I've become extremely disillusioned about work. The main reason is just that it takes up too much time for me to do anything I want to with my life. This old article really struck close to home:
I've tried several approaches to this problem with similarly dead-end results:
1) I used to think that if I just found meaningful enough work that I wouldn't mind spending a lot of time on it. I'm starting to believe that those jobs are either reserved for tiny elite, or your employer will exploit your innate interest with low pay and overwork.
2) Another idea I had was to get to a very high salary and then cut down my hours to part-time, but it seems "part of the design" to not allow this to happen. Such roles also seem vanishingly rare.
3) The extreme option is just to go completely outside the norm, as in living in a commune or with some sort of religious community where I'm given food and a bed for some work. This seems somewhat precarious, but then, so is working.
4) Another extreme would be to plough the maximum of what I earn into something that will pay back without my constant oversight, but I'm genuinely unsure of what options there are here. Become another buy-to-let hopeful?
I'm tired. I used to be able to force myself to work on the (self-?)delusion that it would all be worth it, and one day I'd have all the freedom and autonomy I wanted. Somehow I'd get to a position where I could live off assets or control my own hours. That now seems largely illusory.
Basically: how do I maintain a living wage but not give 40 hours of my week?
I know strategies really depend on how far I'm willing to scale back my expenses, but at this stage I'm willing to hear out and try any idea.
So far the best compromise I've settled on is taking a shift pattern where I do three or four 12 hour shifts, then get three or four days off, so it feels like I have a significant amount more free time compared to the old 9-5, even if I actually work exactly the same number of hours I did before.
It's mostly just a case of reorganising the time so that I have fewer of those dead hours on a week night, where I used to just get home at 5:30 and not really do much of anything until the weekend, but I have more full days, which are more useful to me because I can settle into something productive or make plans for something more adventurous.
In the end though it is swings and roundabouts, because a lot of the time I'll just waste one of those days being lazy on the sofa to make up for the fact it's so tiring working 12 hour shifts. You're right in that the system is designed to keep you boxed in, it's all a con; and unless you get sucked into FIRE or whatever stock marketlads do (which is it's own kind of con) there's no real way out.
That's why I was onboard with the antiwork stuff, before it got taken over by the blue hair tranno brigade. Life really shouldn't be this way, not in an economy as productive as ours is in the 21st century.
If your job is something you can be a massive expert in, become an even bigger expert and then become a consultant. IT networking consultants can get paid full-time money but only have to work a few hours a month, if that. If you become a management consultant, you can just pick a couple of companies who need your help, help them, charge them 15 grand each and be set for the year. Of course, you will at some point need to be really, really good at something, and it has to be something desirable. I couldn't be a consultant at fixing people's blog websites, for example, because none of them give enough of a shit as far as I can tell.
>>14317 >That's why I was onboard with the antiwork stuff, before it got taken over by the blue hair tranno brigade. Life really shouldn't be this way, not in an economy as productive as ours is in the 21st century.
I have my own disillusionment in that I work in a role that indirectly supports the oil and gas industry. Every day I find myself driving to work burning petrol, selling steel that costs a great deal of energy to mine and refine and transport, which then goes to the oil industry to drill more wells so they can pump more oil for me to drive to work.
The anti-commie brigade goes on about how society will collapse without oil and capitalism, but it's sheer insanity just how much consumption is required to maintain the status quo, so little is spent on actually improving and progressing society.
>>14398 Depends how good you are, and how good you are at selling yourself. To learn it, you can go on 4chan's /g/ board and look for /wdg/, the web development general. The first post always contains links for getting started. Do not look anywhere else on /g/; it's poison.
Once you have the skills, you will also need to be able to get some clients. The world is full of people who can do web development, and I can assure you it's not necessarily the most competent ones who get hired to develop websites.
