Kitten Night Farts

why must reductress hurt me in this way

ok a) lmao me too girl, and

b) once burnout hits you CANNOT work that hard, by your standards, so odds are it actually hit a while ago and you just “powered through” because that’s what you’re used to doing. So now, every day, you’re hitting your limit and thinking “wtf man i used to be able to do this, i used to be competent, clever, diligent” and like yeah. you were. and that burns glucose. welcome to the dumb bitch zone.

and c), lmao, me too girl

fuck b) came for me harder than the first post did god damn

d) (at least in my experience) you might have been working extremely hard, to the point that it is a new normal for you, and when you are exhausted and burnt out you tell yourself things like ‘I don’t even work that hard’ because burnout also involves guilt for not being ‘up to snuff’

i think the turning point in my life both academically and professionally was realizing that. If you Go First, be it a presentation or an interview or whatever. If you go first, you are being judged based on NOTHING but yourself. They aren't comparing you to anyone else, you don't have an act to "follow". You are the Bar. You can literally just do the best you can and at that point it will automatically be the best they've seen so far. And once you're done you're done. You can mentally and emotionally check out.

Game changer insofar as being stressed about presenting because now I just bulldoze over everyone else to go first like a feral hog.

these are very wise (and very real) words. believe me.

I'd like to add to this. You may fall into a job/career in your 20s that pays bills and you don't mind doing. And that's fine. You may find your passion and hate the job that goes with it and get one that just pays bills so you can pursue your passion. And that's fine. Your passion may change - and that's fine. Life is not linear. Jobs can be just jobs. Careers can change.

Life is not static. It doesn't end at 30 or 40 or 50 or later. And a job can be just a job and your life can be successful and fulfilling.

What part of 'the wellbeing of workers has an impact on the work they do' is hard for some people to understand? Like even if you don't have a single fraction of common decency or care for other peoples' welfare, and don't care whether they live or die, you should still care whether you live or die. You don't have to be morally against human suffering in order to believe in workers' rights.

An overworked truck driver falls asleep on the wheel and swerves on you in traffic? You're gonna die. An overworked nurse doing a 24 hour shift gets two patients confused? You're gonna die. A bridge collapses under you because the building materials provided were dogshit, and none of the builders wanted to speak out because the one to voice a complaint is going to get fired, and they all have kids to feed? You're going to die.

You literally do not have to care about other people. Nobody is demanding you to give a shit whether anybody else lives or dies. You just have to aknowledge that if the people touching your food, building the roads you drive on and buildings you go into, and altogether work in putting together every single thing that you need in order to live, are dying on the job, that's gonna hurt you too.

Being served like a God and fed with human sacrifice does not make you immortal like one.

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

Sigh.

Important update! His story went viral enough that other paint companies reached out to him and he got a job with a new paint company!!

https://www.tiktok.com/@tonesterpaints/video/6898720259675540742

Listen. This is what people are talking about when they say that if you gave people a fucking UBI, folks would still work. Even “menial” work is beloved by various people if it’s given the respect it deserves and folks dont need to worry about - um - starving to death and dying of illness?

I legitimately love delivering pizzas! If it were sustainable i wouldn’t mind at all doing it for the rest of my life! One of my best friends absolutely loves cleaning, and the only reason she quit cleaning professionally is that she was sick of the ways she was treated. My stepfather has been a carpenter and construction worker for 30 years, despite being a highly qualified graphic designer and architect, bc the man just fuckin loves construction work. For every “menial/undesireable” job available, there is someone who is happy to work it, if not for the stigma and need to survive. And for the truly awful ones? Like slaughterhouse cleanup, sewer maintenance, roadkill pickup, etc? With UBI they could almost all be mechanized, saving people from having to do grueling and dangerous jobs they really don’t have to do.

There are even people who will do those jobs because they recognize that they need to get done. Those people may not love the job itself but they take great pride in doing something that needs to be done.

People don’t just work for free doing jobs they love. If there’s a niche there will always be someone willing to fill it.

I talk shit but I actually don’t genuinely truly HATE retail, what I hate is how people (customers and employers) use, abuse, overwork, and generally treat the employees like shit

If I could have reasonable hours and accommodations for my limitations and be paid enough to survive without being asked to do 25 jobs advertised as 1 job and had UBI to ensure I could leave if it was too much/I was being mistreated/taken advantage of by employers looking to overwork employees to make more money I’d be totally happy to work retail as long as I physically could

When I worked retail, my favorite part was working in the stock room cuz it’s like playing real life Jenga

Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I'm always like "why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day."

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you're inside the car, inside the situation, it's easy not to notice all the extra work you're doing just to maintain the status quo.

There's all sorts of type of work that we think of as "free" that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

The next time you think you're tired from "nothing", consider instead that you're probably in situation where you're doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.

opening my body's task manager to see what's taking up all my cpu

Some people can't work, if your leftism doesn't explicitly allow for this then your leftism is shit

This was a controversial one huh?

