70% of business emails is just waiting for the other person to confirm one thing so they can get back to you and then you confirming something so you can get back to them and then going back and forth confirming things until one of you either dies or kills the other in hand-to-hand combat
so some of y’all have tagged this with the most glorious passive-aggressive office frustration ever and it’s so cathartic to see, because we’re all suffering here, we’re all in adulting hell together, let it all out my dudes
and there’s this
WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING IN ACADEMIA
often in academia there’s no compulsory retirement, so instead of being all peace out at age 65, an emeritus professor has the legal option to retire directly into the grave at 87, which is how the whole department knows about it.
i still think academia is the real world profession that comes closest to its discworld counterpart: your best chance of career advancement is for someone at the top to finally die, but in the real world poisoning them is not fair game.
ok so let’s talk a bit about jobs vs passion. my last fulltime job was at a big game development studio; the kind of job you’re (supposedly) passionate about. most of my colleagues adored the games we made, and so they didn’t care that the company had a major diversity problem, that our salaries were below average, that we didn’t get overtime compensation yet stayed ‘til 11PM more often than what’s healthy, and that the company promoted an unhealthy alcohol culture. because we were passionate. this was the kind of job you grow up dreaming about; don’t go throwing it away because some colleagues are harrassing you or because you get no recognition for your efforts!
for more than a year I was tired. stressed. in constant pain. my anxiety was through the roof. I worked on these “dream projects” and I felt dead inside.
when I quit that job I started freelancing as a writer. I got some really good jobs. I also got a bunch of small-time, low-paid, “hey at least your name is on it so isn’t it enough to pay 10$ for this text?” kind of jobs.
with the typical millenial housing situation of an apartment that I could barely afford on a fulltime pay and a constant stream of job offers that were underpaid I spent four months doing what I love, while constantly overwhelmed by stress. my insomnia got really bad, and when I managed to fall asleep I would dream about my bank balance. I would dream of losing whatever stability I had left in my life, simply because I couldn’t afford a “normal adult life”.
and so, today I got a job. it’s a fairly standard QA job at a medium sized game development studio. unlike any other game companies I’ve been at they offer humane working conditions. they don’t expect me to show up too early and stay too late because I’m passionate. the hours are nine to five, and they disapprove of overtime. the pay is slightly above average, and I get health benefits. I’ve been through several interviews, and at no point has someone tried to belittle my career or tried to convince me to work for less than I’m worth.
for the first time in many years of my career, I’m happy. I’m at ease. I applied for this job because I wanted to get away from the passionate part of the industry. I wanted a job where I could go home at five and dedicate my freetime to my own writing projects. I wanted to work at a place that didn’t eat my heart and soul and energy as I contributed to projects that wouldn’t even bear my name in the end credits.
so what I’m trying to say is that there’s nothing wrong with having a “normal” job. you’re not giving up on your dreams if you take a job outside your main interests. if it offers stability in your life, it’s enough.
This really resonates with me because I left the architectural industry last year. The hours were unreasonable, work stressful and devolved into the new projects filling me with dread. My boss kept hinting I wasn’t doing enough, I wasn’t passionate enough… I finally left, and after a difficult half year, I finally found a job outside the industry. It is not a dream job, and it is not where my passion lies, but the work lets breathe. And I tell you, I now value “breathing” over “making my dream come true” any day.
if you have a job that you can do reasonably well without intense stress and leave at the office when you leave, you can actually spend as much free time as you like Making Your Dream Happen
like, yeah, you can settle down in a cafe on sundays and write your novel, because you have that time carved out and you can afford it. you can put extra money towards materials for your sculpting project. save up for a kiln or fancy paints or whatever. get a gopro and convince your friends to act in your arthouse zombie movie on the weekend because it’ll be fun.
dreams can be dreamed on many levels. jobs only have to be successful on one level, and that is the level where you make enough money to live your goddamn life.
Work to live, don’t live to work.
To all my followers who want to write, animate, and create – this is very real and true! Please take note!!
Academia is really bad about this. “Passionate” is conflated with “willing to work 60-70 hours/week, move anywhere in the country for a new job once a year, live apart from your significant other for years at a time, put your family life on hold, etc etc.” If you’re not willing to do all that, you just don’t want it badly enough. Fuck that. Fuck any employer who thinks that way.
this may be an Unpopular Opinion (even on tumblr) but like the 8-hour workday is just Too Gotdamn Long
like even sitting in an office for eight hours a day isn’t particularly pleasant (or healthy, as we are beginning to see) but when we’re talking about doing *actual work* for that same amount time it gets pretty fucking brutal
doing literally *anything* (even leisure activities) for eight hours straight tends to be less than enjoyable but when we’re talking about things like construction, landscaping, factory work, and hell, even foodservice and retail, eight hours is a fucking ETERNITY
i might just be a lazy weak-willed bitch but honestly i think i’m not entirely wrong
this was being worked towards by leftist labor unions way back in the day after the time of FDRs new deal. people in the 40s and 50s were already starting to realize that we no longer actually needed an 8 hour work day or even a 5 day work week.
even with the comparatively primitive factory tech of the time we were already creating a huge amount of excess production back then and companies were making massive amounts of profit. So it already stood to reason that companies should either let their employees work less and thus each employee could work a shorter shift without lowering the yearly compensation of each employee, or in cases where businesses provide an active service they would shorten the shift but hire more people to cover the necessary operating time. but of course that would mean less money for people at the top so companies fought back hard and we ended up with nixon’s bullshit and so on and now its considered the norm for us to spend the vast majority of our lives doing work that really just amounts to waste.
The IWW realised this and were fighting for it all the way back in the 1930s. This is a take with a lot of historical and theoretical grounding, OP, so you’re standing in good stead.
I’d also like to add it’s also been studied and scientifically proven that after 6 hours, we have an extremely noticeable drop in productivity. Sweden saw nothing but benefits from a 6-hour work day, including worker productivity, happiness, and half the amount of sick-leave used when applied to nurses.
One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit – but rarely articulated – assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.
During the medieval period, work was intermittent – called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were the traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual. According to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers[1], the medieval workday was not more than eight hours. The worker participating in the eight-hour movements of the late nineteenth century was “simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.”
The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official – that is, church – holidays included not only long “vacations” at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints’ andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien règime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.
A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year – 175 days – for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor
“So you want a return to medieval servitude?” NO. We’re simply pointing out that Capitalism bring unique forms of exploitation, one of them being a life where you have barely enough ‘free time’ to get ready for your next working day, and not at all enough to do any actual living that isn’t focussed on getting ready for work again. Our whole lives are stolen from us.
i'll apple your turnover 