My job tends to push me well beyond 8 hour days & 5 day weeks. I feel like my job requires a ton of emotional labour, and I find that super draining. Normally when I’m working, I’m falling behind in sleep and self-care. If I have free time, often times I need to just chill out and rest. I tend to put something pointless on YouTube or Netflix just to relax.
When I have some time off, my body stops screaming to slow down. I catch up with sleep and exercise. I can read as much as I want to. I touch base with old friends who I haven’t talked to in a while. I can do much more IRL activism. Basically, I become the person I wish that I was normally.
God I wish I had some passive income coming in so this could be my life. Everyday would be a vacation. I’d probably go to the office and waste my employees time with meetings so I’d feel like I was doing something. I’d go to a Global South country, pretend I’m volunteering, and meet other trust fund kids who think they’re making a difference. If I had enough capital, I’d found some NGO that makes freedom maps, and the DPRK would get a very sinister colour. I could go to cocktail parties and brag about how my NGO is making a difference. That it’s all funded by the exploited labour of my workers is easily forgotten after 3 martinis.
Looking back at the past, I can’t see any path that I would become a capitalist, as there was no chance of me getting capital, except becoming an especially evil sort of grifter. Maybe I’d be a very different sort of person if my parents left me a 5 million nest egg.
It’d be a long shot but I stumbled into a (admittedly temporary make work) job at a university working as a museum curation technician. It was a job that required no previous experience, had very little on the job training, and the expectations were pretty low in my situation because it was a make work program funded by a government grant. I only learned about it by word of mouth, it wasn’t something that was openly advertised in any place you’d expect to search for work.
I got to spend my days sorting artifacts from excavations to be sorted more thoroughly by the higher ups, did some basic paperwork, replaced old storage containers with newer/better containers, did some document repair, a ton of scanning, and fuckton of photography. I spent most of my time working alone in a room with no supervision and I had a blast because I’m a fucking weirdo.
I’d still be doing it if were a permanent position and not a temporary “we’re helping people who need work until they find a real job” even though the biggest bottleneck in the projects were that with the technicians constantly changing the quality/consistency of the photographs are all over the place. (I secretly hope I get a phone call one day telling me that they’ve managed to get a permanent photographer position but I know I’m not that lucky and its been over a year since I worked there.)
You don’t need passive income to be able to do what you want. Mostly you just need to get past the barrier of housing cost.
Where I am, I could pay down a mortgage on a good house in 4-5 years of working fulltime. With another two similarly-committed comrades to share the house with, we could easily pull it off in 2 years. After that, baseline cost of living would be 6000 a year for 3 people.
After working fulltime for 2 years I quit my job and the 18 months since I’ve averaged less than 10 hours a week of zero-hour type gigs or odd jobs. I’ve been on like 12 overnight-away-from-home trips in that time, totaling over 3 months. I could probably retire on 300k, including the cost of a house. I’m going to have to start working again soon but I’ve been in total vacation mode for a year and a half.
Two suggestions.
First, start applying for Civil Service jobs. If you’re in the US there are places that list all federal, state, and local job openings. It might take a while to get hired, but you’ll have a strong union and paid overtime.
Second, buy and use this book. "Discover What You Are Best At.’ Linda Gail. It’s a series of self tests you can finish in an afternoon, with a list of jobs that use those skills. I’d never considered the career path the book suggested for me; turns out it’s pretty nice to be able to have a job where you fit in.
I’m not in Amerika
Thanks for your advice. Honestly I was just whinging that work takes so much of my physical and mental health.
The book will still be useful. The job I was interested in had a six month evening training program. Once I got certified I was able to find a job pretty fast.
That book sounds interesting 🤔
I went from hating working to being willing to get up on a rainy Monday. There are a lot of jobs that you’ve never heard of out there. I suggest this book to people all the time because it worked for me.
Genuinely curious, what’s your definition of “capitalist” here?
Sounds like he means being a landlord or other business owner. He wants to be able to exploit other people so he can have leisure. It’s noty an unreasonable goal, since they are stuck in a system they can’t control.
Good answer
For this post: enough money to sit on my ass and make everyday a holiday
In general: people with money (capital) to invest, which is used to make commodities to sell. They can purchase the labour of others, so they don’t need to sell their own labour to survive.