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.

https://onlinemasters.ohio.edu/the-six-hour-workday/

I was going through some of my notes, and at the top of one page it says, Lean into the discomfort of the work. This was written in the context of the work being done within my career field, but I find it to be applicable to any area of life. “Work,” be it self-healing or recovery work, achieving personal goals, evolving.. it is not always comfortable. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort of it all, acknowledge it.

People keep asking who would do all the menial jobs if they didn’t have the threat of starvation hanging over their heads, but in my experience there are plenty of people who would be overjoyed to spend all day running minor errands for folks if they were allowed to tell the rude ones to fuck off.

If money wasn’t a problem, I actually enjoy the physical labor of my job and the sense of fulfillment at having something concrete I can look at and accomplish—it’s the being treated like a vending machine/punching bag while also making barely liveable wages that make the whole thing suck, not the work itself

I really enjoyed the tetris like feel of bagging groceries and stocking shelves for years. What wore me down was the inconsistent hours, bad pay, poor treatment of workers overall (they treated the elderly employees especially horribly) and nasty customers who I couldn’t tell off. 

For more pay, and more protection, I’d have happily stayed for a while longer.

I absolutely LOVE working early hours making coffee and tea and donuts and all that. I would fucking show up at 4am in the morning to work in a coffee shop that doesn’t have a manager constantly screaming at how long the line is and how many sales we need to make in an hour to reach our quota.

Like, I just really enjoy making food and mornings and people. 

Yeah tbh I really like selling phones and helping people understand their technology, I love helping people in general, if malwart wasn’t such a hell hole it’d be perfect

“But who would do all the menial jobs if we didn’t threaten people with starvation?”

Have you considered making them not menial?

The degradation of these jobs and the workers who do them is artificial and deliberate, made to justify the low wages and help reinforce the system that keeps people doing them despite said degradation.

It is entirely possible to create workspaces where the people who do these jobs are treated well, valued, allowed comfort and boundaries. This is a thing we can do.

there’s no such thing as unskilled jobs, just undervalued workers

working full time is terrible why do we just accept that having 8 days off a month is normal and okay........ being alive could be cool but we waste it at our JOBS.... sorry i’m just heated about capitalism again i’ll be fine

8 days....never thought about it like that 😓

This seems really whiny to me. Like, I agree with you, work sucks, but our ancestors didn’t get to browse tumblr at their desks or have the option to gleefully spend their ENTIRE WEEKENDS horizontal on the couch stuffing their faces/watching tv/playing video games/wacking off.  They didn’t have weekends. They just slaved away as fucking peasants from dawn to dusk until they died in childbirth or got the consumption.

I am perfectly happy working 8 hrs a day because I don’t have to:

grow my own food

find my own clean water

heat my house

shit in the woods

Hi, I study social and cultural anthropology. Humans working 40+ hours a week is 100% an industrial revolution thing and was not normal in the early stages of our existence. In fact, hunter and gatherer societies that still exist to this day spend about 15-20 hours a week TOPS working. The rest is dedicated to sitting around and telling stories and jokes, dancing, singing, eating, sleeping, fucking and so forth. Read a damn book.

"I wish I had time to live my life" is now "whiny" holy fuckballs

it’s never too early to teach children about the devaluation of labor!

(from an American Girls book)

Babie’s first entitled commissioner

it’s never too early to teach children about the devaluation of labor!

(from an American Girls book)

Babie’s first entitled commissioner

anyway, the 8 hour workday and the concept of “8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours recreation” is outdated and based on the lives and needs of married straight men who had a wife at home doing all the unpaid domestic labor, childcare, and elderly care. We should all be fighting for a 4 hour workday tbh

Research suggests that in an eight-hour day, the average worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes.

They did an experiment with a 6 hour workday in Gothenburg, on a nursing home. The staff became happier and healthier and the elderly also became happier and more content because the staff could focus more on their needs when they weren’t overworked and tired. The staff felt they had more time and energy towards the elderly.

Recently there was an article about a care home in Stockholm were they “””over hired””” (I would argue they just hired enough people), that is they added 1,5 full time staff member. There was an economic gain, not only in health for the workers but also with fewer temps, less overtime and less time wasted on constantly educating new people.

The 8 hour workday was met with the same ridicule a 6 hour workday would. Once, the upper class thought that 14 hour days were reasonable because the poor would just get into trouble if they had time off. Even when there’s actually net gain from caring about their workers, employers prefer making them miserable and paying the cost in new hires, medical costs and poor performance. People have fought and died for our free time and our weekends, even when we know a healthy worker is a healthy company. 

So it’s not strange, nor unbelievable, to take that fight again. There’s nothing holy or special with an 8 hour workday. It isn’t set in stone. It could be done.