It feels all but certain that I won’t be able to enjoy a prosperous life or get to retire. All of the wealth is going straight to the top. All of the opportunities to move up in the world are being rug-pulled. All of the federal agencies that help keep us safe and healthy are gone. The social safety net is getting flushed down the toilet. We will live in disease and squalor, and the most vulnerable of us will die.
Because I dared to not be a sociopath, I and anyone else who voted for sanity will be deemed enemies of the state and hunted down - which won’t be hard, because it would be trivial to build the most robust surveillance state in human history if it doesn’t exist already.
I myself have disabilities (which I don’t think qualify for benefits) that make it hard, but not impossible, to find a job. The problem is that I just can’t bring myself to do it because I don’t get what the fucking point is anymore. I have to work so hard to get out of this rut just for some fascist fuck to kill me or toss me into a torture facility before I can even experience life on my own.
Have you been in a similar headspace and were able to escape it? If so, what snapped you out of it?
I know it’s easier said than done, but try to find work that actually helps your community, but that you also find fulfilling - child, elderly, and or disabled care, working for a charity doing anything from fundraising to cooking to IT, working in a community centre or library, coaching, teaching, handy-work, gardening, and on and on. The pay may not be as high as it is other places, but at least you’ll know that you’re contributing to your community in a positive way.
Bonus points if the place you work is a non-profit, unionised, a co-op, or generally outside of the existing establishment (E: so not part of the state or a large corporation) - building dual power is imperative to changing society, we need communal structures and networks to fall back on once this shit collapses. You can be part of that.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
E: while we’re here, Mutual Aid
I work to have money for shelter and food and, just as importantly, some spending money for hobbies and travel. The freedom to be able to drive basically anywhere any time is a great thing to have.
The inequalities today are large but also the standard of living for even the lower class is probably higher than any other time in history. You can go your entire life without holding a shovel or hammer or piece of firewood Imagine instead having to build your own house, grow your own food, and cut firewood to stay warm. Things aren’t so bad.
Move to a really poor country and meet real people there. Your life will get better, inevitably.
I hated the idea for the longest time. Then I realized a few things. I changed my outlook of working a hopeless job to a job being a tool for me to get the money I need to live a better life. I also accepted that life isn’t fair and that not all the work I put in will equal the output. It feels like you have to do the work of 10 men to get anywhere. I accepted that and I put myself to work.
Sometimes you just have to get lucky and sometimes you have to grow. I worked many temp jobs and fast food restaurants until figured stuff out and landed a couple decent jobs. I started being able to hold a job for 1 year and then 2 years. I got lucky and found a temp job that decided to hire everyone perm. The catch was they waited to see who would sink or float. I floated. I wouldn’t have floated if I hadn’t had previous life experience.
Look at a job as an avenue or tool to achieve your goals. If you don’t have any goals then just pick something. It could be as simple as you want to save up for something nice. Start small and pick bigger goals as you achieve them. And going back to the job as a tool thing, if you don’t like the tool then get a new one. You wouldn’t use a broken tool to fix something. Sometimes you have a bucket of random tools and you have to pull out a couple before you find the right or that isn’t broken. Whatever to you pick, just try and keep trying. As long as you keep trying, you’ll figure it out.
I would also add to try to improve yourself along the way. Whether it be working on self esteem, how to write a resume, interviewing skills, how to cook, how to improve your finances, how to fix a car, work on a computer… Just work on something. You’ll only help yourself and learn transferable skills along the way.
For a while there I was a homeless alcoholic. Now I’m an alcoholic. Given the choice between the two I know which I’d rather.
It is a scam, in the end it is pointless to try, but you gotta eat, clothe yourself, and it’s warmer indoors, which all necessitate to generate income._
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TL; DR Get in on the scam.
Pick something you like to do, or have a talent for, and plan a path to make money from it. You may still have to work for someone else initially, to develop skills and get experience, but it will be better than doing a shit job only for money.
Research what resources there are to support your startup. Even in places where there is no help from government or anything else for individuals, you will find they want to support business.
Especially if you have extra challenges, if you get good, they will make a narrative around your success and promote you as an example.
Life gets worse when you dont work hard.
It doesn’t always get better when you do work, but it can always get worse.
To generalize the answer a bit, if for no other goal, than make the goal to move to a country that better aligns with your beliefs and that you feel rewards you properly for your work. Make incremental steps to achieving that (what exactly the list looks like depends upon the person’s current state and where they want to go) and make marking each one off a goal and motivation.
Get a STEM degree and move to a country that respects its citizens.
Or other degree that’s also useful, including social work or the arts.
The arts lol? Nothing but debt.
Supply and demand. There’s less people in STEM so they get paid more.
