zlacker

This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better about being a insignificant cog.

My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."

>>Mister+(OP)
Yeah I think this is spot on. It's just a side effect of widespread, pervasive alienation, in the Marxist sense. With LLMs we're at the point where the last enclave of relatively alienation free work is disappearing.

>>Mister+(OP)
Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow, some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an essential part of it. That's just how modern society works.

To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.

Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.

>>Mister+(OP)
It's also way more in your face that you are a sucker now that you can see the rich, carefree lives of people online. While it might not be your boss, it's people in the same circle living the same lifestyle.

Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.