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do you ever want to gently float up to someone and whisper “this isn’t a debate; i am actually educated on the subject and i’m telling you you’re wrong”

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reblog to tell a 14 year old that these are the very, very hard years and they're not wrong to feel the way they do.

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4 points

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Reminder to self:

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Magunatip bamboo dance by Budayawan

Source

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it's called a competitive salary because you need to fight your boss to get paid enough

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ILONA MAHER as LUISA MADRIGAL

Dancing With The Stars (33x06)

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DS9 | 5.01

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This can be true, but also: all 40-hour workweek jobs are not created equal. Some jobs are just more physically tiring than others, and some jobs/workplaces are more mentally/emotionally damaging than others. Heck, the same job can be more draining at some times of the year than others.

That said, if your job is *consistently* leaving you too dead inside to live outside of work, whatever the reason, eventually it will turn into a disabling medical condition, even if you didn't start out with one. I know doctors like to brush everything off as stress or anxiety or depression (which are of course not serious or disabling conditions at all) but it is worth considering before spending a crapton of time and money on trying to get a medical diagnosis whether your disabling symptoms are in fact caused by your job giving you stress anxiety and depression.

Sometimes there's nothing wrong with you, the job is just really that bad.

The 40 hour work week isn't good for anyone. We know this, both on a gut level and from empirical research.

However

There are people, the majority of people in fact, who go through their 40 hour jobs and then come home, make dinner, and do something with their evening that is enjoyable and not just a dead-eyed zone out. They spend time with family or friends, play with pets or kids, engage in hobbies, or even just sit and enjoy media actively.

When they talk about how much it sucks to go to work, it's a kind of general grumbling (because again, nobody likes the current system).

If you approach going to work and feel like you might just die if you have to go in again. If you come home after work and can't do anything except stare blankly at the TV or your phone. If you can barely make dinner or keep your house clean. If you feel like you're actually drowning all the time and have no ability to actively engage in any enriching activities outside of work.

That's not just the general shittiness of the system. That's a sign that you have a mental or physical health issue that's being compounded by the system. It's a sign of disability.

The medical system where you are may suck donkey balls, but there's a lot you can do just by tracking your symptoms and trying to figure out what's going on. And if you can get medical help, you can vastly improve the quality of your life, even if you can't get out of the system.

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Even in food service, there is the demand for exponential growth. Each store has a profit target you're expected to hit every quarter. Each quarter the target gets bigger and bigger. The only way to make sure you hit or exceed that target is to increase sales or cut costs. Sales can only go so far though, so at a certain point there is the understandable temptation (not justifiable, but understandable) for your manager to start cutting hours. Once they do, your location has entered a Death Spiral.

The thing about the Death Spiral is it is nearly impossible to escape. It starts innocuous enough, with a few hours getting shaved off every week. And true enough at first you probably didn't need those hours. They were the slack, the extra hands that helped distribute the work and made it easier on everyone. You might not even notice they're gone. Maybe the morning rush is a little harder to handle, maybe there isn't as much time to chat as there used to be. But on the whole nothing has changed. You're still hitting your sales quota and, hey, everyone seems to be working a little harder. That's good, right?

Then the next quarter rolls around. You exceeded your quota. Upper management is very excited. But now your new quota is even higher than it would have been if you had simply performed to expectations. You raise prices a bit, push more expensive drinks, and sure, cut a few more hours. Bit by bit the slack gets tighter. The fat gets trimmed. All because continual growth, continual improvement, is not just demanded, but expected.

The endgame of the Death Spiral is the expectation that every worker will operate at 100% efficacy 100% of of the time, and that nothing will go wrong ever. It never reaches this point, as any food service worker will tell you, shit goes wrong. Service gets worse, you lose a few customers, and you miss your quota. This is the point of no return, because the only way to solve the problem is to add more hours. But there's no way upper management will approve spending more money. On a failing store? Don't be ridiculous. Maybe get those numbers up and we'll consider adding hours back. But the only way to get those numbers up is with no hours. It's a Catch-22. You're trapped. Slowly, inevitably, the store fails, and then closes.

The Death Spiral is a doomed strategy, but it is the one corporations push in response to investor pressure. It tricks workers into more work for the promise of relief later, if they do well and succeed, not realizing they'll only be asked to do even more next time. So how do you fight it? Know your worth. Don't let anyone give you more work without some kind of kickback. Don't fool yourself into thinking that being indispensable will lead to a reward later.

But the best defense? Join a union.

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For my Entire Childhood I was low-key upset that my mom always ate all the blueberry flavored instant oatmeal out of every box when that was the best flavor without leaving any for me, but I'd been raised not to be selfish so I never said anything, because I didn't want her to NOT have delicious blueberry oatmeal bc of me.

When I was in college, a whole adult, I was having an awful day and opened the pantry to see all the blueberry packets were gone and at the limit of my endurance I dared to whine "aww, all the blueberry ones are gone" in my mother's vague direction. My mother was flabbergasted.

Turns out my mother HATES blueberry instant oatmeal and was, for YEARS, eating them first so I wouldn't have to eat them. Years of unnecessary suffering for both of us cause we were both just too polite to complain.

i think one of the most important things you learn about making connections with others is that a significant portion of the time people just do not know theyre doing what theyre doing

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FUCK THIS COUNTRY

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I think it would be really funny if George Lucas didn't mean for womp rats to be longer than most humans are tall and he just had no idea how big two meters is. I mean he clearly thought a parsec was a unit of time and not distance. It's possible. And really funny.

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Yall gotta quit giving me false alarms I keep seeing the first image on this post and got my "sit the fuck back down it's too soon to call results" reply half written in my head before I see the second one I'm still jet lagged from the time change don't do this to me

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this is very unsympathetic of me maybe, but sometimes I see posts that make me go "I think you guys are just making up problems"