16 Bucks an Hour
Time in the trench
They’re called ‘dead end’ jobs because when you’ve got one, it seems like there is no way out.
In early August of this year I decided to get my first official job while I was in Boise, Idaho. I wanted to start making money to fund a radical alternative to college called The Preparation, for which, I am the “beta tester”.
I applied for quite a few different types of jobs. Manual labor work or retail jobs, I didn’t really care as long as I’d be able to make some money, learn what I could, and not completely hate it.
My dad always talked about just how expensive things have gotten. So much so that he wondered aloud, “how can people possibly make ends meet?” But, it wasn’t until I started working that I started to understand how bad it was.
16 Bucks An Hour
It wasn’t long before I realized $16/hour really amounts to nothing nowadays. While stocking backpacks I happened to look at the price tag. $50!
If I wanted the bag (I didn’t), I’d have to trade four hours stocking shelves under the mind-numbing fluorescent lights to be able to “afford” it.
One of the guys I worked with who was always kind and helpful and definitely on the spectrum, would be at work nearly everyday. When extra hours were offered he was the first to volunteer.
Stocking shelves together one day, we got into a good conversation. I asked about his plans for the future. He told me that he was looking for an escape by joining the army national guard, but he said he was having trouble getting in. I assumed the mild autism was to blame. On top of that, he said his parents needed him home.
Why?
$3000 Rent
My work friend couldn’t afford to move out and anyway his dad needed him to stay to help pay the rent. He told me that month after month it’s a constant struggle for them to stay afloat. Their rent is $3,000 a month!
I did the math. $3,000/ month is 200 hours of work for me and expensive for anyone. His dad was working two jobs. He’d get up early in the morning to work one job, go home to rest, then get up in the evening to work his second job.
Another day he asked me how much I was paid. I told him and immediately regretted it. I saw the surprise on his face. He told me he only made $14.
Why I, brand new, earned $2 an hour more than a guy who’d been there 9 months was a mystery to both of us and a disappointment to him.
Financial strain was evident. Money was the predominant factor in most conversations. Sometimes, the conversation would stray towards talking about the cost of living. Other times, the acquisition of new material possessions was the only thing spoken about.
The atmosphere at Office Depot was depressing. The people I worked with constantly looked exhausted and demoralized. They were marking time while waiting for something better to happen. But, the longer they wait, the worse it gets. Falling behind and compounding over time.
The system does seem rigged against them. But, there’s more to the story. Do they understand the role they played in ending up here? Do they have the tools or even the will to get to a better place? It’s not clear.
No Sack Lunch
I cannot tell you the amount of times I saw my coworkers leave the building to buy lunch from a fast food restaurant across the street. You know, completely canceling out at least an hour's worth of work.
Frequently they’d walk over to the fridge that was stocked full of drinks by the register to buy their 2nd or 3rd energy drink. Keep in mind that these energy drinks cost around $5. Some employees would have 1 or 2 drinks every time they came in for work.
Now that's two or three hours of work gone to waste.
Another coworker of mine got in a minor car accident. For a few days his parents dropped him off at work. Then, out of the blue he showed up to work in a 2023 SUV. That was the happiest I ever saw him. I don’t think he realized he dug a much deeper hole for himself.
Bad decisions everywhere.
One day I heard this infamous line, “We don’t get paid enough for this.” It made me cringe when I heard it. It felt like such a degrading thing to say. It makes one feel like a victim, and blinded by it, can’t see the way out. More responsibility not less. Maybe some do not want responsibility? Maybe they want to be the victim?
As V from V For Vendetta says, “If you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.”
Our lives are our responsibility. The Preparation is a program that hinges on radical personal responsibility. It’s designed to be an alternative to college for ambitious young men. [you can learn more about the program and my role as the beta tester here].
Prepared for the future
The goal of the program is to turn a young man into an adult. An adult who is unusually well prepared for the future. Along the way, you gain broad and valuable skills, do interesting things and meet interesting people. It’s hard and unusual work.
It all starts with casting aside self-pity, victimhood, malice, and hatred. Choosing instead to pursue industry, courage, self-control, independence, self-responsibility, wisdom, and competency.
In case you’re wondering, working a dead end job for a time was part of the program. I’ll explain more in a later article.
There are many ways to whinge about work. One of my favourites is, "They pretend to pay us so we pretend to work."
Your examples about the choices people take are good. Some people are enthusiastic about the "old college" path and so they take on huge amounts of debt to pay the absurdly high tuition and fees.
Beyond the fact that young people are often naïve about debt and college degrees there are definitely aspects of that situation which are intentionally exploitative. Nobody seems to offer any guidance about how little market value is assigned to "gender studies" degrees by employers.
Heavily endowed universities have been raising their fees for generations. In the will of William Marsh Rice, he set forth that no tuition would be charged. Of course he also wrote the will to provide free education to "white men" and he founded the Rice Institute for scientific and engineering studies. None of that has mattered to Rice trustees so it is Rice University, it charges tuition, and it admits men and women from various ethnicities. Which just goes to show how little standing dead people have in enforcing their last will and testament.
See, the guaranteed student loan programme is a huge subsidy to the communists who manage and operate universities for the freemasons. And making debt slaves is one of their goals. Enslaving and murdering billions of people are amongst their other goals.
Trade schools offer a different path. You might want to acquire a technical skill like welding or lock picking. These are skills that are always in demand. Sewing, cooking, flying, and coding are, too.
At some point, the work of stocking shelves is going to be fully automated. I have already been in a bank with zero local tellers, only remote tellers. It's not clear how many dead end jobs are going to last.
But it is clear that the economy is a set of complex systems. And there are essential tasks that cannot be automated. The fun thing about complexity is that the failure modes are not all obvious. Discontinuities abound. And the mathematics at inflection points are really interesting. Chaos is in store for many of these systems.
Which is why I am building eighty small communities with independent physical archives of knowledge and technology. Good times. Noodle salad.
Supposedly anyone with the will could sign up for a trade and make a pretty good income rather quickly. The problem is we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that real jobs are bad jobs.