u/Busy-Recipe9840

I am burnt out in my senior tech role and have reached a point where I don’t care about my performance anymore. In the event that I get fired I think I’ll live off unemployment and savings while I prepare for nursing school. Infinite job security and stability is what I am after, and based on my experience with family and friends in the healthcare industry, it doesn’t seem too bad.

They hate their life, but so do I. Even if they aren’t the best nurses and techs, the industry is so understaffed that they have job security and upwards mobility while hating their life. I (26) have come to realize that I am too comfortable with the life my career affords me. If I want a similar lifestyle in another career, I essentially have to participate in a job or career that extorts (or supports institutions that extort) the human condition.

Want monthly income for life (UBI)? Join the military then claim that you have a disability you encountered in the service. They are handing out $2-3k a month for depression (which normal people literally grow up having anyway). Want infinite job security? Become a police officer, trade worker (maybe), or healthcare professional. Those are basically the new options for middle class mobility. It is no longer IT or Software. It is no longer engineering.

Besides the fields I named, I genuinely want to know what else there is besides being a government civilian or federal contractor with a clearance that gives you more job security (for now) than private sector roles aligned with the same type of work. It feels like you have to sell your soul (with the exception of unique characters naturally drawn to these roles) just to have a shot at middle class life in modern western civilization.

Will be going to Belgium and possibly Luxembourg or Amsterdam. How do I non-awkwardly ask someone to shoot me a flick lol

I will be going to Belgium soon and will have 3 days after surgery to “rest” before I have to leave on the morning of the 4th day. I’ve never been to Europe before and wanted to take the train to some close by cities. Am I cooked?

I have basically 1.5 days to do what I want before the surgery which sucks.

No, I won’t. I will feel relief that my heart rate will no longer have to rise visiting them. I will feel peace knowing that they can’t make my future and personality shrink to make them comfortable.

I love them, but I can only take so much.

I would ideally want to follow the roach around its life in a drug addict’s apartment with the same thermal effect.

Hearing something like this after dedicating years of your life, money and energy to a person is probably within the same moral category of being physically abused. It’s like you watched me do things I had no business doing (according to you) then gas lit me once I brought this fact up to make you see an avenue of accountability in your part.

This is a question I am asking out of genuine curiosity. How did it affect the dynamic of the marriage or separation process?

My budget is about $15k and I am aware that I could stay in the U.S. for that price, but I’ve seen that the following doctors/clinics are the best for our hair:

1. Bisanga Hair Restoration
2. Dr. Felipe Pittella
3. Dr. Mwamba

Despite most of these doctors being world renowned, almost everyone in the black version of this sub go to Heva. Why is that? Many people say the place is a hair mill and the technician does the parts of the surgery the surgeon should do, yet people are posting tons of results from there. Are we simply just going there because of the sheer volume of black hair they touch or am I missing something?

I (26M) have lived in Mississippi for most of my life (mostly the Hattiesburg and MS Gulf Coast area). I lived in Baton Rouge, LA and a city outside of New Orleans for 5 years as well. I’ve traveled to most states in the South (NC, TX, AL, FL, GA, and TN) and have also visited CA (multiple times), OR, WA, NV, NY, NJ and OH. With all due respect, there is ontologically no difference between living in Mississippi and living in say, California. This is a claim I will make when analyzing the effects of each state on my soul as an individual.

Yes, you will have many overpriced things to (for example, consume with the money you barely have on a median salary in California which is $69,500 - $70,000) do and you will be able to wake up with the pretentious feeling of superiority as you observe stadiums, beaches, palm trees, blue oceans, and other infrastructural elements of Capitalism that people associate with the American Dream but what comes after that? Maybe I have more living to do, but every place in America is essentially the same.

Every highway, road and interstate (in most population dense areas in Mississippi) is cornered by billboards, fast food chains, SUVs, and other properties that represent modern urban or suburban areas. Most of my friends living in “desirable” states are struggling while I have well off family who live outside of Jackson, Mississippi with high networths, paid-off McMansions, and travel internationally whenever they feel the need to. Some of us who live in desirable parts of America lead quiet lives of desperation even if the subjective notion of being in better parts of the country conflict with the expectation of optimal locality.

I make a decent amount of money (not even for my age but in general) and have the opportunity to live in D.C., NC, WA, and VA. Why haven’t I moved? I want a house one day that isn’t a $700,000 shed in the middle of a busy industrial area of whatever “fun” city I am in. I am also black. Despite being told that I would have more fun in other places, the most lonely I’ve ever felt was when I was in Seattle and Portland. The white people I have met in Mississippi and Louisiana (the south in general) are ironically nicer than those in other regions, despite being tethered to the geographical history of the particular region we are assessing.

