Speaking As A Former, Nearly Lifelong "Good Worker" (the Capitals Are Potently Felt), I Wish I Had Been

Speaking as a former, nearly lifelong "Good Worker" (the capitals are potently felt), I wish I had been cognizant of what I was contributing to. Namely, not only increasingly awful and inhumane standards for all employees, but also my own incredibly painful and inevitable burnout. I have left every job I ever worked before now in a state of total exhaustion, both physically and mentally, often with long-term health problems and accident-proneness (and their related costs) to boot.

Because I was always this person at work, I have known many people who were the same. We were that first wave self-enforcing. We valued the same things about ourselves (work ethic, high standards, non-complaining, no breaks, etc). We shared the same fears with regard to upsetting management, namely losing our jobs, reduced hours, pay cuts. And I can say everyone I've known like this suffered for it.

I wish we (I) had known who to blame. I wish I had been better at saying 'no' to authority figures. I wish I had developed enough self-esteem that I could value myself outside of my work performance. I wish I had enough sense of self-worth to withstand the disapproval of an authority figure. I wish I trusted myself to fight back if punished passive-aggressively for refusal to do more than I was being paid for (a very common tactic). But I didn't.

I'm working on all of that now, but it was 2 decades of miserable work experience where I know for a fact I made work life harder for others. I genuinely regret that, but the point I want to make is that without fail, in every job, I was targeted by management. And pretty much immediately. Singled out, praised by comparisons to my coworkers, treated like a favorite, and then worked like a dog.

And the thing is, I knew it. I knew the praise was disingenuous and manipulative but it didn't matter. I didn't have what it took to withstand dislike or disapproval from a boss, and any positivity in my self-image was too (read: entirely) dependant on my work performance. Others who were the "Good Worker" had identical or similar reasons. Certainly none of us could afford the financial risk of a boss being displeased with us. It's a state of fear, stress, isolation and constant tension. And the expectations ALWAYS escalate. Dramatically. Quickly. And burnout is inevitable, often so severe that you have to leave the job because of health problems/injuries it gave you. Stomach ulcers, chronic back pain, knee injuries, plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel, stress migraines--the list goes on.

I could write a whole dissertation about the vulnerabilities of being autistic or on the spectrum and discovering competency and self-esteem for the first time in a professional environment. I feel like that's another later to this fairly common story too. The added layers of vulnerability to manipulation, newness to praise, and the inability to stand up for yourself, speak quickly and smoothly in a loaded social exchange ("but I know I can count on you for...", etc) certainly exacerbates this situation tenfold. It also, far more than I probably realized, put a target on my head. But my coworkers who were on green cards, supporting families, trying to bring family members into the country, had babies on the way, etc. all had targets too. It's anyone they can get to give more than has been agreed upon.

This is a violent and common system. Your boss is being encouraged subtly to do this by their boss, and on and on to the top. Stand your ground. Do it for yourself and for all your coworkers who can't. Stand your ground, hold your boundaries, work harder at loving yourself than you do for any company. They'll take everything from you and leave you with nothing, and face no consequences. But the power to let them or not is yours.

There is a distinct technique used by capitalists to bypass the legal and contractual rights of workers which to my knowledge has no name currently - so I’m giving it one - Lunch Grinding.

Lunch Grinding is a manipulative erosion of worker rights both in and out of the workplace. It bypasses legal and contractual standards through informal social pressures which the bosses cannot be held directly accountable for.

Lunch Grinding is named after one of the most common examples. It begins by asking a few employees to skip lunch in order to finish a project. Workers who are already insecure about their position due to economic anxiety will see this as an opportunity to prove they are a good employee. Those who refuse to do so may receive blame for failing to finish the project on time.

The issue becomes compounded when the bosses begin to purposefully schedule less time to complete the same projects. A distinct class begins to appear ignoring their contractual right to a lunch break - who become hostile to those who refuse to work during lunch for being “lazy” or “the reason we didn’t finish on time.”

At this point the management no longer needs to influence anyone directly to work through lunch break, simply by keeping up the sense of constantly being a little late for the project they have ensured the lunch-grinders will apply pressure to their peers who aren’t working through breaks.

