582
Corporatism drug
(jlai.lu)
cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/24534988
When you look at corporate culture vs work/life balance.... And you consider a broader scope than just working hours and time off (vacation/holidays), apart from the weekend, you get shockingly few hours to do what you want. The vast majority of your day is serving the interest of the company.
Let's start at wake up time. Assuming you're a normal person and get up a few hours before work, so that you can go to work, and assuming you work in an office, and you commute there... You get up, have a coffee, that you paid for yourself, so you can be awake enough to get to work and be productive. You clean up, so you are visually appealing, or at least not visually repulsive, and put on clean clothes that you spent your own time and money to make clean. Now that you are energized, clean, dressed and presentable, you then get into the car you bought with your own money, to spend gasoline that you pay for (or electricity, if you're an EV owner), to propel yourself to your companies office. You do this, every day. Hours a day of unpaid work, out of your own pocket, in service of the company, all before you do one thing that might actually generate revenue for the business.
You finally clock in and you're getting paid.
Lunch comes around, and you're hungry from working hard all day long so far, so you either crack open your lunch box and take the food your bought with your own money, out of the box to eat. Food you might not even like, but it's cheap and works well for lunch, so you choke it down regardless.... Or you go and spend your money buying lunch, which might actually be something you enjoy eating, but it takes so long to get to where that food is, order it, eat it, pay for it, and get back to the office that you get exactly zero time to enjoy yourself.
You then get a few fleeting moments to enjoy the day, before you have to get back to the office and make more value for the shareholders.
Quitting time finally comes but you're not done for the day. Sure, you're off the clock, but now you have to travel home. Could be an hour or more to get home with all this traffic!
So you finally get home, but wait, there's more. You have to feed yourself so you're not starving tomorrow, so you make food and eat then clean up .. by the time you finally get to the part of the day that you can relax and do what you want to do, you get a precious couple of hours at most before you have to go to sleep at a reasonable time, so you can wake up and do it all over again tomorrow.
Let's add it up, shall we? Let's say you're pretty efficient and live relatively close to work. You get up and shower, consume some kind of nourishment and get out the door in, say, 1.5 hours, then drive 30 minutes to the office, 8 hour work day, and the pitiful "break" you get for lunch, so, let's say that's 9 hours in total, from the time you get there, until you are headed to the car. Another 30 minutes to get home. That alone is 11.5 hours. Take time out for dinner, and cleanup after dinner, say, an hour and a half, we're at 13 hours. Don't forget your should get 8 hours of sleep! So you've now spent 21 out of 24 hours catering to, creating value for, or doing things in service of, your overlords... I mean your workplace. You get a pittance of 3 hours to do what you want, at the end of the day, when you're tired and mentally drained from being at the office all day....
And companies wonder why people want to work from home.
I work from home. I get up maybe 15 minutes before work, make a coffee, go log into work. I'm then doing work until lunch, I eat whatever's cheap and available, honestly, usually leftovers from yesterday. And once I clock out, I'm home. And I can start doing whatever I want right away. Cuts that 21 hours down to... What? 18? Tops? I easily get twice as much free time to do what I want during the day than you in office workers....