After telling a generation of kids to get stem degrees or they’ll be doomed to flip burgers, I feel I have the responsibility to say this is no longer the case. The jobs still pay well but; between ghost job listings, recent layoffs, and every entry level job wanting like 4 years of hyper specific experience; I have observed it being nearly impossible to enter the job market or move around it right now, and the whole thing feels very oversaturated.
Unless you’re willing to build bombs. Don’t know much about that end of it cause I’m not interested in developing things intended to kill people. but that’s where the money is if that’s what you’re about.
Nah. Money is not in military contracting at all.
No, bombs and the defence industry was not was I was on about. I see your point. Yes there’s been some downturn recently, but the tech industry has always been cyclical. It’s difficult to get hired today, and there’s certainly favoritism towards senior employees.
My point was simply about economics; supply and demand. In my university, about half of all degrees issued are in the arts. If employers want someone with that kind of training, then they have all of the selection in the world. Compare this to a tech company. If a tech company wants to expand their business and they need to implement a technology to do that, depending on what technology it is, there might be like, 1k… maybe 100k, maybe 1M people on the planet that have that specialty? Employers are going to pay a lot more for a person with that kind of training.
I wasn’t implying you were talking about defense, I was just saying that if you’re only about money then you can make a lot of it developing weapons for the government.
Different universities specialize in different things. I went to an engineering university that issued mostly engineering degrees, plus a few business degrees. Both of my state’s public universities also have fairly large colleges of engineering with quite a few engineering programs run by them. You’re also not only competing locally, but with remote, outsource and H1B visa workers. There is plenty of supply.
God forbid you have to train an employee in the specialization you’re looking for once in a while.
Naive old advice. You are about one generation too late for this to be relevant.
Lol fuck you, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
As someone that spent half their life very poor, I always take offense with the “just move” answer. Many people, if not most, in the US cannot afford to emigrate. It is also very likely that OP or someone else in their situation, cannot afford to get a STEM degree.
My sincere apologies for trying to be helpful.
You don’t. That’s what the homeless people are for.
But, it’s not impossible to move up. When oil crashed in March 2020, several companies’ stock, which you can purchase on Robin Hood or any app-based exchange, were down to pennies. Those shares are now trading for $15-$25 dollars, so even if you bought a small amount, you made a tidy profit.
Trump, in his largesse and incompetence, is likely to inadvertently cause a market crash somewhere in the next four years, so I’d encourage you to save at least a few bucks if you can from each check against the possibility of being able to buy stock super-cheap in the wake of a crash. If you have the patience to hold your stock for a year or two, it’s rewarding.
Maybe try to find a small business you care about or interests you? I own a small business. It’s me, my wife, my sister-in-law and two friends I made in the industry. We all get paid $16/hr. We got to create the environment we wanted to work in. Its a lot of work but we’re happy and feel more free than we would elsewhere.
I know I’m coming from a point of privilege writing this but I like to think we’re all on equal footing at my place and we’re doing our best to grow together rather than making me rich. I’ve worked for a lot of small businesses as well and they often have more respect for skills and individuals - not all - but a lot. If you find a place you like or even love it can become like a second home.
God I miss my job.
More than 20 years of peace and I took it for granted. When the boss started talking about selling the place I thought, “Who would buy this outdated hole in the ground that makes no real money and is surrounded by competition?”
What bums me out the most though is that when I was 16 he said, “Come work for me. In 10 years I intend to retire and I’ll lease one of these places out to you and you’ll take over when I die.”
I knew it wasn’t happening at the 11 year mark.
Don’t be loyal. Jump around. Don’t throw your life and time away. Everyone I know who has ever made any money did so by selling their skills to the highest bidder.
I helped someone else get everything they ever wanted and I got nothing but promises.
Don’t do that. Seriously.
(I should have made this its own comment but yours is the one that moved me to write it. The speech is directed mostly at OP and anyone else who stumbles onto it.)
I have no answer for you. Really, there is no point. Hopefully enough people give up on the system that it crashes and we can start over.
If everybody gives up on the system we fought to build with protections for workers and public goods everyone can use, then starting over will just cause more death and suffering.
Try to find a job you enjoy from 9-5. That means focusing on activities you enjoy that are the main activity of said job. I worked in a pet store because it afforded me 30% of my time playing with puppies, even though the remaining 70% was cleaning puppy shit and stocking goods. I now work as a therapist because I spend 70% of my time talking to people about their problems (which I enjoy), and 30% doing paperwork and correspondence. Make your job something you enjoy most of them time and it gets much easier. Then, you retire and collect Social Security. As long as you’ve worked for most of your life, that’ll be a decent retirement. You’ll have to live frugally, but it’ll be livable.
Also, if you can manage it, invest $10,000 as early as you can in a stock market index fund and pay for a fund manager. By the time you retire, that will provide you with a substantial cushion to rest on.
Get offline, and simplify. Start doing things that are good for you. There is yet joy to come.
