During a conversation with my manager this morning, she mentioned that her manager– the district manager– had told her that “We want people who are passionate about our products. We don’t want people working here if they’re doing it for the money.”
To which the manager (internally, because she doesn’t want to be fired), went “you’ve got to be fucking shitting me.”
Here’s the thing: it is totally possible to do a job for the passion and not be obsessively thinking about the money every minute of every day. In fact, there have been economic studies regarding that very thing.
You know when it starts?
When the employee in question is making $50-75k per year.*
That’s the starting point of financial security. That’s the point when you’re fairly secure that you’re going to have rent, food, and basic living expenses covered.
I’ve worked a lot of jobs over the years. A lot.
I saw the same working as a freelancer– when I charged lower rates, my clients treated me like shit and acted like they were doing me a favor; when I charged more, they respected me as a professional. A newspaper that started out paying me above market wage also treated me very kindly, because they started with the assumption that I was a human being who needs to eat.
In my experience, the employers that insist that your job be your “passion” are also the ones that pay you nothing and treat you like garbage. It’s exactly like abusive people, who tell you that you would put up with their abuse if you “loved them enough”. It’s a way of convincing the victim that they’re responsible for their own mistreatment, which is absolutely fucked up.
Here’s my advice to you:
It is absolutely okay to take a job that doesn’t pay you what you deserve– you’ve got to eat, after all. But don’t think for a second that you have a responsibility to that job. If you see something available that pays better and treats you better, take it and don’t look back. Don’t waste an ounce of sympathy for employers who try to convince you that passion is an acceptable substitute for survival.
saw a comment someone made on a post saying “it’s not possible to read dark fiction and not have that affect your morals, you can’t train your brain NOT to normalize those things!” and i completely agree
as a life-long crime fiction and horror fan, i am an immoral monster. i’ve watched all 456 episodes of law and order and committed a murder after each one. i ate my neighbors after watching hannibal. i started a meth lab after breaking bad. i ruined my high school prom because i watched carrie the night before. in middle school i read stephen king’s it, went down to the sewers with some friends and
Wendy why would you hide this masterpiece in the tags
Like, all hyperbole aside, don’t @ me about how fiction can guide your mindset. Believe me, I know. Consuming certain pieces of media and thinking about them has helped to make me the person I am today. But the argument that consuming less-than-pure content (and pure according to whom?) is inherently harmful to “young, impressionable minds” is exactly the same bullshit that book-banning, fundamentalist types have been spewing for decades.
Sorry to put this salt mine on your dashes for a third time today, but I can’t believe I missed OP’s most excellent tags:
Lynne Cox is an accomplished American open water swimmer. Twice, she held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel. Cox was the first woman to swim the Cook Strait and the first to swim the Straits of Magellan and around the Cape of Good Hope. Cox swam the Bering Strait from American soil to Soviet soil in 1987, at the height of the Cold War.
Look at her.
I know open water swimming isn’t really glamorous, but Lynne Cox is arguably one of the greatest overlooked athletes of the 20th century.
And quite possibly a mutant.
She can withstand water temperatures that you or I would die from because of her training and her body’s unique reaction to cold (you know how the blood will leave your fingers and toes when it’s cold, to preserve heat? her whole body does that, pooling her blood in her core and insuring her body temperature stays toasty where it counts).
She funded the Bering Strait swim herself, clearing out her bank account when she couldn’t get corporate sponsors. After she succeeded (to almost everyone’s surprise: if you get in the Bering Sea without serious gear you generally just die) Gorbachev mentioned her during treaty talks with Nixon: “Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live.“
She wasn’t just the first woman to swim the Strait of Magellan. She was the first person to make it across.
On top of setting multiple world records, she swam a mile+ to the coast of Antarctica, in just a bathing suit, and did not die.
She’s swum over 50,000 miles.
And look at her. This is a photo from when she was young, at the peak of her career and setting records all over the world. She is a great athlete. She is a human who can do things most humans would die trying. I’m sitting here at 1 AM getting all teary eyed because this is the first time I’ve looked up a photo of her and I am so surprised, so gratified, so overwhelmed to find out that this world record setter, this literal superhuman, has nearly the same body type as me.
Since they wouldn’t let her be a fantasy creature in a video game, she just did it in real life, I guess.
Anyone who thinks there is just one athletic body type isn’t paying attention during the Olympics opening ceremonies.
Her body type is optimized for her sport. The shape of her body and the presence of fat both provide insulation to keep her core warm while she swims.
A lot of open water swimmers aren’t this chunky, but that’s because most of them are actually triathletes, and their body type is a compromise between the ideals for the different sports.
There really is no one way to be fit and athletic. For some reason, we tend to get ourselves hung up on the body type of track and field athletes, especially that of marathon runners (who tend to carry almost no extra fat) as the ideal.
So I found out a few months ago that wanting to ‘not exist’ or wishing you could ‘just sleep forever’ is also considered suicidal (specifically suicidal idealization). It shocked me cause I used to think that way when I was younger but had previously thought that being suicidal meant explicitly wanting to die.. but it actually involves wanting to not live too.
I think its an important thing to note cause it might allow someone to realize the severity of their condition earlier.
This was the funniest thing to me. Because I was talking to a counselor, and they were like “Are you suicidal?”
“No not really. But sometimes I don’t want to exist though”
“You do know that’s suicidal ideation?”
“…what?”
I wish I kind of knew before. Like honestly, we know so little about mental health.
Same goes for wanting to run away, I had this urge for the longest time, to just leave, I thought it was because I was looking for thrill or something but after a few dozen times of googling “why do I want to run away so badly?” And “is it normal to want to run away?” I found out that that’s also a symptom of depression and suicidal idealization, obviously not as strong but definetly also a part that’s not talked about a lot
Yet another installment in humans being fuckin weird compared to aliens: humans give blood, organs, and tissue to each other, because our race is built around being able to function under as much stress as possible.
So of course, what do we do when another human will die without something we could live without?
We go to our local hospital and undergo trauma to provide them with it, for no compensation.
Sure you might need to eat and drink more, take antibiotics or anti rejection drugs, but hey!
B’ril over there had to wait until HIS race figured out stem cells and lab grown organs, because ALL their organs are vital, and losing a pint of fluid flat out kills them or sends them into shock.
“You… you lost… your toxin filters?”
“Well, we’ve got a few things that do that, but yeah, like… four of them?”
“….Four?”
“Well, counting tonsils.”
“You are… How are you alive, again?”
“You make it sound so weird. I still have two kidneys- One’s synthetic, the other was donated.”
“…….donated?”
“Yeah, my girlfriend was compatible.”
“Donated.”
“….Yeah? Like, we had the same blood type and everything, and she volunteered. What, you guys don’t do that? What do you do when someone needs a liver, or something?”
“We… clone one.”
“Okay, sure, but what did you do before cloning? You didn’t just like, give someone a piece?”
“….. we died? Wait, what do you mean, ‘give someone a piece’?”
“Well, our livers can grow back. You can give someone a piece of yours, and they can grow their own. You guys don’t do that?”
funeral-biscuit 