I would like to call attention to the statistics that support my fondness for Mississippi compared to other states. The regurgitation of Mississippi being a 3rd world country does not support the numbers unless you are looking at 3 sections of the USNews Ranking Scoreboard which indicates the following:

Crime & Corrections
#20

Economy
#49

Education
#34

Fiscal Stability
#47

Health Care
#50

Infrastructure
#47

Natural Environment
#31

Opportunity
#31

Overall, I need to state that this place suck, but I only think Mississippi sucks compared to places I want to live like Norway, Portugal, Spain, etc. I don’t like living in America in general, so there is no reason to look at NYC as being better than Mississippi because I make enough money to live well in both places. They are both eye sores to me.

My budget is about $15k and I am aware that I could stay in the U.S. for that price, but I’ve seen that the following doctors/clinics are the best for our hair:

1. Bisanga Hair Restoration (Belgium)

2. Dr. Felipe Pittella (Brazil)

3. FueGenix Haarklinie (Netherlands)

4. Dr. Zarev (Bulgaria)

5. Dr. Turan from FUECAPILAR (Turkey)

Despite most of these clinics being in the A-B list of hair transplant clinics (from my research in a few communities), almost everyone in this sub who post have went to Heva. Why is that? Many people say Heva is a hair mill and the technician does the parts of the surgery the surgeon should do, yet people are posting tons of results from the clinic. Are we simply just going to Heva because of the sheer volume of black hair they touch or am I missing something?

My friend got married and I was essentially forced to be the best man. I could’ve told him no, but his buddy already bailed out on being a groomsman and he had one other guy left. I don’t like his wife as I think she is a bit too pretentious for my taste and I think he could’ve done better physically. This is going to sound messed up, but most American women I’ve met are not nearly as interesting as they seem to think they are. This is based on my own experience and I know they are not all like this. I ultimately chose being alone over:

1. Being a financial serf to another person who doesn’t even appreciate me.
2. Spending thousands on a wedding most of them want to impress friends and family that don’t even care about them.
3. Feeling like every essence of my being is subjected to performative behavior because I am expected to be “on” all the time as an American man.
4. Feeling lonely in my marriage.
5. Broadcasting the American Dream with my wife on social media to people who don’t care.

I have a colleague around my age (25) who got married as well this year. I genuinely did not feel a sense of happiness for him which sounds wrong. I actually felt sorry for him. The entire vibe of weddings (just observing) seems to be one of a kind of “positive” funeral. It felt like I was watching the emasculation or deaths of my buddies happen before my eyes. The little intersubjective rituals you perform to show your “love” for the other person in front of people you barely talk to is unsettling. The masks people are clearly wearing as a performative gesture of solidarity.

Then when inevitably ends, these are the same people that are nowhere to be found in that man’s life. He ends up on here, talking about how he got fleeced by the system. Why do men not see reality for what it is, then come crying when a statistically, ancient and negative social practice implodes in their life? Marriage is a beautiful thing, but it’s beautiful in the sense of how I think a coin flip is. The absurdity (and positive possibility) behind its logic is beautiful, not its reality. If you go through my post history, maybe this type of mentality makes sense based on my own psychology, but I genuinely think you are crazy if you choose to marry or REMARRY as a man in 2026.

Most of you on here are in your 30s-50s. I’m in my 20s, so what I say won’t be respected probably as I “still got life to live” but if this is the life I should look forward to (even considering what most think a happy marriage is), just shoot me now. At this point, I’m going to keep going to the gym, improving my financial future, making music, eating healthy and going on dates (I will show single moms love as well) if it means I am shielded from becoming an overweight shell of a man most “happily” married men seem to be.

This is more-so a reaction to observing trends I am noticing as our field assimilates to the unrealistic expectations and AI. I am currently working as a weird love child of a Data Engineer and DevSecOps role. I honestly don’t even know what I do anymore nor do I care. I am 26 and have been in this field since I was 18. Started as service desk support then moved across the Networking pipeline until I and upper-management realized that I had a gift for automation. That’s the thing though. I don’t feel like I actually have a gift. I just spot trends in technology then implement them before other teams do which makes me stick out.

I essentially notice things a team is not doing that management wants them to do as a shiny bargaining point for a contract’s proposal (to make the company more competitive) then I do it. Most people in IT perform Click-Ops type of work and despise scripting, automation, AI, etc. so it is very easy to stick out if you are at the right place. You basically learn to climb the ladder by profiting off your teammate’s and leadership’s lack of vision or laziness. Maybe I am underestimating my value, but this is what I noticed and it has created a sense of disdain for the people I have to work with and the “big picture” mentality I am supposed to have.

