People spend their whole lives trying to prove to the machine that they aren’t a burden, so that they aren’t next on the chopping block. If they have a problem with that, well “it’s up to you to deal with that.”
So everyone has to perform. Constantly. We all need to prove we are an irreplaceable asset or we’ll end up on the street. “I am my best self. I am useful. I have marketable skills. I am calm and collected. Because I can’t trust anyone to support me but me.” That’s hustle culture in a nutshell, isn’t it? But can people (especially those who aren’t sheltered by wealth) really live like that all the time? Especially in the face of a world full of problems that a positive attitude alone can’t solve? With the constant pressure to wear the skinsuit of a perfect asset even if the world is burning around them? Isn’t it obvious that it would make everyone so tired?
To top it off, when the inevitable happens, and people crumble under the weight of the mask and and all their fear and anxiety explodes out of them, often the world will give them the exact response they feared. Confusion at the sudden collapse followed by “Well I guess they weren’t strong enough to handle it. Not my problem.” or at best a “Let’s get that mask back on.”
I hate forced positivity so fucking much. I’ve been told by adults, teachers, bosses, whoever since I could speak that I had an Attitude Problem. My mental response to this has pretty much always been “fuck you, the world has a bullshit problem and im not gonna change my core personality magically and I certainly dont wanna do so to appease these cretins” well before I could articulate it. A positive outlook on a pretty grim reality isnt something to be proud of, it’s delusion. There’s keeping hope, but that ain’t what this is.
Whenever I was visibly in a bad mood my mom was fond of telling me “change the attitude.” One of many things that drilled into me the skill of keeping my face expressionless.
I will give myself this. I never backed down and kept it up and still do. Suffering in silence just leads to further suffering, fuck that noise. Once my parents got their heads around me they’ve been cool af but maaaaaaan did we fight hard when I was younger. They adjusted to life in this hellscspe so naturally. My mom only ever had one job from age 19 to retirement. My dad worked around a lot when I was young but eventually got a sick union gig with the post office. Once moved out and all that and they stsrted seeing how high rent was and how little wages had increased and high school people I knew graduating with degrees and working the same kitchen jobs as me, they noticed how much worse things are and gained a lot of sympathy for my perspective.
But yeah, as a kid id get that all the time, it was dismissing my feelings and I knew it and would often call it out and then there would be a whole fight and my mom would cry so she could win. She eventually cut that manipulative shit out, and my dad intervened regsading it. I think its mostly cause I stopped feeling bad when it happened and we would hit a reallt uncomfortable for him stalemate. We had some harsh times. Im in my 30s and like both of em a lot now and a big part is that we have gotten comfortable with the fact that we are fundamentally different. Things oddly chilled out when I becsme a teenager, I think they figured out that I was gonna do and say what I wanted and they’d be better off encouraging it towards the best direction possible and not opposing it entirely, which was a reslly smart move on their part or id totally be dead from an OD by now
I don’t even see it as positive. If anything the “fix your attitude” stuff comes across as nihilistic to me, because there is always this message of “The world sucks, that’s just how it is. Stop complaining and deal with it in a way that isn’t a burden on the status quo. No one cares, or we do care but we can’t deal with you right now.”
Yeah, i feel like my attitude is pretty tuned intonthe state of things and generally has been. It’s like when I was a Gifted Kid who wasnt Living up to My Potential. Potential for what? I didn’t know I was in training for a job that needed doing. Like im fucking anakin in the prequels and not a child who was good at reading and talking. It was never about anything specific, if they had a gig lined up id have probably worked toward it, it’s the fact that it was this abstract notion of always being okay with what you’re supposed to do according to someone else. Ill do that if it serves a purpose, I’m happy to be a cog in a machine that works, but dont tell me to eat a shit sandwich and smile while I do it. Irs bad enough I gotta eat the shit sandwich. Complaining is fun and cool
A lot of times when they talk about “Potential” as something unique about someone, it is a code word for class. They want you to pick up a career path that is prestigious and high-paying so that they can point to you as a success story. They want to see you get in to the exclusive group, and to sustain the hierarchy that money creates, that some people are overall quantifiably superior to others. It’s part of the reactionary outlook that sees allies around them not as people to celebrate in their own right, but as agents that advance the same cause.
These days I can use elementary business knowledge, middle school math, and LTV to demonstrate that the positions I’ve worked create upwards of $100 of net exchange value per hour, sometimes upwards of $200 or even more. I don’t need to impress or validate anyone anymore, there are things that I gravitate to because I like them intrinsically, not because there’s a carrot dangling by them. And coincidentally many of these things are weaponizable for a counter-economics.
Hey, could you detail how do you apply this to any job? I’m not that good at economics, thank you!
At a pizza place where I worked, the menu cost of what each cook on the line could produce per hour was at least $200. Spreading this out across all restaurant staff, it became closer to $80.
Of course it’s easiest to do this when you are directly making a product. In other sectors, for instance at larger retailers, it is much harder to quantify, but if you have access to company overview info then you can easily divide revenue by total workforce and get a productivity metric. The nationwide average is a little over $160k per year ($29T GDP, 175M workers). It’s not unusual for companies to hit $300k a year per worker.
My accounting career has radicalized me far more than any other factor.