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Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.
I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).
The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)
The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.
All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.
I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?
Can you elaborate on this a bit? Haven't seen your full take.
Overall, I feel you man. Working a paycheck job that you don't find fulfilling is awful. For certain personality types like myself, it is downright torturous. And I don't say that lightly.
It's sad that so many people, especially on the right, cannot understand this basic fact. I completely agree that there is dignity in working for something meaningful, and gaining discipline and teaching yourself to do things you don't enjoy in the short term for long term gain is a crucial skill. Yet all of that can be true, while still saying that the modern model of a 9-5 job that is most likely utterly meaningless to the employee is one of the most broken and evil systems man has ever created. Yes it doesn't have the outright violence and evils of the past, but it's far more insidious in how justifiable it is, and how it slowly breaks people's spirits over time.
As to fixing it... well, who the fuck knows? I like to think if we genuinely build good AI and robots, hopefully we can automate away much of the work. Unfortunately the trend seems to be that as we get better tech to theoretically make our lives easier and better, instead we just end up demanding more stuff from ourselves and each other, then burning out.
I think the only realistic solution I can see would be some combination of a better understanding of how early childhood trauma impacts people's ability to do useful work, and gene therapy. Then we slowly get everyone regardless of race or family wealth on a close to level playing field, and we can have a true meritocracy. The people who don't want to work can pursue art or whatever the hell, and the people who do want to work can own starships and planets and have galactic empires. That's the dream, at least.
Maybe I'm an idiot or too Pollyanna, but I've worked a bunch of jobs ranging from farm labor to Walmart to mopping floors to financial analysis and I've never thought any of them were awful. Most had bad days occasionally but never beyond that. I've had less than wonderful bosses and wonderful bosses and prefer the latter but even then there have always been things about the job that were at least decent.
After about 10 days vacation I'm still enjoying myself but am usually starting to get bored pretty quickly.
i think salaried work is liberating in the sense it gives you autonomy. you can say " i have work, I cannot do XYZ" and everyone understands, without the guilt trip of having to make up an excuse for not attending a wedding or some other shit that you don't want to do
The thing I don't want to do is work, because I'd rather be doing various things that a dependency on work is keeping me from doing (like exploring the world or full-time intellectual pursuits), so this doesn't really seem like autonomy to me.
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