Work

Is being employed by Elon Musk a good idea?

This post is a response to a question posed in its original format: “Do you think it’s a good idea to be employed by Elon Musk?”

It’s not, and this question is a horrifying indictment of the dystopic dysfunctionality of modern-day employment.

Specifically, dealing with Musk as an employer would be career suicide. You have no job security in a position that would disappear on a whim. You would have an extremely spiteful megalomaniac who would destroy your opportunities to make vertical moves outside his control. You would be lucky to make a lateral move out of the organization and onto another.

Generally speaking, however, the employment landscape has become a corporatist nightmare.

Fifty years ago, you pretty much had a guarantee of lifelong employment with almost every employer. You also had many opportunities to gain employment with endless choices in who you would work for. You could join practically any organization, and it would feel like a small community in which you could fit in like a human being.

The people you worked with were people, not potential competitors. Meanwhile, in today’s corporate environment, you are taught to mistrust your coworkers because they’re so focused on career development that you are regarded as a potential threat to their ambitions.

I discovered an example earlier today when I checked out a basic dispatcher job from a generic notification I received on Farcebook.

Taking on a simple dispatching role in a remote capacity for extra dollars is no longer a simple job for an employer who needs a person to fulfill a functional need.

Every job today is plugging into a vast corporate network with massive amounts of leverage to dictate terms.

Their screening processes are draconian and violate privacy laws in Canada.

What gave me a chuckle and a shudder down my spine, in this case, was the tagline below the company logo: “A Family of Businesses.”

I may have become jaded by experience, but every abusive employer I have ever encountered described themselves as a family.

In a world where a whopping majority (70%-80%) of families are dysfunctional, it feels like the world as a whole has been slowly morphing into a Stepford community.

I have always preferred smaller environments totalling no more than 100 people because I prefer to work with people, not drones, whose role is to perform at a sociopathic level of disengagement, meeting robotic criteria.

If you’re okay with constantly looking over your shoulder and viewing coworkers as enemy combatants that you can’t trust won’t knife you in the back while wondering when Damocles will drop his sword and escort you out of the heavily secured building with multiple checkpoints, have at it.

I prefer to keep my humanity intact, even if I die in poverty.

My friend thinks I’m lazy not to want to work more than 40 hours for extra money.

The original question this post responds to in its full format is as follows: “My friend admitted that he thinks I am lazy and childish to not want extra hours for extra money. He said working 40 hours a week, smoking weed, and playing video games is very, very lazy and I should ashamed. Is he right?”

Your “friend” is opinionated and not much of a friend.

He’s also been conditioned to believe life is a race to the top of the economic ladder and that it’s within everyone’s reach if they apply themselves.

Forty years from now, he’ll find himself alone and lonely while getting nowhere because the world will have changed so much that everything he believes now won’t apply.

He will then view the friends he knew as people who had life figured out much better than he did by taking as much time away from work to enjoy life as much as possible when they still could, mainly because they managed to find a community to fit into while prioritizing their enjoyment of life so that they have supports that he will no longer have from alienating himself from the people he looked down on as lazy.

Ask yourself and him what those extra hours of work will get him. What will an additional fifty dollars do for him? Will he bank it and watch it grow over time?

That sounds wise until you realize how fragile your savings are when an economic bust comes along and corporations gouge you with price increases while keeping your salary low. Inflation eats away at your buying power so that those extra few dollars are no longer extra but necessary to survive on.

The harsh reality is that his go-getter attitude has been exploited to the point where leisure time has been lost because every moment is expected to be invested in monetization efforts.

Your leisure time is much more important than he realizes. It’s how you keep sane while he gets an ulcer.

This isn’t to say that if you feel motivated to grow your life in a particular direction, putting in extra effort isn’t worth it because it is. It’s just that you need a better reason than just collecting extra cash. Money is good for getting stuff, but what you get for it is what matters.

Something you may have already noticed is how the workaholics among us who do well financially also piss away a lot of their money on expensive toys. Instead of being happy with a $20,000.00 sedan, they buy a $100,000.00 sports car.

That may make them happy but also quite stressed when they freak out about people bumping into their car and scratching the paint.

Life is about more than impressing people with material things — not to say that you shouldn’t aspire to some luxuries, only that you don’t allow materialism to define the whole of your life.

Life is about finding a balance that makes you happy and feeling fulfilled, not about what other people expect of you.

Please do what you can to plan for a happy future for yourself but don’t forget you have a present to live in or by the time you realize how much time you’ve lost in gaining something you can’t take with you, it’s going to be too late to recover moments to build memories you can treasure.

Life is about accumulating happy memories of doing what you love and with people whose company you enjoy, not about the objects you collect or the transient status that leaves you hollow when it’s gone.

You do you, and he can do him.

If that’s not good enough for him, he’ll move on with his life, and you will do it with yours.

The only competition worth your attention is the one you have with yourself as you challenge yourself to grow as a human being, learning about yourself and the world you inhabit for such a brief and fleeting time.

Temet Nosce