Living a life
I don’t want to write the 50 paragraphs that I could write, but basically where my life has ended up today is frustrating (but still pretty damn great so I have no right to be frustrated 🫤).
I make a top tenth percentile individual income. I have a home on my own. My kids are not disasters. I have some friends and family that I can count on.
But at the same time, anyone who is in a corporate (or any?) job, knows about the enshittification of work. I really never wanted to be doing what I’m doing, but here I am. I had a similar lower level role 10 years ago and this would have been fine then. The red tape today is impossible. My grand boss holds meetings with my boss and I and says things like “we just need to be smarter about quality than anyone else [in our division].” “We need to figure X out and really drive it.” Blah. But I have no time to be strategic or improve processes or implement AI or outsourcing. We are all eaten up with time to track down all the approvals we need to send out a tiny contract. I think my boss is equally frustrated but he is set up with a wife and bigger income, so he has a little more mental bandwidth.
I have little time for hobbies or my own social life, or even to maintain my house. My dad was a truck driver and worked 70 hrs a week, but when he was home he was home. He knew exactly what his schedule was. I have so little time to DO work and then get things from my bosses that are always last minute, due immediately and have no staff available to support. People on the interwebs are like “put your foot down.” Unfortunately that is the job. You have no control.
This girl wanted to write funny greeting cards as a child. I ended up in corporate engineering. Sigh. Now I just want to have little adventures on the trails in the woods before my body completely betrays me. But it’s the last thing I get to do after everything else and I still owe too much and am stuck in my familial duties to not hold a job like this anymore and just go live my life.
Thanks for letting me vent here.