As workplace hostility increases towards the “unproductive” members who are expressing their formal right to a break - they will be replaced with new individuals who may not even realize they have the right to a lunch break because working through the hour has become normalized by their peers.

Thus formal written standards from contracts and legal code become functionally non-existent. After which a new standard will be identified by management for erosion some examples include:

+Accepting uncertain hours. +Working off-the-clock. +Staying “On-Call” at all times. +Finishing projects / responding to emails at home. +Never using time off or sick leave.

All of which are socially conditioned in the same format - starting with “The Good Worker” who does a little favor for their boss - and ending as a peer enforced pressure and a perpetual hostility from management claiming productivity isn’t as high as expected. 

whenever management is like, ‘remember to think about your team mates and how calling out will affect them’ i’m just like, damn, maybe you should hire more people about it

I think part of the reason why we feel so sad is that we're too far away from raw, numinous experiences. Like you know that post with a picture of the unpolluted night sky where people are reacting in terrified awe not realizing that's what the stars really look like?

I think it's like. You need vivid experiences that can't be easily repeated. You need elemental things. I don't mean this in a crunchy hippie just-try-yoga way I mean this in a way that's like...we're inside all the time and most things we experience are scheduled ahead of time. When there are sidewalks, we follow them, and there's always some boring place to go. You need things that no one has any control over and that no one can sell for money.

You need to be outside in a storm and see lightning strike very close to you. You need to meet a wild creature and have to stand very still and almost not even breathe and watch before it vanishes. You need to be alone somewhere very big. You need to go to a place because it looks interesting and be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You need to climb over a fence instead of going in by the gate. You need to hear the exploding sound of a huge flock of birds flying. You need to watch live theater performed by kids on a low budget. You need to be lost somewhere. You need to be barefoot somewhere. You need to sing with other people who are singing. You need to get soaking wet with all of your clothes on and come inside shivering.

Weird Questions

If I’m somewhere where there are Educational Personell (Museum Docents, Q&A zookeepers, Park Rangers, Public School Teachers, Professors etc.) I have a question I like to ask them:

“What’s the weirdest question someone’s ever asked you?”

I say weird and not Dumb becuase even buckwild questions can have important answers, but whoever I ask it too usually has to think about it for a bit, then comes out with something different every time.  And I love every single answer becuase it just warms my heart out there to know people are trying to understand the world a bit better, no matter how limited thier starting point. A collection of favorites so far:

Art Museum Host: “A man once asked me “Can you help me find someone and if you can’t can you find someone who can?”  Which I always thought would be a great title for an Artwork.”

Park Ranger: “I’m so glad the Japanese couple asked me “Is bear spray like mosquito spray and it goes on the jacket, or on the bear?” instead of just trying it.”

Zookeeper: “A man once pointed at the live red-tailed hawk I had out for a demo and asked me “Aren’t those extinct?” We eventually figured out he meant “Endangered” but I hear that question every time I see a redtail now.”

Primary School Teacher: “About every other year a student asks me what part of the school I sleep in at night, because clearly I live here.  I tell them I sleep under the bleachers in the gym but it’s actually the Nurse’s office.”

Professor: “A student asked me “So how do I use this in a conversation when my aunt is wine-drunk at thanksgiving and being a jerk again?” Which honestly is a fair question about philosophy and really changed how I teach rhetoric.”

Natural History Docent: “A woman once asked me what the difference between a Million and a Billion was.  Kinda pieced together that she’d just left her church for her safety, and was learning about Earth’s Natural History for the first time. Nobody else was there because it had been snowing, so I walked her through the Hall Of Time and answered as many questions as I could.  She was bewildered, but really trying. It always struck me as a really brave thing, to try to understand all of that while fresh out of a dangerous situation. I hope it helped.”

Forensic Scientist:  “People ask me how to commit murder all the time, but if you really hate someone, stealing thier identity causes much more suffering and is a lot harder to get caught at. A guy did ask me if working at a body farm was creepy and did not like that it was ok until you learned that decayed human fingers are a deer’s favorite midwinter snack.”

