I like being busy, but I like having agency over how I am busy. I don’t want to be “busy” because I have a bunch of arbitrary and meaningless paperwork to turn in that my boss won’t even read, but I like being “busy” in that I’m happy to spend my time doing things that have an immediate impact.
Give me a 12 hour day cleaning up a homeless shelter over paperwork.
So yeah… I noticed you haven’t filed your TPS reports this week.
When we got to UML diagrams I dropped out of programming and CS. I’d rather eat fucking glass.
My bullshit poison paper work was lesson plans. Like, what other profession expects you to tell them what you are going to do a week in advance? I planned my lessons, but I didn’t do it in a way that matched their paperwork. Like, bruh, can you trust that the stack of books on my desk with notes on them indicates something?
Like, I don’t know what vocabulary or math skills I’ll be teaching this week - because sometimes I’d find out they didn’t know how to use a calculator or the same dickweeds that wanted me to have my entire future planned out decided to have a random fire drill.
I like teaching without a plan and I’m damn good at it. Making me spend my Sunday evening (you know, time I’m NOT AT WORK) filling out some dumbass form made for english and social studies teachers which doesn’t realize that science spends months on the same standards…. When I know my shit. Put 20-25 teenagers in a room with me for an hour and they will know the quadratic formula or how to balance a chemical equation. Just fucking let me do that instead of staff meetings and discipline (ie, spending 1-2 hours after school calling every parent of a kid that stole my shit/refused to put their cell phone up/called me a fucking [will be removed if written out]) - just let me TEACH.
My wife is a middle school teacher and I 100% feel your pain through her.
Lesson plans are like of bullshit paperwork, invented because a minority don’t do shit without being tightly monitored and a rigid structure to follow.
Good teachers can just wing a class based on whatever needs covering from the curriculum on that day, bad teachers don’t care whats on the curriculum that day, terrible teachers don’t care and couldn’t even teach it without following a detailed plan.
Its because of those two groups that lesson plans exist.
In an ideal world you would just performance manage those two groups and sack them, but because teaching is underpaid there are a shortage of teachers (plus most people suck at putting people properly through performance management), so its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
its beneficial to micro manage instead rather than having mass vacancies.
Kinda a positive feedback loop there. Teaching is a hard job which is going to require lots of work beyond your contract time and pays shit compared to other jobs which require the same level of education and training. Adding the additional work and micromanagement drives people away. Especially when that micromanagement is pointless and ineffective.
They’d pay these consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell us to do things, when those consultants had no understanding of the fact that you cannot teach a physics class like an English class. (Maybe use that money to hire more staff? There’s a huge difference in the work when the class average is 25 and not 32.)
And yeah - the district I worked in was primarily staffed by emergency certified teachers. I taught my colleagues subatomic structure and wrote their assessments, because they often had degrees in things like physical education. I get, if you’re hiring people off the street because you’re desperate you probably do need to watch them more, but at the same time if the vice principal is taking me aside my first day of teaching and saying “you actually have a degree in this, so you are going to have to step up and take one for the team” - idk, if I’m going to have to work Sunday nights, let it at least be in a way that acknowledges that I’m a professional and have my own system.
You not going to break the loop till you pay dramatically more to teachers, poor pay usually attracts under motivated people in smaller numbers, so you cant be picky. These people eventually get promoted, an you end up with poor quality managers running the school who take advantage of good teachers.
Its so self defeating as high quality teaching as you do results in better engaged students with better results that lead to life long improvement to the entire economy. Instead we have ladder pulling from the rich who want to kneecap state funded schools while enriching their own private schools to create a barrier for the majority to compete.
I agree. That’s why I said ‘fuck the system’ 13 years ago and haven’t spent a single second being a slave since then. Every day I wake up and don’t have to pay a house scalper is another victory against crapitalism.
Long live the 4-day work week.
Which has been proven to improve both productivity and profits. Same as home office. But petty people still prefer to take away freedom from people they consider beneath them, I guess.
I mean, it’ll be unpopular if you post that on bootlicker social. I mean LinkedIn.
LinkedIn somehow has the world’s worst takes. Actually filled with leaded boomers.
