Focus on making your therapy easier and making better metrics, especially at the cost of actual value. The purpose of the therapy-is- the pointlessness.
I have seen this unironically used to excellent effect, and the user was considered indispensable, since being indispensable and highly “valued” was what he focused 100 percent of his 9-5 on. Meanwhile, he was able to leave work behind once he walked out of the office, because he was not at all invested emotionally in the “therapy “ sessions.
Probably won’t work for everyone, but it’s a pretty solid pattern for accepting useless work. The important part is to have some “real” work that you -do- care about. Otherwise it’s potentially a shortcut to a high ledge.
We could also do a lot of things to make such work less uncomfortable. For example, why are cashiers in American supermarkets forced to stand?
If there is no upside for anyone, but only discomfort for the checkout clerks, someone might be able to disrupt the field by paying slightly less but allowing them to stand. Since that isn't happening, I assume that either a) workers are showing the difference between revealed and stated preference b) grocery stores are actually making more money of clerks stand c) paying less in exchange for sitting clerks isn't possible because minimum wage
Employer isn't actually getting any value out of making cashiers stand, and in most other countries, it is a sitting job. So far as I can tell, the only reason why US does it is because "we have always done it this way", which is also the ultimate rationale for a lot of other similar bullshit.
The workers, realistically, don't have any choice if every employer does this. They can take the work as it is, or they can starve, especially seeing how US doesn't have full-fledged welfare.
Ah yes, because nobody has rent to pay or food to buy.
This Ayn Rand-level economic analysis is a joke, and is an insult to people with legitimate grievances. I hope You have the day you deserve.
But we aren’t on that track.
AI+robotics+energy is power. With real creative power you need money much less. The game changes from being a billionaire to having terawats of automation.
Without guardrails, robotics and artificial intelligence will become the primary tools of capital. Capital won’t need workers to implement their designs, and they won’t need money in the sense that they need it today, mostly to pay people to do things.
With factories to produce robots and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, there exists an opportunity for the capital class to separate itself entirely from the seething masses.
With essentially unconstrained power to create, you don’t need to buy things you want, except very special or artisanal things perhaps. You want a yacht? You build a yacht. The promise of GPAR is that you don’t need a factory. You just need more general purpose arthropod robots and the right software. They build the warehouse, they build the ways, they lay the keel, they build the ship. The fact that it might not be the most efficient way to build a yacht is immaterial.
Of course materials may need to be purchased so there will still be steelworks and other heavy industries that don’t lend themselves to small scales, but they too will be “manned” with GPAR labor, and the capital class will just be swapping tokens around among themselves. The true end to trickle down economies.
Humans will still have work in some situations, but it will be work that for some reasons robots cannot do because it is too risky, or too expensive to use automation. So humans will be limited to work that robots cannot do without risking destruction of robotic capital, or that humans can do for around the same cost as 36kw of solar electricity and $10/day of depreciation. Maybe that will cover rice and beans?
Either way, unfettered, untaxed access to effective hybrid cognitive/physical automation is not likely to be great for most humans in the long term.
We need an entirely new approach where labor is not the basis of survival if we are to realise the humanitarian potential of universal automation.
I think there might be a modest proposal or two floating around out there that would neatly resolve the problems as stated.
It goes without saying that the physical damage of being punched in the stomach is a metaphor for the psychic damage of having your soul sucked. You can bare it for a while but it starts to add up. And, like many wounds, it CAN heal over time.
Less money and greater meaning, or more money and mind-numbing tedium.
I sympathize with you because on January 1st I nearly doubled my salary, but the job leaves me rather unfulfilled. I'm left substituting my hobbies and family for all meaning in my life, but it's challenging when you spend 50-55 hours a week at work.
This whole idea of "other people have it worse so it's rude or 'bad' for me to complain about things I don't like" is not a helpful mindset. That there are starving kids in Africa or victims of war in eastern Europe or slaves imprisoned in China doesn't make your life any better or worse. If every slave in the world was freed making those JIRA tasks would feel exactly the same so there's nothing wrong with wishing those JIRA tasks weren't quite as bad as they are.
Housing is expensive. Food is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Health insurance is expensive (even the "good" insurance, where a PPO will still gleefully deny your claims).
So you can either be well-off and miserable, but probably not destitute, or you can work at a gas station, and enjoy 30-40 years of precarity before you die of a preventable illness.
Great options.
Either way, things are going to suck for a while. That my employer prioritizes Jira tickets over making good software seems a small price to pay for a bit of financial security (at least until Elon hacks my bank account and takes all my money, or I get thrown in prison for being a wokeness sympathizer, or whatever).
I spent some time at Pivotal, and then shamelessly adopted the Pivotal process at subsequent companies. One thing I took to heart is that a product manager that communicates through well-written user stories is golden. Jira is a drag but it's still fundamentally a textbox and you control what goes into that textbox.
Run wild with it! Engineers actually are counting on you.