Don't underestimate, the level of traffic 4chan gets makes it a very important place, as much so as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The place is one giant honeypot these days. The radicalism on /pol/ is direct disinfo and propaganda. "The Hacker Group Anonymous", while admittedly of only the most tenuous link to 4chan itself these days, has basically been acting as the US government's lapdog for years now.
As a grotesquely overpaid consultant, I'd recommend being highly knowledgeable about two things, because it allows you to totally dominate a niche without being a mega-genius.
Web developers are ten-a-penny, so it can be quite difficult to get your foot in the door when you're new. There's a much smaller number of web developers who really deeply understand a particular unglamorous sector of business. I'm sure I've used this example in a previous thread, but it'd be fairly straightforward to become the go-to web developer for small-to-medium meat producers, the go-to social media consultant for the construction trades or the ERP guy for heavy engineering.
Every industry has their own magazines, trade shows and networking events. Pick an industry, learn everything you can about it and you'll only need to be reasonably competent at your particular technical skill to get work because you'll have a very good understanding of what your specific clients care about and what they need to grow their business or reduce their costs.
If you've already got industry experience - particularly experience in a boring industry that most people don't care about or have never heard of - then you're half way there already.
OP here. This is genuinely useful advice and I thank you for it.
I've run into this in a somewhat roundabout way. I now have knowledge of a very specific area of a particular industry, and I'm looking for ways to combine this with some other relevant skill. One of the projects I've taken on might even result in starting a new company.
>>14402 >Don't underestimate, the level of traffic 4chan gets makes it a very important place, as much so as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Say what now? It might be a big site but that's just ridiculous. There are 500 times as many daily tweets than 4chan posts and Facebook as a company is in a whole 'nother league above that. Most people haven't even heard of 4chan.
>>14405 Yeah, but there's a lot fo Big Ideas The Man doesn't want discussed on 4chan. It's not just people crying about computer games and posting ten year old memes.
I have no idea how much traffic 4chan gets, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if activity there were monitored by security agencies. For one, even piddly little real life UK groups have been infiltrated by police, so the actual importance doesn't really seem to have much bearing on whether people are willing to sink time and money into surveillance. For two, 4chan has had a disproportionate cultural effect, to the extent that even my mam knows what a "meme" is in this bizarre nightmare world.
You know how there are places in your city that the pigs know to patrol round more often because there's likely to be a lot of dodgy sorts hanging about there? 4chan is like that for the internet.
I don't think for a minute it's the hackers on steroids scum of den and villiainy it's always made out to be, but when there have been documented cases of high school shooters and chronic wanking lady-stabbers who posted on there and even hinted at their actions, the authorities are bound to keep tabs on it.
Although, if we're going to indulge our tinfoil hat gut feelings, I reckon it's more likely the spooks are the ones who egged those lads on. We know for a fact the CIA/FBI is batshit enough that it literally funds terrorists just so it can arrest them later, you think the US having their own troll farms to shit up /pol/ and influence the online alt-right zeitgeist is far fetched? Or do you think only Russia and China play that game?
I spend enough time on 4chan that I have noticed, several times, when large numbers of paid users start appearing. There are a few mentally ill posters, but there aren't enough to fully explain when lots of people suddenly support the Chinese government for no reason, or start repeating pro-Russia talking points in a tone that is just slightly insincere, somehow.
I just said you shouldn't look at /g/ because it's nothing but students and hobbyists, nobody there has an actual technology job, they're all insecure about this and that's why they actively discourage anyone from trying to learn or improve, and the only topics ever discussed are brand wars (no knowledge required), open-source obsessiveness (it's free stuff, exactly as a board of terminally unemployed students and NEETs would rely on), politics (it gets everywhere; it's the kudzu weed of discussion), and programming (a very popular hobby, especially among teenagers). Topics like domain registrars, virtualisation, VMware, Plesk vs cPanel, T568a vs T568b cabling, and database administration are all things that would only be discussed by people who have real jobs, and they are all curiously absent from /g/. I don't care if the people desperately insisting that they're really good with Python are glowies or not. It honestly doesn't matter.