It may have been the case before that people thought hard work brought a better life, but now things have changed
Professor Bobby Duffy worked on the study, and said that millennials have ‘become much more sceptical about prioritising work as they’ve made their way through their career’.
I worked hard. Busted my ass for almost 10 years. Almost made it over 100k a year and then BOOM. Mass layoffs, lottery style. I got another job but at half the pay, the best available pay for the area.
The game is rigged against anyone who isn’t already rich.
Plot twist: IT NEVER HAS.
It has, but only in very limited and specific circumstances, mostly historical. Homesteading isn’t exactly a profession anymore.
Mm, not quite. Homesteading in the early US, for example, was an insidious seeding scheme by the ruling class to simultaneously cull both the indigenous defenders and the “pioneer” (aka wishful peasant) population shipped in by the boat load. Canaries in a gold mine, if you will.🥲
The decline of unions will do that to you. We’re in a second Gilded Age.
I mean, that is objectively true now. Hard work just gets you more work.
Hard work only brings a better life to the person who signs your paycheck.
If hard work brought success, the donkey would own the farm
Turns out it just makes you a jackass.
Boomer parents, Boomers and some gen X were a fluke in history.
Being a slave was never a good position, and you can’t work your away out of structural bullshit.
Got to face the parasite class in other ways since employment arrangement ensures you can never win.
The key isn’t to stop working hard, it’s to stop working hard for someone or something that you don’t get to directly benefit from.
I’m self employed. I enjoy my work. It’s very rewarding, but every time i get a little extra money sometime comes along and takes it.
I have no retirement savings. My retirement plan is to kill myself when I’m too sick to work. I’ve made sure my life insurance is written so that it will pay out to my wife even if I off myself.
I come from a long line of men who don’t die easy. I watched my grandfather refuse food or water after being diagnosed with stage 4 bone cancer and still live for two weeks. That was after ten years of enduring strike recovery. My dad coughed up a lung from congestive heart failure for over two years before finally wasting away, looking like a pregnant Holocaust survivor. Same for several other uncles and great-uncles. I figure I’ve got another 25 years before I’m a liability. I’m already physically miserable. Middle age sucks. Old age sucks even harder and I’m not even there yet.
I’m gonna follow one of my great-uncles examples and go for a walk in the woods. I’ll make sure whatever SARs volunteer that draws the short straw isn’t too traumatized when they find me. Just another old man that chose his own time
Also self employed. My situation is a bit better than yours (99% luck, I know how I got my contracts) and I’ll probably be able to retire, maybe even a little early if I can keep up my skills until retirement.
However, my plan when the money starts running out or the back pain makes it too hard to get out of bed every day is the same as yours. I don’t plan on getting married. I’m not leaving anyone behind. I’m not going into a bang 'em and bin 'em joint. My back has been degrading since I got rear ended in my 20s. I have a couple of acres in the middle of nowhere that’s entirely wooded where no one goes (I guess, I only check on the place twice a year…taxes are almost nothing because no one wants to live anywhere near it). I’m going out there and just becoming one with nature.
It’s very difficult to be self employed because the big boys have every market covered and can take a loss here or there to corner a new one. Meanwhile, you have to pay your bills on whatever you earn. There are benefits to being employed–at the right place.
-
This is why I stopped working for myself (not the best business partner, long story I won’t get into here).
-
I hope that you find a better way and that you don’t have to resort to that. Suicide will hurt your wife, I have a friend who had her husband shoot himself in the head with a shotgun a few years ago. She’s 74, and while she has her kids and grandkids visit sometimes, she misses him terribly 3 years later. They were married for around 50 years.
Please, choose a different way.
Only selfish people ask someone else to suffer longer because they’ll be a little sad without them.
Only selfish people shoot themselves in the head when they have loved ones to help take care of.
See how your logic works? You’re a shallow troll at best. I will not voice what I actually think you are.
-
Gotcha, subsistence farming it is
Unironically this. I knew a guy who used pandemic remote work ubiquitousness to buy a huge farm, move to it, start growing all the food he and his family needed all while working as a software dev. He hated “work” but LOVED working.
Not necessarily subsistence, but like growing your own garden to feed your family, plus focus on one crop you can sell locally? I’m down for that.
Gardening as a hobby will end up costing most people more money than they save from eating what they grow. Turns out, farming is a profession for good reason-it’s hard to do well unless you put in a lot of work. One of the under-discussed aspects of the baby boom and its attendant economic boom is that the boomers represented a massive shift from rural communities and agricultural labor to cities and industrial labor or white collar work. As an example, my dad and his five siblings grew up on a farm in Minnesota, and not a single one of them stayed farmers. Every one of them decided life in the city and getting a college degree was better than getting up at 5 to milk cows and collect eggs.
That’s because in many cases it often doesn’t and can even lead to a worse life depending on your priorities.
