Why It's Time to Quit Your Job
If enough of us quit, we could save the world
I’ve already written about the impending climate disaster. Scientists now predict we’ll be beyond the point of return within five years, others say we’ve already passed it, and based on prior predictions, almost all climate scientists have been overly optimistic.
We’re experiencing events that weren’t supposed to happen for 50 years while at the same time discovering more salient variables regularly. We didn’t know until recently that the Thwaites/Doomsday glacier is also melting from below, weakening its attachment to solid ground.
Do you want to spend your last relatively healthy years doing a job that you hate?
Implicitly, we have a normalcy bias, so even those of us who accept the math and data and acknowledge that science is much better at ascertaining reality than we are are emotionally inclined to just keep on going as if everything were normal.
The math has been saying it’s time to quit for awhile, and what’s the point of paying off your mortgage if your house is going to be underwater or burnt to cinders long before then anyway?
If you wake up every morning and have to rationalize why your job isn’t really that bad, it’s time to quit.
If most of what you do is just bullshit that just burns electricity, you should quit.
If you’ve been forced back into commuting, which also involves buying new suits, watches, and phones to radiate the illusion of success despite the waste this causes, you should quit.
Most importantly, corporations have become more powerful than ever and our safety nets have eroded, and the only message that corporations understand is quitting.
Rather than pay the unemployment or health insurance you’ve paid into your entire working life, they’d rather audit you to death and drive you so crazy you quit. Corporations do this even just to avoid paying decent raises and bonuses.
I just quit, and a few of the members on my team said this has been a yearly tradition. Work hard all year with very few errors, and then suddenly in November, before the end of the calendar year, management starts searching for anything to audit you with, which also servers the purpose of justifying firing you.
HR and upper-management are sided against you, but it’s gotten to the point that you have to call and complain regularly to have any shot at all at unemployment insurance.
All of this cruel, stupid, horseshit could be stopped by giving employees unemployment insurance by default whether or not they’re fired or quit, and this is how the government should work. The employees with virtually no power should be protected, not the massive corporations that are fully capable of protecting themselves.
In other words, we should be protected from entities that literally have billions of times more resources.
The minimum wage should be tied to inflation and cost of living, as should raises. Every person in public office should be paid the median income of individual US citizens, and any campaign contributions should be off-limits. We should end campaign contributions altogether, as they’re legalized bribery. It would be more difficult for politicians to call us lazy complainers if they were forced to scrape by on $61,000 a year, and that’s still more than half of working Americans.
The mode income in the US, or what most people earn, is around $10,000 a year, and as the precise data has become almost impossible to find, I rounded up to the highest estimate.
The super wealthy pull up the average, the dwindling middle class props up the median, but if the plurality of adults in the US are earning $10,000 or less, that also means they qualify for food stamps, which have also been funded by our taxes, or are something we paid for, but most people are ashamed when they have to use them.
Why feel bad about spending your own goddamn money?
I can live with having chipped in more than I’ll ever get out—including social security—so some poor person or family can eat.
A very small minority of people are gaming the system, but not to the extent of corporations that explicitly tell their employees that if they raise their wages, they’ll lose their food stamps.
So few individuals are gaming the system it would cost more to investigate and prosecute than to just pay them, and corporations already know this. If you’re willing to go to court for your unemployment, most corporations will fold, as paying a corporate lawyer $1000 an hour to fight against you getting your $500 a week is a losing proposition.
I’ve been working since I was nine and have had corporate jobs on and off for the last 25 years, and every year, they’ve gotten worse.
First they took away the paid hour lunch and replaced it with a paid half-hour lunch, then they made you work 8.5 to 9 hours minus a half-hour or an hour for a mandatory unpaid lunch.
My health insurance used to cover two checkups a year, then one. Now, my deductible is $7,000 before I get anything. The only reason I kept my lousy insurance was in case I got hit by a bus.
I am privileged to be able to quit. My mortgage is paid off and I have assets, but I’ve quit before when I was in massive debt and just decided to never pay the debt. The laws were different, and even if you didn’t file for bankruptcy, as long as you could live without credit cards or decent credit for seven years, the debts would be voided, because ultimately, the credit card companies and society in general wants you back in the game, wracking up debt at insane interest rates by buying crap you don’t need to impress people you can barely stand.
If well all decided to stop working until we were treated like human beings and paid equitably, corporations would fold, but that kind of social cohesion in a country this large is extremely rare, and a lot of our jobs are going to be obsolete soon anyway.
We’re about to lose whatever leverage we have.
The rich don’t want to support 160 million people and their families who have become obsolete. They’d rather we die so a few people can live like kings.
I’ll take contract jobs or become a janitor or work as a bartender or server again. The latter two pay better than most corporate jobs anyway and health insurance is no longer a factor.
But I’ll never take a corporate job or work full time for more than a few months at a time ever again.
It isn’t worth the misery.
We get one life, and I’d like to spend what’s left of mine napping, reading, and trying to pick up women.
A lot of people talk about social justice, but take no action at all because it’s too difficult, frightening, or they’re just hypocrites.
All you really have to do is nothing, and I plan to do as little as possible from here on out.
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Enjoy.