Why we aren't a generation (or three) to be feared and/or paid well

Posted by Matt Morris on August 5th, 2019

make more money on amazon

When I look back at the year I had, particularly the FINANCIAL year, I have to wonder where I've been my whole life. How did it come to this? How did I go so wrong?

My husband has been working like an angry bear for 20 years, slogging his way uphill through customer service calls and staff meetings and iterations of the seemingly endless cycle and recycle of contact management maps and quality evaluation guides. He eeked his way up to about an hour before being summarily disabused of a career with his fortune 500 employer by being treated like a child playing with a gun.

He quit last month, and this has opened us up to an insane amount of possibilities and about as much stress as I would expect to feel dangling from a stealth bomber by a ball of string, or maybe surface diving the bones of the Enola Gay come shark week.

We went into business for ourselves last year, see, and I've been seeing some amazing growth. Great, forget that fortune 500 company and let's retire at the ripe old age of 30-something. We'll just do virtual assistant work and things will be peachy.

Needless to say, we work hard and it pays off. We have anything get in the way of a productive week, and we are effectively screwed. I'll stay out of the metaphors on that one.

It leads one to think, how can I make more money? Well, you could probably make more money on amazon, if you want to pass your soul off to the technological equivalent of the great and powerful Oz (or maybe Kthulu the great tendriled beast-god who eats folk). You could always try selling on eBay, as long as you don't mind following the hypothetically formulated and incredibly unforgiving rules that seem to vary wildly and sometimes week by week.

It's OK, it's just my livelihood. No, really. Suspended you say? Well, that's OK, I'll just appeal. This account. And that account. And my mom's and my brother's accounts. And that guy I used to live above when I lived above a guy I didn't know once whose account is suspended now because I lived above him once.

Joking, of course. I've never been suspended by eBay, and I didn't used to live above a guy. At least not that I know of (basement apartments, mostly).

The bottom line is that it is scary as #$%& out there right now for middle class America.

And I know, yes yes, first world problem from a first world whiner. I get that.

The truth is, that's easier to say than to believe. We all see only the reality of what we live. If I were in a third world country, born and raised, I would have an expectation and I would either be on the high or the low end of that expectation--thrilled, or scared.

Ultimately, I look at the stock market (which I know nothing about), and I complain. I look at the Presidential cluster (which I know nothing about) and I complain.

We all know there should be something better, but we can't quite bother to learn enough about any one thing to DO something about it.

Welcome to the Internet generation. My voice is important, just like everyone else's. I can be anything. Just like everyone else.

And we're all competing in the same arena of both important and anything. All thru-hundred-and-sifty cabijillion of us. I made that number up because I don't know how many of us there are. I don't even know what I mean by us.

What I do know is that something has got to give. We are disenfranchised, we worry about being socialized or syndicated or encorporated because maybe then we wouldn't have anything to bitch about. Or what we bitch about would become far too similar, and one voice might actually echo back at us.

Heaven forbid the thought.

Socially, financially, emotionally and incoragably, we have become crippled by the media that streams around us and the knowledge that pulses through us. We think we can know it all and expect anyone who knows better to not be such a jerk when we don't look like we know what we're talking about.

That cripples us. It limits us in our insight and our growth, and maybe even prevents us from becoming the great things we thought we could be. The payments are check to check, the savings dwindles, and we still hate our job even though it happens in our pajamas now.

Take matters into your own hands, America, and learn to speak your minds together. Find the outlets that allow you to be who you want to be and the vehicle to ride together into the future.

If we don't do it now, these sad generations of ours might just never have that chance.