Working hard is stupid, and loyalty to your employer is even stupider.
What’s up with all these assholes that brag about how long and hard they work?
Am I the only one who realizes how fucking stupid it sounds when someone boasts about working tons of hours a week like it’s the pinnacle of their worthless life? “HURR DURR I WORKED 12 HOURS A DAY SIX DAYS A WEEK LOOK AT ME I’M FUCKING AMAZING!” “I HAVEN’T TAKEN A DAY OFF IN TEN YEARS THAT MAKES ME BETTER THAN YOU!” “I WAS SICK TODAY BUT I DIDN’T CALL OUT BECAUSE I HAVE TOO MUCH WORK TO DO!” “RISE AND GRIND HUSTLERS!” Yeah, rise and grind, to an early grave, dipshit. The only exemption to this might be if you own your own business and are self-employed, but 95% of you reading this article most likely aren’t, and obviously this article doesn’t apply to self-employed people so take your pedantic bullshit and shove it up your ass. Also, working for commission might be a valid exemption too, I guess.
I can already hear you mongoloids seething. “B-BUT AJ, WHAT ABOUT ALL THE OVERTIME I’M MAKING?!” Yeah, what about it? Fat load of good that money’s going to be if you don’t have the time to spend it because you’re so busy working. Can’t take it with you to the next life, despite what the pharaohs may have thought.
You guys are fucking idiots, and you’re being taken advantage of by an employer that most likely doesn’t give a shit about you. Normally I lambaste millennials and Gen-Z’ers for being self-entitled crybaby pussies trying to redefine the American dream as communism (and many of them still are), but this is one instance where I think they’re completely in the right. Fuck slaving away for pennies to every dollar your boss makes. My existence isn’t validated by how much money I make for someone else, no matter how hard misguided idiots try to insist it is. I didn’t ask to be born, I had no control over what socio-economic status I was born into, why the hell am I expected to spend most of my life toiling away like a slave for someone else? Slavery didn’t die, it just painted a smile onto its face and dangled a few trinkets in front of us. It’s one big stupid game, and I refuse to play it.
I read a story about a guy who worked at Burger King for 27 years and never called out once. He was rewarded for his loyalty with the following:
…his bosses gifted him a backpack stuffed with a movie ticket, a Starbucks cup, candy and chocolate…
It’s like his bosses literally just cleaned out their cars and gave him whatever shit they found laying around their cup holders. The guy’s family uploaded the video of him receiving his “presents” for pity points, and ended up raising him over $200,000 from a GoFundMe page. Most people look at this guy like he’s some kind of folk hero and give him respect for being such a hard dedicated worker.
Fuck this guy, he’s a fucking retard.
Yeah, I said it. This guy’s a damn idiot for slaving away at Burger King for 27 years and never calling out. I’m not even putting him down for working at Burger King, sometimes you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do to pay the bills and put food on the table, and I can respect that he was taking care of his kids. However, he’s a fucking moron for showing Burger King any kind of loyalty. I can guarantee this guy showed up to work sick on countless occasions and missed many important events because he couldn’t find the balls to call out from his menial job. From the article I posted:
“I haven’t seen my grandkids in over four years, until the other day when ‘The Today Show’ flew me out to New York and I got to see them live on TV,” Ford told the outlet.
Bro you’re a fucking clown, and anyone who donated to your pity party is a stooge. I have no sympathy for you and your piss-poor decision to be loyal to Burger King at the cost of yourself and your family.
I’ll openly admit it, when it comes to my job I’m lazy as fuck. I’m not going to go into details about what I do for a living, but if I told you how much I make and how little work I actually do you’d probably seethe with rage and try to dox me so you could dime me out to my employer in a fit of jealousy. I do the bare minimum required of me to not get in trouble, and I actively mock my coworkers who go above and beyond for the company. I’m not going to pretend like I work for the worst company in the world or anything (that honor goes to Amazon, based on everything I’ve ever heard; sloped toilets guys, seriously? I hope Jeff Bezos gets shot by a disgruntled employee and left in a gutter to bleed out), and the owners of my company are actually approachable and down-to-earth people. But I don’t delude myself into thinking that they have any genuine loyalty to me as an employee, and I know they would drop me like a hot potato if they could make more money from it. That’s fine, to quote Michael Jackson, “That’s just business”. Most people don’t realize though that this is a two-way street. Employers like to maximize profits while cutting labor, why the fuck shouldn’t I? I’m going to do the least amount of work possible for the most amount of pay possible, and only a lunatic would take issue with this.
