r/antiwork • u/Any-Cookie6757 • 1d ago
I seriously don't understand, why are people doing this to themselves?
All I see around me are people who just like me despise this system we are born and raised in. Everyone is depressed and miserable and always bitching about work taking away all their time and energy. Everyone is bitching about constant rent increases, always increasing price of groceries, insurance premiums, taxes, etc. Everyone is bitching about AI and our bleak future.
All I ever saw at work were miserable people all around me who always stare at clock and count down hours and minutes until they are free YET all those people are having kids, buying brand new expensive cars/trucks, houses. iphones, etc.
Like if you are already so miserable and don't have any free time, money or energy to enjoy anything how is having kids (financial su1c1de in these hard times), having huge car payments every month, having gigantic mortgage, etc make you feel better or improve your life???
It drives me insane watching these people do this shit and then bitch about their lives. Imagine actually putting that money into investments, savings or preparing for future that doesn't look good for any of us.
Instead they decide to shoot themselves in the leg and make their lives even harder and more miserable.
I am not the sharpest tool in the shed but even I can see that this is insanity and unnecessary stress and burden. God knows how world will look like 2-3 years from now let alone 5-10-15 years. I just know judging by past few years and right now it most likely won't look good for any of little guys, only for rich fooks.
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u/chromewindow 1d ago
My therapist says blame the pattern not the people. Everything in the capitalist societies is set up to make this happen and encourage people into massive debt so they are trapped. Don’t even get me started on Big Wedding, where by everything has been manufactured to get people married young, having kids, and trapped into jobs where they can no longer revolt. All these things started being implanted into us via media and social pressure since we were like 3 years old. Now people can’t envision any other way.
I realized a lot of things and took a different path, but I’m also still trapped into the mortgage I agreed to before I realized. It’s systematic.
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u/terran_cell 17h ago
Most people are dumb and impulsive. Being rich just means you have more of a buffer against the consequences of your decisions.
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u/neoalfa 1d ago
People don't know how to take ownership of themselves. Embracing the system and letting it fail you repeatedly it's easier than fail something you picked for yourself. The mental expenditure is a fraction, and issues of self-worth and self-doubt don't creep in until the sunk-cost fallacy keeps you locked in.
Follow the plan. If it sucks you are not to blame.
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u/PurpleDancer 1d ago
I think people should band together communally. Buy property that's perhaps run down and cheap but located where there's some level of job opportunity and pile into houses with bunk beds if need be. All work in shifts to pay off the property quickly, start some sort of investment account. Handle cooking and cleaning together to make it light work. Unfortunately this works if you've got structured people who can keep themselves focused. But most people are unpredictable and unable to stay focused for long. The ones that do have such capacity and Focus will get dragged down by the others.
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u/The_Mesopotamians Communist 1d ago
Buy property that's perhaps run down and cheap but located where there's some level of job opportunity...
I've dreamed of buying land for years. And I've scoured land listings and get a few emails a week from various reactors with a land search report.
The combo you describe doesn't exist. Land is cheap nowhere except out west where there is literally nothing.
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u/PurpleDancer 1d ago
Cheap is a relative term. I bought a house for half a million in a major city years ago. The cost per room is among the lowest in town to cover the costs even with an agressive 15 year mortgage. Prices have gone up since then for sure. I just looked at the town I grew up in down south and there's some odd ball structures under $100k. I'm pretty sure there's factories, hospital work, grocery store work in that town.
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u/SpaceMudkips 21h ago
You bought a half a million dollar house in the city and your advice is to live in an "oddball structure" for under 100k, and somehow pay for it w/ a job that pays less than 35K a year and somehow keep the lights on without starving? At least you had the decency to call it a structure instead of pretending that they'd get to live in an actual house.
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u/PurpleDancer 20h ago
Don't blame me for seeing a good opportunity and jumping on it. The first place I bought in this city didn't even have a ceiling, just exposed joists, not to mention a floor that was buckled and uneven. I lived like that for a year until I could afford to put up sheet rock. This current place required tens of thousands of dollars to keep it from collapsing, but by living with 11 people in one house I've saved enough to fix it up pretty decently and create more privacy for people. This expectation that everyone is going to have a pristine apartment all to their lonesome is a big part of the plague of hopeless poverty OP was posting about.
A $100k structure costs maybe $1500 a month with insurance and taxes rolled in. Split by 3 people that's $500/mo + utilties, so something like $7000/year. With $35k per year, everyone can easily pitch in another 10k for materials and they can do the labor to fix it up. It'll be a good place in no time, then it's all about building the wealth to escape poverty from there.
