actually fix the problem, they just patched it back together manually. When faced with a reoccurring problem, I look at how I can stop it from happening; of course I fix it in the short term but as soon as Iâm done Iâm working on a script that can do it for me, then figuring out the best way to trigger the script so that I donât have to be involved.
No matter how busy you are, finding a way to get rid of problems like that, by any means necessary, is essential; otherwise, youâll be drowning in tasks to fix stuff that shouldnât be broken.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. I think the issues that you mentioned are becoming increasingly prevalent in other lines of work as well. I do not work in IT, but really resonated with what you mentioned about documentation/reporting requirements being weaponized by upper management to increase âproductivityâ regardless of the cost (namely, quality of the work performed). I wholeheartedly agree that this environment is toxic, oppressive, and unsustainable.
I am still in my first job as a B2B tech and thought this was something only my workplace did, was scrutinise ticket time.
I continue to find it hard there because I legitimately donât slack but gaps end up between my time records (its hard to continuously work 4 hours at a time with zero downtime) and the boss comes down saying his KPI of ticket time / worked time teamwide keeps going down, and like you say the goalposts keep shifting.
I even went to the trouble of making my own time tracker that gave me even more information about my time entries and what was left for the day and how much I was out, way more info than what PSA gives you, but then got scared of continuing to work on it as the goalposts shifted again to billable time entries / worked time, and doing a time tracker isnât billable to a client.
Not really, but yes. Fib. Lie. Put down what you think is appropriate. Donât exaggerate, donât over bill, just adjust for what fits.
For me, I refuse to track my time down to the minute. I realized that if I put in 5 minutes for sending an email, I would get credit for 0.08 of an hour, but, 5 minutes is actually 0.083333⊠of an hour. So I started putting in 6 minutes instead (0.10 of an hour). Rather than be irrationally docked the 20 seconds or so, Iâm getting a whole ass extra 0.02h (or rather 0.1666⊠of an hour).
Iâll do 6 minutes, or anything in 15 minute increments. If it took 7 minutes, thatâs 15m. If it took 20, thatâs 30m on the record. If Iâm looking for a ticket, or closing a ticket (after my time is entered), or even if I go to take a shit while working on a ticket, that goes in the time entry. I might be in the bathroom, but my brain is working on the problem. Iâm not exactly taking a break from working the issue, Iâm just trying to brain storm while Iâm away from my keyboard.
Every second from the time I start looking for a ticket to work, to the time Iâve closed it, should be on the books. I didnât work from 9:35 to 9:56 on anything, I spent 9:30 to 9:35 finding, and opening the ticket prior to my time entry being started. I spent 9:56 to 10:00 closing the ticket and mentally preparing myself for the next task. Minute by minute tracking is unreasonable, and bluntly, you shouldnât do it. Youâll lose more time from what I call âgrey timeâ (doing all the things you need to do in order to account for your time), than you account for actually doing your job. Reading email, looking at documents and keeping up to date on technology issues⊠All of that is grey time.
Iâve put in time for internal meetings, "ticket review"s, even âreading emailâ. None of which has every been questioned. You need that time to simply keep yourself organized. Donât hesitate to mark it down and bill it to your own employer. I know they donât want you to do that, it âartificially inflatesâ your worked time, but bluntly, if theyâre going to require that you account for so much of your day that you canât have grey time anywhere in there, youâre doing yourself a disservice by not adding some kind of entry to account for it.
The only thing I strictly do not do, is mark down my time for lunch and breaks. Thatâs not acceptable to me. Everything else, sure. But Iâm going to pad it to account for my grey time. When I spend too much time doing stuff that I consider grey time, Iâll put in an internal entry for it, and bill my employer. I try to keep these to a minimum, but itâs an easy entry when you get called into a meeting or something.
Once you start seeing all the losses from grey time adding up, youâll be able to account for 6-7 hours of your day easily. Plus 30 minutes for lunch, and 2x15 minute breaks, and youâre missing an hour of your day at most.
There are times Iâve worried about not having kids, but comments like this help me feel good about my decision. Why would I want to put someone I love through this? (Or anyone, for that matter)
iâm often sorry i had kids - not for myself, because i love them, but for them.
iâm glad theyâre not interested in having their own kids, and i hope they are able to stick with it. and hopefully none of them/their partners ever needs an abortion.
This is exactly why Iâm opposed to bringing kids into the world⊠I mean, have you looked at the world? It sucks. Why would I want to condemn another individual, whom Iâm sure I will love wholeheartedly, to suffer through all of this for their entire life?
I didnât have any say in being born and if I had even an impression of what I was in for, I probably would have said no thanks.
The only thing Iâm thankful for from my parents is that they took care of me for so long. Iâm not thankful that Iâm alive and Iâm not thankful for being born. That said, Iâm also doing my damnedest to be a force for good in the world. Iâm not making a significant impact, because Iâm just one guy working a menial job, but Iâm going my best. If I must continue to be alive, I might as well try to make everything suck a little less.
youâre suddenly found in a meeting where you have to explain why you were so inefficient.
probably an account of the being in meetings questioning me about my efficiency, which proceed to then lower my efficiency, which then proceeds to spawn more meetings, and then proceeds to lower my efficiency even more.
Donât worry everyone, you 100% have the freedom to exploit the working class yourself. See? The system is fair. Oh, youâre not exploiting the working class for passive income? Maybe youâre just not smart like you think you are dummy!
Itâs real in the same sense that income from illegal activities is real. You have to report it to the IRS and it requires harming others in order to acquire.
I mean if youâre wealthy enough you can just make money on interest and dividends. You can get a 5% interest rate on $2m right now and thatâs insured, no real risk. Thatâs like 75k/yr without doing any work.
But thatâs probably not what most people mean when they say passive income. And basic income for the wealthy is kind of backwards.
What about royalty income? Like, residuals, or�
A few years ago I designed a bunch of clever tee shirtsâŠand they keep selling. Not a ton, but enough for me to call it âpassive incomeâ at this point.
It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you donât want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.
But donât worry, the American Dreamâą is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe theyâll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.
I make about $7k a year from some books and T-shirt designs I did a few years ago. I literally do nothing to maintain them (I put in the hard work making them originally) and the money just goes in my bank each month. Itâs certainly not enough to live on, I have a full time job, but it pays for our groceries.
I publish through Amazon Print on Demand services (Amazon Merch and KDP), and I have a few other stores selling items too. Basically I design the manuscripts and graphics, upload the files to the service, they list it, and when it sells they print and fulfill it and send me a portion of the profit.
One Christmas I made $8k in a month and we went on a cruise with the profit. Those were good times! Itâs settled down a bit now as more people have flooded the platforms and copied all the content.