Zookeeper: “People call us becuase they think they’ve found an escaped animal all the time, or they think they’re neighbor’s husky is a wolf. One guy asked me if his dog was part hyena because it had spots. But that one guy really did have a Tiger in his toolshed that one time so we try to take them seriously.”

Meteorologist: “A guy once emailed me about how hard you’d have to fan a tornado to make it start spinning in the other direction and included a picture of him holding up a box fan at an approaching tornado.  We printed it out for the work fridge.”

Park Ranger: “I was giving a talk on the Yellowstone Supervolcano and a guy asked if, after it errupted, the earth would be ‘hollowed out’.  I suppose I was just relieved that he understand that the earth isn’t flat.”

Primarcy Shcool teacher: “A student once asked me where she could sell her bones online so she could by a dog.  Which? Same.”

Natural History Docent: “A guy asked us ‘If I had a time machine, and managed to kill and cook a T-Rex, what would it have tasted like?’ and every paleontologist on staff deciced to take him seriously.  They did research to learn about fat distribution, and read up on culinary science to learn what flavors meat, even did chemical analysis on the bones.  They concluded that it’d be Tough (no evidence of juicy fat pockets), bitter (carnivores tend to taste foul) and would probably kill him, because heavy metals travel up the food chain and T-Rex accumulated a lot of the cadmium that was in the dirt in the late cretaceous.  Wrote him a letter with our findings and he sent us back a drawing of him and his buddies cooking a T-Rex over a fire and all of them throwing up and dying, and it’s my favorite drawing in the whole world.”

What Mark Zuckerberg Really Means When He Talks About the Metaverse

In the parallel world of augmented reality, Facebook’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses contain cameras for taking photos/videos and a microphone for taking calls. The addition of more sensors and cameras increases the amount of egocentric data that Facebook can collect.

The metaverse, it turns out, is less cryptographic origami and more high-tech medical exam. The metaverse inextricably links the user’s individual, corporeal body and the ideas and actions that person takes. It’s about ever more granularly tracking and defining the individual consumer, down to our subconscious and involuntary reactions. The shocking thing about this is how easily the wow-factor of VR helmets and tricked out Ray-Bans have distracted us from the core, inevitable problem. The more deeply these devices are connected to Facebook’s ecosystem of apps and identity, the more the same old Facebook problems will come straight back to the fore: systematic mass surveillance, development of biased and opaque algorithms, and a general disdain for transparency or accountability.

Zuck’s Metaverse is just another data collection scheme – albeit on steroids. Sadly, many internet users who are easily dazzled by shiny objects will fall for it.

Mark Zuckerberg is a megalomaniacal James Bond villain. And he’s relying on masses of gullible users to volunteer for world domination under his cyber-totalitarianism.

We’re quickly running out of time to deal with tech oligarchies.

For those who care about social justice and free expression, getting caught up in the metaverse hype cycle would be a big mistake. But ignoring it would be, too. The problem is that Facebook is a trillion-dollar company that can afford to pay the attorneys and lobbyists and data scientists and product developers at the same time. Facebook’s “embodied internet” is not only a gross expansion of its ambition to total surveillance, it is an attempt to outpace the regulatory debate. As the whistleblower hearings and regulatory fracas continue, we can expect that Facebook will continue to delay, deny, and deflect.” But that’s in Washington. In Silicon Valley, D is for data.

As is the case with climate change, we need to act quickly. Of course the first thing everybody can do is to permanently leave Facebook.

The Facebook-clingers claim, “but that’s how I keep up with friends”. Look, Fb in its earliest form was created in 2004. For thousands of years before that, people managed to communicate with friends. d’oh!

It’s a remarkable failure of the imagination (as well as a bit of laziness) that people claim they will lose touch with friends by exiting a massive data collection vacuum cleaner.

Deleting Facebook will not only improve your mental health but could even be profitable. After a New Zealand publisher deleted Facebook, her readership soared.

This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up

Sometimes I think about the fact that under the Hawaiian Kingdom, Honolulu had electricity before most U.S cities, and Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House did, but today, the state of Hawaii ranks as having among the worst infrastructure of the U.S states. Colonialsm is so full of lies, of the "if it weren't for the u.s you would be living in grass huts" variety