Hard Work SUX, and so does life?

If you manage not to be too disturbed by the zero-nutritional-value R-Rated Opening of this article, you will find the most touching description I read of what it means to be a salary man.

To me, there are other venues of life-earning, but I swear, if it comes to choosing between being salaried or being a Basement-Dweller, I choose the basemets.

It does suck, but it's not as bleak as it sounds: If you get in a sufficiently incompetent and bloated organization and know your office politics, you might well eventually find yourself the proud recipient of a corporate non-job.

Proud and non-job do not belong in the same sentence.

edited 11th Aug '11 5:47:02 PM by GoodGuyGreg

Really? Someone who finds work demeaning might be proud they got a non-job.

"We humans were not designed to spend our days taking orders from others. We were first and foremost hunter-gathers and we are happiest when we roam, explore, think and grow in playful ways.[2] We are miserable when we are confined, and even more miserable when we are ordered about and forced to care for our offspring alone and in the absence of extended families. The nuclear family is a special kind of hell created by the Protestant bourgeoisie to generate wealth for the sole end of pleasing a psychopathic god (you aren’t even allowed to really enjoy it). If agriculture inflicted great and enduring misery on the masses, then hierarchical social structure, slavery, serfdom and employment magnified it into hell on earth."

The phrase "sour grapes" springs to mind. I don't really see much in that article besides childish wangsting by someone who (judging by the quoted passage and comments about how intelligent people are "marginalized) is projecting his own dissatisfactions on the rest of the world.

Intellgent people, people who can ackowledge things for what they are, truth-bearers, pare naturally antisocial and the subject of mistrust and scorn. It's called anti-intellectualism, and it is real.

It is only, through extensive research and scarring practice, that the intelligent learn to be artful too, and use the abovementioned sensitivity to truth for their own purposes. This effort, It Gets Easier, once you have given up on redeeming them and have accepted them as delicate tools to use over and over again, and/or pets.

I am feeling pessimistic tonight. I'm on a "romantic" winning streak these times, and it's being depressingly easy, especially with exceptionally beautiful girls, especially if they are already in a committed relationship. Unfaithfulness, unfaithfulness everywhere.

All I can say is that the writer of the article needs to shut the fuck up and pursue a job that he likes then.

I know how miserable I'd be working in an office job, that's why I don't do it. That's why I went for the military, that's why I'm in college to become a paramedic, because I don't want a boring job that gives me no freedom or sense of purpose.

Decide for yourself what you want out of life so you can draw a roadmap on how to get there. Then you start walking.

edited 11th Aug '11 7:15:33 PM by Barkey

Greg: Care to actually say something with actual meaning or reason to it?

It is entirely possible to get a job you like and will not despise. It might take a while depending on what you want to do. If you hate your job find something else to do.

The article is very whiny there is no nice way to put it.

Okay, first up: This guy already lost most of the respect I had for him as soon as he mentioned cryonics. That only works in sci-fi, and in very small creatures under very specific conditions — something the size of a human would be damaged too badly to be salvageable.

Second: God, this is whiny! Work sucks, kids suck, life's a bitch and then we die. If you want to die so bad, then    go and die   . Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying what's left of my life, warts and all, because death is boring.

^

Cryonics is worth further research imho, I think eventually we could find the means to properly suspend a human being, in time.

That being said, this guy is way too into it.

Yeah cryonics is one of those fields that has POTENTIAL to be great, but with current tech it's nothing more than a icy version of a burial.

But yeah, if this guys hates his job, he should do what Peter Gibbons of Office Space did - stop going, and find another one.

"I am feeling pessimistic tonight. I'm on a "romantic" winning streak these times, and it's being depressingly easy, especially with exceptionally beautiful girls, especially if they are already in a committed relationship. Unfaithfulness, unfaithfulness everywhere. "

So, you're scoring with pretty but faithless girls, therefore people suck, therefore working for a living sucks?

"I know how miserable I'd be working in an office job, that's why I don't do it. That's why I went for the military, that's why I'm in college to become a paramedic, because I don't want a boring job that gives me no freedom or sense of purpose.

Decide for yourself what you want out of life so you can draw a roadmap on how to get there. Then you start walking. "

A thousand times this.

Also, the main upshot of that article seems to be along the lines of "modern people/working people have to do things they don't want to, get old, and die". Guess what? That's not a product of modern society or working for a living, it's a product of being a living human being. Everyone has to do things that they don't want to, everyone gets health problems sooner or later, and everyone dies. Even the author's utopian hunter-gatherers (in fact, they have more hardships and die younger than civilized people).

