>>148210I believe it's a combination of two things. Or we could just call it alienation.
1) It sucks having a master, now matter how comfortable the chains are. I am required to work. To make myself available at a certain time. To set my time around weekends. To wake up, to go to sleep, to ignore my bodies natural rhythms and desires. I'm selling 8 hours a day technically but really my whole existence is sold.
2) This is the larger one. I create something that is useless. There is no social value, it's based on optimizing marketing numbers. Conversions, visits, etc. And even this is half-baked, there's no direct tie to revenue. So it's doubly imaginary in that nothing real is produced and it doesn't even fulfill a capitalist purpose of increasing productivity or circulation.
I have no stake in the firm, just a salary. I feel resentment that I have to spend my time doing this work that is useless, creating this tower of cards. Who wants to live their life moving widgets around?
And I realizing this is all very much peak first-world bitching. Like
>>148263 says. It's objectively a nice job. But living like this is rotting whatever soul I have. I've had jobs at a grocery store and as a waiter when I was younger and the actual work was much more stressful but you're doing something real and valuable to others, with people, in it together.
Here, I just see the pure mechanisms of exploitation and that I'll never be free of them until I die.