My favorite hobby is describing socialism without using the word “socialism” and watching everyone in the room agree with me.
Guy at work: *bitches about work*
Me: “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. See, the company can only make money off of the work we do, so they’re never gonna pay us what we’re worth; you don’t get paid for eight hours’ work, you get paid for working eight hours. That’s how they make bank. So the relationship between us and management is always gonna be adversarial. Why you think [boss] is such a dickhead? He’s incentivized to be a dickhead.”
Guy: “That….that actually makes a lot of sense.”
Me: *stares into the camera like on The Office while ‘The Internationale’ plays in the background*
i don’t understand the difference between getting “paid for eight hours’ work” vs “paid for 8 hours.”
Most companies want you to do 12 hours worth of work in 6 hours of actual time. They want to work you so hard your stress level is through the roof. So then you go to the doctor for various illnesses caused by excessive stress. Then you get to add to that stress by worrying about missing too much time from work to take care of the problems that work created in your body.
That makes sense now, thank you!
The company makes its profits via the additional value your work adds to their product or service. A sewn shirt is more valuable than three yards of fabric, for instance, and a chair is worth more than a few bits of wood, and so on; but for the commodity to reach that market value so much higher than its components requires labor.
So, your employer is not actually paying you an equivalent value for what your labor generates; that’s where their profit comes from. All they’re paying you for is your labor-power exerted over a certain amount of time per day. With modern industrial practices, your employer easily makes back your daily wage in added value within the first few hours of your working day; the whole rest of that time you spend generating profit.
You don’t get paid for eight hours’ work, you get paid for working eight hours.
when you’re 47 au’s deep into your maladaptive daydreaming and someone forces you back into this threshold of reality by engaging you in social interaction
I once said to my therapist after a particularly hard week, “I wish I could just fix all of my problems and move on to live a normal life”
And he looked at me and said, “There is no finish line”.
Those words felt like a stab in my heart, but they were words that I desperately needed to hear. There is no finish line to my problems. It’s not possible to get through a certain point in life and have my problems simply disappear. And it’s unhealthy to think that way. Up to that point in my life, that’s what I though recovery was. I thought it was like working your way forward until it seems like your problems never existed in the first place.
The finish line does not exist. Instead, everyone has a capacity for recovery. You may never completely rid yourself of whatever causes you pain, but you will move miles from where you started. Don’t set your expectations too high and create that theoretical finish line in your life, or you will only end up chasing it. Instead, focus on your own capacity for recovery, and be proud of yourself for every step you take.
Just saw Eighth Grade and reblogging the heck out of this bc wow it gets so much better if you just take it one step at a time
Okay but I cant help but hear “there is no finish line” and immediately respond with “then why am i running the race?” What is the point*? Where is the benefit of putting in the effort if its not going to ever end? If i am always going to battle I would rather just give up the fight.
*(Im not saying recovery is bad or whatever ppl wanna reach for, this is my personal view)
That’s the thing, though: it’s not a race. It’s a garden.
No matter what your garden looks like in the beginning, you have to weed it before it can grow into what you want it to be. And when your flowers are planted and growing, you still have to keep up with the weeding. You have to keep up with the weeding even after your flowers are tall. A garden can’t survive on its own. There will always be weeds.
But there will be flowers, too, if you give them space to grow. Give them room, give them time, and keep checking in to make sure the weeds don’t get too tall. You will always have weeds, but you will also have flowers.
And maybe your garden doesn’t look exactly like you imagined it would. Maybe you aren’t sure how to get rid of that one big thistle in the corner. Maybe you’ve got bindweed and nutgrass (which will always, always come back). Either way, you’ve got flowers now, and it’s a nice place to sit and look around, and it looks nicer than it did before, and it’s yours. Keep going with it. If you miss a few days, or months, or years, that’s okay. Pull up the weeds when you’re ready, uncover your old flowers and plant some new ones, and keep going.
Gardening is a process, not a project or a problem that can be solved. The same is true for your mental health. Weeds will grow, but you’ll get better and better at pulling them, and you’ll grow flowers, too.
Astronaut bird 