Jealous wage-slaves will often put down people like me, and use that old fable about the ants and the grasshopper, where the ants spend the summer gathering food while the grasshopper plays. The grasshopper then starves in the winter because he didn’t spend his time working like the ants did. The takeaway from the story is basically “work today, eat tomorrow” and extols the virtues of working hard. It might be a valid point, except for the fact that we’re not fucking insects. I’m a human being, dipshit. I’m the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and natural selection, blessed with opposable thumbs and the ability to survive adversity at all costs. I’m not going to just starve and freeze to death if I don’t have a job. We live in a society where failure really only means that we don’t live with modern conveniences like plumbing, electricity, or TV, and even then homeless people have ways of circumventing those issues. There are hundreds of social safety nets, all funded by assholes like me who work and pay taxes.
Another popular quote about working hard that idiots like to parrot is this line from A Bronx Tale:
…it don’t take much strength to pull a trigger but try getting up every morning day after day and work for a living, let’s see him try that, then we’ll see who the real tough guy is, the working man is the tough guy, your father’s the tough guy!
This is said by Calgero’s dad, Lorenzo, in response to his son idolizing Sonny, a local mobster. A Bronx Tale is a great movie, and I recommend everyone watch it. But anyone who genuinely believes what Lorenzo said is a damn fool. Life isn’t some tough-guy pissing contest, my “man points” aren’t going to buy me an Audi or a home (shoutout to Vanguard and Blackrock for destroying the housing market; AJnet is watching, ana simtim alaku). Pretending that unnecessarily taking the hard route is virtuous and makes you a better person is cope of the highest order, and I have no respect for someone who eschews the easy way for imaginary brownie points. If I was Lorenzo I’d have ditched driving that bus in a heartbeat to run numbers for Sonny’s gang, and Lorenzo was fucking retarded for saying no.
Every time I think about working hard at my job, I take a look out my window at the methadone clinic across the street from my workplace. Every day I watch hundreds of people come and go, getting their dope on my dime because they’re addicts and therefor “disabled”. Half the people show up in their jammies in nicer cars than mine, covered in hundreds of dollars worth of tattoos. There’s even one guy that gets brought up in a private ambulance every day, and has a five-man detail to escort him out of the back of the ambulance in a gurney and into a wheel chair so he can be wheeled in to get his fix. I know I routinely exaggerate in these articles to make a point, but I’m actually not exaggerating on this one. This guy actually has a five-man team of EMTs to get his methadone every day, and it fucking sickens me. I look at these people, who probably haven’t worked an honest day in their lives, and I ask myself why the fuck I would even think about working hard. These junkies have better cars and better healthcare than me, and they don’t have to work for any of it? On top of that, the government pays for them to get high every day? I feel like a sucker. Where’s my free Mustang and dope? I want my piece of the pie, damnit.
I then look around at some of my coworkers, and see people who routinely drink on the job, spend half their day in the bathroom, come and go as they please on company time, show up two hours late every other day, and basically do diddly-dick all day and not only still have jobs but make more than me and even receive more respect than me. I ask again, what’s the incentive to work hard? Like I’m going to work harder while my bosses literally laugh about watching my coworker sneaking into the nearby woods to slam beers. Go fuck yourself, dude. I’m paid by the hour, not by how much I actually get done. My paycheck is the same at the end of the week regardless of whether or not I do extra work or use my downtime to assist other workers in need. In fact, the only thing stopping me from joining my coworkers in getting drunk on the job is my commute being 20 miles one-way, and I don’t drink and drive, asshole. If I could walk to work then I’d literally be getting paid to party every day.
I have no idea when or why it became a bragging point to be a hard worker, but it’s stupid and has to stop. You’re basically gloating about how much you abuse yourself. The ultimate goal of every person should be to exert the least amount of effort for the most amount of profit. Let’s stop pretending that there’s some moral high ground to working your life away like a slave. More often than not, the reward for working hard is more work. Don’t fall into this trap. Unless you own your own business or you work on commission, only put in the minimal amount of work required to keep your job and not attract negative attention from whoever signs your paycheck. Let all the idiots bust their asses for their “tough guy points” and other kudos that mean literally nothing, I’ll be over here doing half the work you’re doing and making the same amount of money with less stress.
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