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.)