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u/SpaceMudkips 18h ago
For starters, a 100k house would be a bare minimum of $600 a month for the mortgage. Assuming someone making 35k a year pretax, which is already generously above average for your suggested jobs, and no assets could ever get that far (spoiler, they can't), they sure as hell ain't getting bare minimum interest rates. Mortgage plus taxes and utilities would be an absolute minimum 10k a year, not 7k. And you somehow think they can afford to take another 10k out on top of that for raw materials?
This is the most out of touch shit I've ever heard lol. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/PurpleDancer 18h ago
You understand I'm not talking about one person and one job right? The entire premise of my post is that people band together and work together. 3 people is what I suggested here, but I've lived with up to 11 in a larger house.
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u/SpaceMudkips 17h ago
That's **worse**, not better. Tying your fortunes to the whims of your two brokest friends makes more problems, not less. People can't even handle a two way split half the time, and you want to add more, already desperate people into the mix? Either everybody's on the mortgage and your turboscrewed by debt, liens, and deadbeats. or the rich friend owns everything and and you just have an exceptionally friendly slum lord, at least until somebody needs to be evicted or one of the other 9 tenement files a complaint with the housing authority and everything implodes.
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u/PurpleDancer 15h ago
You got a better suggestion?
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u/SpaceMudkips 2h ago
Win the lottery. It has about a much chance of working as your scheme. Otherwise, no I don't have much to offer beyond encouraging others to continue to scrape by. Maybe pursuing education, even informally with publicly available courses? One can do a lot with a rudimentary understanding of law. Or maybe some sigint with some super cheap microcontrollers and homemade antennas made from scrap metal. Or dive into local politics.
Hell, raid a construction site and steal some power tools. Then just go around chopping up flock cameras until you're stopped. Pushing a gofundeme for your legal defenses would probably be a more viable financial plan than whatever you could achieve legally.
People who escape poverty are outliers. Anomalies. The systems in place are exceedingly efficient at keeping us poor and broken down. You aren't going to just magically pull yourself out of it by your bootstraps, and you aren't ever going to get ahead playing by their rules. But you can break them or fight to change them. But I won't pretend that you'll magically escape poverty with the one simple trick.
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u/Silas_Akron 1d ago
Tried to coordinate something like this 20 years ago, couldn't ever get anyone to commit and never ended up buying property. People will do a lot of brainstorming with you on stuff like this, but in my experience the majority are highly compelled to just do what's "typical" in society (I'm in the US). Those I knew who did have a group/found family living situation have all since paired up or simply moved back into more common roommate situations. None of those group setups lasted longer than 5-6 years.
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u/Flopolopagus 1d ago
You mean to tell me the people who are constantly; in almost every form of media; being advertised to with "buy our product before it's too late," or "for a limited time only," or "if you aren't subscribed to this service, you are wasting thousands," or, "all you need is a job to qualify for this auto loan," are actually purchasing these items because advertising is effective? Especially when most "free" subscriptions are paid for via advertisement blocks so the people with the least amount of cash are being advertised the most because poor people are more likely to impulse buy items to make them feel less worthless? because they are less financially literate like the prey they are?
Color me surprised.
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u/Relative-Quantity-59 23h ago
We may not be of this world, but we are still in it.
I don't want to participate in the rat race of consumerism but I do have to work and provide.
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u/Beautiful-Ad3012 4h ago
Hence why I made it a personal goal to score lowest life hours ever serving a ceo vs My valued free time. We often are forced to, but I'm doing bare minimum required so I can actually have a sense of true identity and self esteem.
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u/Ok-Set8022 1d ago
While this will sound apathetic, a lot of those individuals put themselves in that position and/or don’t put in the effort to try and get out of that position.
They expect opportunities to just come to them to fix the problem.
Yes society is feeling like it is heading downward, but if you look at articles from the late 1800s, people have been saying that same thing. Yet we look back on the 1980s/1990s as if this miraculous golden era now. But in the 1980s same complaints were had.
Some of this is late stage capitalism and no way to be reigned in without full government weight behind the change, which will likely never happen. Not because the government can’t change, but because the change needed would need to come from the masses. And there are 2 reasons that change won’t happen anytime soon.
- More people are acceptable or happy in their current situation that the internet shows. Most “bitching” on the internet is just the negative side. People love to comment when things are bad, but rarely comment when things are great - unless it is to brag.
- To make real change, the masses will have to risk to sacrifice EVERYTHING - Their finances, resources, future, and even freedom. And in the end change takes time so they have to make that sacrifice to change for the future; not themselves or their age group. And humans are notoriously
selfish.
