Mine is retail work. Yeah I get it. You hate it. There isn’t anything that I hadn’t heard before about it by now that hasn’t already been said. Yup, people suck.
But on the same token, I don’t really appreciate the level people go to, to dissuade people from getting into retail work. Job is a job and income is income. You’ll need both of these things. I’ve learned that a lot of the time, people just happen to be employed by shitty stores that are managed by power-tripping people or maybe the team they work with are annoyingly incompetent.
Yet if you manage to find a store that’s worth working in, it’s worth it for however long you want to be there for. I chose to work for retail. I don’t mind the labor. I don’t want a sit-down desk job.
And yeah I work for a big company that has questionable values and has destroyed communities. But that’s really out of my control and because that I work for said company, does not necessarily mean that I agree with it or side with the corporate standards. If I wanted to, I’d go back to school and find something else to do.
And that’s what I advise people to do if they’re so tired of their retail job. Go back to school, it’s really all you can do other than go to trade school to get skills and branch into different careers. Just bitching about it all day is not going to do a thing. I used to be like that but all it does was just make me hate everything and there were a couple points where I could’ve gotten fired over it. It’s not worth getting fired over something you don’t really have an investment in.
Equally related to work, I’m someone who has been quiet quitting for a while, and generally have rather “Graeberistic” view about work.
But I simultaneously want to be very competent at what I do, and get easily annoyed by incompetence. I slack of as much as I can if my employer treats me badly, but when I actually do something I want to do it well.
My line of work is IT / Audio, but in a job which I hopefully quit really soon for new one.
You make plenty of sense here. It’s all about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation right?
For some reason whenever I tried to excel and take pride in my work or invent small improvements to things, I was either rewarded with nothing but higher expectations without higher compensation, or more often, I was just shut down entirely and told to shut up and get back to grinding.
None of that romanticized “I like your style, kid howabout a raise?” hollywood crap happened to me!
I think people more often than not want to do well, they want to be good at something, get better at it, take pride in their work. Being a complete layabout is exhausting!
But just like you, I got to the point of saving my passion for my own projects, and just doing what’s most visible in the job description to not get fired, because I got real tired of being actively punished for making an effort.
Yeah I have been shut down so often it has made me apathetic towards my job, as usually within few months we have a problem because we didn’t do what I told to do.
Even without intrinsic motivation, I think in certain tasks it’s unethical to be careless.
I used to work in kitchens. Hated it. But still be extra careful with allergies and special diets and hygiene, because not doing so might affect people negatively, people who don’t have anything to do with why I hate my job.
It can be same in more abstract ways in somewhere like IT or audio, like taking care of cyber security.
But when that doesn’t apply, slack off as hard as I can.