That Insidious Feeling of Working a Job Below You

  Blender Dumbass
December 13, 2024

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https://blenderdumbass.org/ : 👁 1

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If you are going to skim, better listen to it instead.

Yesterday I overheard a few words from a conversation between teenagers. One of them said a word combination which is roughly translatable into English as "Black Work". An insidious, and most definitely racist way of putting out there a discontent with a certain type of probably useless activity, most people today call their "job". In a different place I heard of statistic claiming that something along the lines of 75% of all humans are tasked with mindless work, which is often pretty much decorative and is there only to facilitate a certain governmental goal of employment. Basically non of us are doing anything actually useful and we are all struggling because of it. And I often feel depressed doing such jobs, yet there is seemingly no obvious road to escape them.

We live in post-scarcity. In a time where the stuff that people actually need for survival are abundant. You can observe post scarcity in action when obesity becomes more of a problem in the country than famine. And while there are still countries with famine, it is there only because people refuse, often, to think about issues globally and are only concerned about the relatively unimportant domestic well-being.

Even though I do sometimes say that I am "fine" with my current work in the supermarket, I am saying that only because I don't see how I will not survive like this, yet psychologically I'm rather suffering. And yet I cannot think that this suffering is only my own, since I know a lot of people who work similar jobs actually are educated for far greater things, they just can't seem to find a way to use their education.

I am doing what I want to do. I did a few films and some games and other projects that I am proud to be making. But to remain alive I have to do things that are completely pointless, so that people in charge will give me money. I calculated that I need to only work about half of the month to get the money I need to survive with. And I'm trying not to go to work too often. I'm happy enough to work in a negligent enough place, where they don't care much if I come or not. Yet, even with that freedom I still feel like half of my month is being utterly wasted.

I already explained why I am not pursuing a more fulfilling job. Many people with blogs like the one I have, which are linked in people's Mastodon bios, say that they work professionally at this interesting job, or that one. I am working at the god damned supermarket. And yet, I can't see how I can do anything else. I mean, I can and I did, work at a warehouse, before that. But it is equally as meaningless, equally as uninteresting and equally as, frankly, boring.

I often tend to set myself strange challenges at works I do. At the warehouse I was competing at speed with other workers. At the supermarket I competed at accuracy for a while, until it became such a second nature that I never did a penny of a mistake closing my cash-desk. Then I added to it speed. And now I'm way ahead on both metrics than the second place. I do those challenges to get something interesting out of the experience. To at least treat it as a game of sorts. And yet I feel miserable in the end of the day.

I have a solution to my misery that might work. The petitions on this very website will show you an implementation of an idea that might in future grow into becoming something financially driven. The main issue I'm trying to solve is to get some soft of leverage while not using copyright, against the buyer. In other words, copyright is used as a tool to force the consumer to pay. Because any other mean of getting the same item are outside of the law. But this restriction of people's ability to share is inherently anti-freedom and therefor wrong. But how would one have any way to force the buyer to buy if forcing is not allowed?

Well I decided that I may not even publish anything until I get my part of the deal. By making the deal not with singular buyers, but with the world in its entirety, and asking the world a certain price for a publication, I can leverage something out of it. If you go to the Dani's Race version 25-09-24 petition, you will see that it is actively asking the world for something in exchange for me publishing the damn thing.

At the moment it is not doing it with money. There are problems with trying to make it with money. It is nearly impossible to find any information for filing taxes manually in my country. Apparently all taxes are filed only by people with a special license. Basically requiring a subscription on anybody who wants to work alone. And those companies that offer those kinds of services, they have to do the accounting in specially prescribed software that was selected by the state. And this makes it very unlikely that I could do what Free Software Foundation is doing and use some kind of a Free Software banking tool that will allow me to implement a secure credit card form on this website.

Crypto-currency was ones what I thought to be the solution to my misery, but in reality it just obfuscates the problem by adding additional steps to it. Even if the transaction itself is happening with Free Software, which are many for crypto, there are still another two transactions that have to happen using one proprietary tool or another, to move the money from the bank to the crypto, and wise versa to move the money from the crypto and into the bank. Therefor using crypto-currency as something that allows for Free Software transactions online is the same kind of absurdity as using a Free Software web browser to load and run proprietary javascript code.

Maybe some time in the future I will figure something out. Maybe I will figure out how to make this work, so at least people in other, better countries could enjoy making money and being free, but unless tomorrow my country ( and countries of my readers ) suddenly decide that they want to implement GNU Taler or something, I don't see it happening to me.

It feels like no matter how hard I try to come up with something clever, to make money ethically, there is always some stupid caveat to pay attention to that makes everything fall apart. It is as if the only way for blenderdumbass . org or anything I do to survive, is for me to keep working my shitty jobs, for that sole purpose, of simply surviving. Perhaps I will never feel fulfilled. I will never feel like I am not wasting myself. Because all those ways to try to achieve that fulfillment are evil in some capacity. Perhaps it will be very interesting to see me making my 10th feature film, that is watched by a billion followers, in a hundred or so years from now, and yet being late for my shift at a fucking supermarket.

But It is fine... Yeah... It is truly fine... It is... It must be...

Happy Hacking!!!

Thumbnail uses an image by Koshyk called Great Depression CC-BY.

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  Anonymous Guest c:0


I'm up against a similar wall currently. It seems that here in the U.S. it might be at least somewhat easier to escape it, but the core elements of the economy are obscured by many layers of nonsense, captured by government and the people who own government. I'm going to have to quit my job and do something productive on my own terms even if it means much more work. My psychological health demands it. I wish you the best.