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by planetsprite 1299 days ago
It's hard to get out of that mindset, especially as a young new hire.

In the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood due to high rents, few social support structures, health insurance often tied to your job, etc.

There's a model of thinking taught in schools and universities that teaches individuals to defer helplessly to their superiors, to be subservient to a fault and respect hierarchies as sacrosanct. When someone abuses that hierarchy, one either has to unlearn their programming, or assume the burden of the imposition of value on their psyche.

3 comments

To summarize, an abusive manager pays your rent and keeps you from dying. The only way to win this game is to be self-sufficient enough to walk away.
pledge fealty to a different lord
Welcome to America - compete or starve.
> in the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood

Has there been a time or place where this isn't the case?

To quote Karl Marx "He who does not work does not eat."

The safety net of (primarily European) certain countries is definitely easier to live with when losing a job. In theory you can probably continue indefinitely on some of those welfare payments, although for many people that leads to another kind of burnout (boreout?) again.
It’s also really not comfortable. I am sure you could live on it indefinitely as a kind of ascetic performance but people who actually need that to survive are usually very keen on getting other sources of income. Some of it undeclared and evading taxes, but that’s another problem.

Overall I think there’s a decent compromise to be found there. I am happy for the society to ensure that as many people as possible have a guaranteed bare minimum to survive, which provides opportunities to find better. If some people are content with surviving, well. More power to them. They are not in big enough numbers to matter anyway (the sums involved are dwarfed by companies’ tax fraud).

Yes, many countries that aren’t the US provide health insurance regardless of your employment status.

Some countries (Germany, Switzerland, maybe others) will pay employment insurance even if you quit of your own accord and lower the elimination period if you had reasons to do so (as certified by a MD)

> He who does not work does not eat

That was Lenin who wrote that, although it was originally from the Bible.

the issue is conflating work/livelyhood/job which arent always synonyms.

your survival being predicated upon engaging in state-enforced financial exploitation by a capitalist and being separated from the value of your own labor

isnt quite the same as

engaging in activities deaigned to produced a beneficial outcome to the self and society at a point in the future