I am grateful for my salary and I realize how lucky I am to be able to do this in a LCOL (I live in one of the lowest ranking states in America). I honestly think I could dedicate what piece of my passion for this career is left and try to get into management or job hop for another $50-100k but what is the point? I genuinely just don’t care about the work anymore. I don’t want to work with a glorified autocompleter or a glorified autocompleter that also has API read-only access to external facing business applications that we are only using to build reports. I don’t want to containerize a small Drupal site with an overly engineered, massively expensive K8s solution that has no real value based on what the customers actually want.

My “leads” are bots. Everything I do “leads” to them just regurgitating exactly what I told them. There is no mentor. There is no senior level guidance resisting me. Whatever I say goes. As well as not drowning, I am also just jealous of the fact that the higher title you earn the less work you genuinely do. Yes, I have worked at 4 different companies and this hierarchy of labor distribution is always the same. The last thing I want to mention is the shear volume of quiet desperation you notice in the workplace. The herd mentality. The need to do what sounds good theoretically without considering the actual value or how it will be integrated into production environments. Many of you will say I am burnt out, but that is the external symptom of a larger issue I have with modern work in general.

The realization I have come to is that most jobs that extort the human condition will give you that superficial level of satisfaction you are looking for. Want the Big Tech job? Go into defense contracting with a higher level clearance or be an extremely valuable SME in a sector (like database/backend, cloud migrations, Intune, etc.) of IT nobody else wants to do (since those sectors require higher/obscure levels of patience/training most people don’t have). I don’t have to explain the moral justification behind the government contracting idea, but you can sociotechnically see why this pays off. There will always be a country to blow up. There will always be sociopolitical policies that our useless technology upholds through our rigidly controlled change boards. If I was to quit, I would go into healthcare. People die everyday and if I walk-out of my job, people will still be dying at the next hospital.

I just read this piece in his essay and am interested by his conclusion almost 200 years ago:

“The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man
reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-
twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations. This is
why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand,
cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to
the most important. It is by virtue of man’s reasoning powers that he does not live in the
present only, like the brute, but observes and ponders over the past and future; and from
this spring discretion, care, and that anxiety which we so frequently notice in people. The
advantages, as well as the disadvantages, that this entails, make woman, in consequence of
her weaker reasoning powers, less of a partaker in them. Moreover, she is intellectually
short-sighted, for although her intuitive understanding quickly perceives what is near to
her, on the other hand her circle of vision is limited and does not embrace anything that is
remote; hence everything that is absent or past, or in the future, affects women in a less
degree than men. This is why they have greater inclination for extravagance, which
sometimes borders on madness.”

I wonder what he would think today with social media and other forms of social technology available.

Me and her have been separated for 6 months. She is literally existing like she didn’t beg me to explain how much I love her every single day. I wake up in an empty apartment. I don’t have an appetite, so I force myself to eat. I think about her every 5 minutes without much control while she is probably moving on without much concern while attending Nursing school.

Her most recent post on Facebook (she post once a year) says “I’m back!” and it’s just pictures of her in the club with drinks, rocking a short revealing dress and all of her comments admiring the “glow up.” I know it sounds like I am being a hater. Well, I am. You can’t possibly be “happy” for a person who used you to launch their next career chapter without any display of appreciation throughout the relationship. Also, what’s up with them deciding to “reinvent themselves” AFTER the relationship? Did I not deserve that?

4 years spent together and she basically just pretends I don’t exist. I have come to the conclusion that love is a means to an end for most. There a preconditions (masks to wear, money to make, self-depreciating compromises, and status to gain) that determine the accessibility to that love. Even if you have every precondition met, it will still not be enough for 50% of men today. I am 26 years old, make high six figures, tall, and I actually have hobbies (music and reading). I feel deeply, treat people with the respect I get, and try to REALLY pair bond to the person I am with.

None of it is enough. The saddest thing I ever heard came from her Uncle who still calls me:

“Think about it nephew. Even if y’all had 25 good years of marriage, at least you could say that the experience is what counted.”

Yeah, F all that. I don’t even want to experience this anymore. I rather die alone with a carrot in my ass than go through the excruciating pain of this process AGAIN, but with children, alimony and assets in the picture. The worst thing I have to live with is the fact that she knows my darkest secrets and insecurities. I regret letting her in on that stuff as you know she was most likely blabbering about them with her “girlfriends” after the breakup to speed up her grieving process (assuming she had one).