You can either do what you have to (even when you don't want to) and make the most of things, or you can wangst about how much your life sucks. Civilized people have the free time and physical security to find existential things to bitch about, while hunter-gatherers are busy enough with surviving that they worry about that instead.

tl;dr: The grass is always greener on the other side, especially when you have a full stomach and a recliner to sit around and mull about it in.

edited 11th Aug '11 8:26:17 PM by Wanderhome

If you hate your job so much good sir can I have it? You can work at my old job washing dishes at minimum wage.

Dishwashing is not too horrible. It still sucks though. Though the guy i briefly worked for paid us under the table.

It is impossible to find the absolute perfect solution to living in conditions you desire.

edited 11th Aug '11 8:43:35 PM by TuefelHundenIV

From the sounds of it, he likes his job—he's talking about what he perceives around him. It sounds like Greg hates his job, but let's not judge this on the basis of Greg.

Can I have your job? I don't have one and honestly I am pleased with pretty much fucking anything.

Stevebat's current ideas of an ideal pre-college job:

• Full time
• Pay >= $10.00/hour
• Non-Labour

Might be hard to get non-labour for pre-college except as some kind of admin assistant or secretary.

Anyway, so I'm not sure what the OP means. Working for a business that has control over your projects is not something you can be adequately compensated for?

Having to do hard work to survive is more a function of the entropic, chaotic universe we live in rather than any particular facet of society. It's just something you have to grow up and deal with, as best you can.

What kind of hard work you choose to do is really up to you. It's possible you'll get something less hard, or harder, but what's much more important is getting something you enjoy more (that still supports you living, let's be realistic.)

My ideal job right now: Civil Engineering intern. Good $, actual career experience, almost a guaranteed job out of college.

But I'd settle for just about anything. Blistershitting fuck is it hard getting a summer job when you don't just have one to come back to from highschool, and you go to college five hours away.

I've got tutoring, but that only pays 7.25 an hour, plus two 0.25 raises because this would be my third year. So 7.75. Cheap-ass universities.

edited 11th Aug '11 9:24:46 PM by deathjavu

My ideal job is to be a Gunsmith with a focus on restoring, replica, and repairing historical weapons. I would even want to expand that to include non-modern weapons.

My ideal job is to be an eternal student and therapist.

Let's throw mediation in there too because hey this is "IDEAL FANTASY DREAM LAND" we're talking about.

My ideal job would be to own my own distillery, and roll out all kinds of whiskeys, scotches, vodkas, liquers, and so on...

It'd be like a Willy Wonka factory of liquor.

Basically we all have a dream job but we may never reach that job. So quite often you have to bite the bullet and take a shitty job.

I just want to finish my Paramedic degree, after that? Maybe take a gig with Triple G 4 S/Olive patching up holes in people and putting holes in others.

That or I'll just stay stateside and keep being a paramedic, I think I'd be happy with that.

I could say "Oh yeah I want to be a special forces General who does x, x, and x!"

But if there's anything that people need to realize it's that sometimes you gotta be realistic. If you have a really lofty goal, plot your course to get there and plan a few alternate routes you can take if something goes wrong, or make sure you have a way to support yourself if you don't get all the way there.

Say if I wasn't able to finish my paramedic course, I'm still EMT certified.(Not that getting licensed as a paramedic is really all that hard in the scheme of things. It takes hard work, but it's not something you have to be a special snowflake to do.)

edited 12th Aug '11 2:31:48 AM by Barkey

Luckily, my job is awesome and I love it. I have enough intrinsinc value that the hyrarchy can't just absorb me into a stupid suit and into talking without synergy. Not without my consent, and then I'd be roleplaying for the sake of a goal.

To those that say "white collar desk jockeys should be thankful, their life is easier and more comfortable than that of huter-gatherers", I think Barkey will agree with me that comfort, security and a long lifespan do not have a 1:1 correlation with happiness/enjoyment. Not by themselves. Not when all you do wih that extra time is suffer. The problem isn't "working on a desk". The problem is "working within a sick power structure that rapes your soul at every move". That is what needs to be changed.

Say what you will about cryonics, it's still better than any other form of post-mortem treatment. I intend to sign my children in from the day they are born. What the article disputes is that besides all the easily-countered arguments about cryonics not working, people may not seek to live on if they believe the future will suck as much as the present.

And yeah, I myself was in a whiny mood because I shared some sex with ("score"? are we playing a sport here? did she lose?) yet another unfaithful girl that night. Thing is, I'm a bit of a Tom Jones, and the reason I'm depressed is that I fear I've been helping them destroy their own self-esteem, their own relationships. See, I can't help but care for them (I wouldn't sleep with a girl I don't really genuinely like) and feel guilty for my part in this. But getting to know them, in all meanings of the word, is just so great... until I stumble on that one rock, time an again.