It’s not that we’re too busy. It’s that we’re too busy without purpose. What’s the point of being busy when it doesn’t proportionately translate to having our needs met?
We have more abundance than ever before in all of human history, and yet we work harder than hunter-gatherers just to feed ourselves, and we have less leisure time than they did. We work more hours per day and have fewer days off per year than medieval serfs. And for what? What’s the purpose? So some asshole who was born on third base can buy another mansion?
Preach.
I have a routine day job and a part time night job which I do from home on contract basis. I had vacation from my day job last week, because I have a sweet union job and get loads of vacation so some of it is just hanging out at home, but it’s AMAZING how job 2 expands to fill all that time, as well as every errand thing I have no time for, like haircuts. And my dork assed loser ex I still have to live with is like “well you can get these things done while you’re off”. I’m never off. Never ever.
Is it really that crazy to think you might have more time to do things when on vacation from your day job?
It is actually. The amount I work is insane.
You honestly sound bitter
Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve worked at least 60 hours a week for 20 years, while he sits on his ass and watches hours of TV.
There is no reason why taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens. But if everone no longer had to worry about survival, no one would put up with corporate abuse from rich cunts and plus if they’d paid their fair share of taxes and couldn’t just steal tax money to gamble with, they’d never be as filthy rich as they are to begin with.
What you describe is more or less the Nordic economic model, except the basic income. Corporate abuse is low, because it is not unthinkable to “not work” in response to such abuse, but also because unions are strong. Nevertheless, a lot of people still work a lot, so it doesn’t completely change the work/life balance oddity op is posting about.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
Looks like the slaves are getting upitty again
taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens
Well that’s how it’s done in most rich and even some poor countries. So I assume you are talking about the US which is indeed in a terrible situation with human rights for it’s wealth. And sadly voting red/blue won’t ever change it.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
Joke’s* on you
(The joke is on you.)
I don’t think it’s the level of busy - for most of human history mere survival took a lot more time than it would take us today if we worked directly on actual survival. The problem is that we do the survival by working on too much irrelevant shit that enriches other people, who keep making our share less and less.
Humans used to have a much more direct connection between what they did and their survival. Gather enough food and you won’t starve. Keep an eye out for other tribes/clans/families competing for the same resources and you don’t get killed. Processing TPS reports all day doesn’t seem like it does much of anything even though it gives you money. We’ve lost the connection and our brains can’t handle it.
So modern life is simulating an impending death scenario for the brain. All the time.
That actually makes a lot of sense. Like the panic that occurs when layoffs happen.
If your work isn’t mentally stimulating, then get another job that is.
If you’re being complacent then that’s up to you.
I flat out tell my employer to automatise the monkey work because I’m not doing it adequately.
If you want me to perform, make the work release dopamine etc when I competitively complete it.
I think this is accurate. We may be the most “intelligent” animal on this planet, but we’re still animals. We’ve been pulled out of a natural order and forced into systems the worst of us came up with to keep said worst ones happy. At the exact same time we also have the capacity and potential to make this planet a habitable, utopia for all creatures, but those systems, man…
Yeah, I feel this. We’ve been forced into a system that treat life like a nonstop grind instead of something we’re meant to actually live. Real connection got replaced by control. It’s crazy how unnatural all this ‘normal’ really is.
Some people basically hibernated in the past. Slept for most of the day in winter to conserve energy(ignore the part where they slept a lot because they were hungry, we have food).
Modern “work ethics” is a scam.
Especially in USA
Look at any other mammals our size.
Specifically other primates and great apes.
They lounge in heards and eat plants.
That’s a pretty fucking stupid take, our ancestors had to be busy all the time just to survive.
We are living in a time of 24/7 news and access to way too much information that’s a way better explanation.
In fact I even like the explanation of anxiety being a result of abundance of calories more than this shit. That theory posits that our brains can go into overdrive simply because it has access to so many excess calories whereas in the past it didn’t.
There is also the move towards white collar work, work that’s not physically demanding, that we didn’t evolve to deal with. Try going to the gym/exercising regularly and you will notice a significant drop in anxiety even on your worst days.
You are 100% correct.