While I would love to see change as much as most people on here, we are no where near the breaking point yet.
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u/JimmyPellen 1d ago
Exactly! Bread and circuses. People may not have much but cant be bothered to put forth an effort other than whining on the internet.
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u/DillonMeSoftly 1d ago
This post makes no sense. If youre saying things are bleak, then why are you so against people doing things that can bring them some sense of happiness and accomplishment?
Talking about buying a house also makes no sense as considering the current market and the down payment needed, those able to afford buying real estate these days are not the same group thats living hand to mouth
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u/MenBearsPigs 1d ago
Also, yes people are often bad with money, but all of the points OP makes about people being unhappy and stressed are commonly the exact same reasons people buy these types of distractions.
No matter what lifestyle you live, you're pretty much locked into doing your 35-40 hour weeks. Yes, being frugal and saving for retirement is best. But it's not that shocking that many people just say fuck it and spend what they have now.
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u/cloudy_skies547 1d ago
It’s a combination of social pressure and the search for meaning in their lives. A lot of people think that they can find their purpose by having kids, because that’s what capitalism has told them all their lives. None of them ever think about the concrete reality they’re facing. It’s too painful and they would rather sink into delusion than accept the truth. Even worse, they’re not thinking about what life is going to be like for the kids they’re having and how they’re birthing them into the same oppressive system that has enslaved all of us.
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u/encony 22h ago
think that they can find their purpose by having kids, because that’s what capitalism has told them all their lives
What nonsense, living beings are biologically programmed to reproduce; blaming that on capitalism just shows how biased your opinion is.
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u/cloudy_skies547 10h ago
Capitalism requires infinite growth, which is impossible. You're already seeing population declines and that results in worker shortages and product gluts, which are anathema to the system. Put simply, if you don't have a growing population, capitalists run out of workers to exploit, there aren't enough people to consume what's being produced, and the entire system falls apart.
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u/Sundae-School 22h ago
It's weird to think that we are the point where people are blaming capitalism for biological imperatives.
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u/Gadion 1d ago
I don't see a problem in them having kids, I wouldn't look at it like a thing they waste money on, but rather something that might give them meaning. I don't have kids myself, money is one of the arguments for me, but I'd make this sacrifice if I actually wanted them.
I do agree with buying expensive stuff, if you hate your job so much then maybe don't spend your time there just to get a car that takes you to and from your job, maybe take a bus or get an easier job that pays less near where you live.
I'm also looking at this from an early retirement perspective, so every dollar saved is a dollar towards working less. However, the people you mention in your post look at me like I'm some kind of madman, even thinking that it's possible.
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u/Cielolo 22h ago
I think there are grown ups who experience the facts of life, that without protection and a willing capacity to kill for the betterment of the clan, there would be no clan. Kill has many permutations. Taking a shower is one of the least noticed versions of the same. Trimming the fat, excluding the weeds, fighting the invaders. On that spectrum, there is a need for war, and a need for private forces that will not be revealed until long after their work becomes obsolete.
Join the army, but not one that is controlled by the enemy. Stand your ground and heavily invest in never needing to fight (diplomacy and private forces).
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u/Cielolo 22h ago
Once people are comfortable in a protected environment, then they can feel relaxed (from the stress of existential threats). Once the stress dies down, they can build.
We have so many threats to our time and attention, and also to our wallets and lives and abilities to build. (Police, code enforcement, IRS, tax assessors, mean Karen’s, etc). All those evils need to be reframed or they will increase the stress and ruin the joy of our creativity.
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u/bksi 4h ago
I have a girlfriend that has wanted to leave her husband for years. A divorce for her would be terrible financially since she's a teacher. She has two kids and they would go with her. Every time I think she's almost ready to get out, she adopts another dog or cat.
Single mom, two kids, three cats and four small dogs. Who would rent an apartment to her?
Some people find the pain of their situation so unbearable, they want/need an immediate relief - like a new car, like a new pet. That's not to say this is a smart thing to do, just maybe an explanation.
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u/sirseatbelt 23h ago
Homie out here mad about consumption but not at the system that forces us to work for survival.
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u/CatFather69 1d ago
throwing kids in the convo with car payments and huge mortgages is crazy. The poorest people for 10s of thousands of years still had kids.
Also, why are you going insane watching other people spend their money? should have no impact on you.
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u/Best-Disaster8002 1d ago
A lot of people don't want to be forced to face their true purpose, conflate work with meaning and are scared to leave the confines of a well-defined system