god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that’s so fucking frustrating. I’m living paycheck to paycheck because I’m not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world
I could have made a killing as a psychic, but noooo I have to feel bad about lying to people ugh
I think abt this all the time because the thing is, evil rich people truly believe that they’re geniuses who have discovered a way to make money that the rest of us dummies haven’t…but the truth is that they are just willing to do evil shit that everyone else would prefer to not to because we have standards
When I attended my graduate school job fair, Raytheon (unprompted, hearing me say my degree at the next table) offered me $230,000/yr to come work for them. That was their opening offer after hearing nothing more than my degree, in a city with a very low cost of living. The only catch was that the job was working on vision systems for missiles. (i.e. those ‘targeted’ missiles which kill a ton of civilians as collateral or intentional damage)
I ended up taking an $85,000/yr job as an optical research scientist at Corning instead.
It is an odd feeling, having a price put on your soul. I’d be a millionaire with a house by my mid-30s if I’d accepted that. And the offer is still open, in fact I’d have an even more generous one waiting for me with the skills I have now.
In all seriousness, if you have the right skillset, you can actually sell your soul. This very week. You will live in comfort and moderate luxury for all your days. Two of my family members did that work decades ago, until they couldn’t stomach it any longer, and it set up the rest of their lives.
But I promise you, it’s not worth it. It’s been almost 50 years for one of them and it still haunts him. He says the worst part was the way they (him included) talked about human lives as things. Numbers on a spreadsheet, sterile corporate jargon in meetings. A lifetime later and you can still see it in his eyes when he talks about it.
You can’t take it back, treating humans like things.
TWIGGY & WOODY ALLEN My Generation (2017) dir. David Batty
“His first question was: ‘Who’s your favourite philosopher?’ My heart sank. I wanted to run off and burst into tears. I didn’t know any philosophers. And he probably knew I didn’t. When I said so, he replied, 'Oh come on, everyone has a favourite philosopher.’ It was such a cruel thing to do to a young girl.”
“I was desperate and trying not to cry but I turned the tables on him and asked him to come up with some names - but he couldn’t think of any either! Then he said to me, 'I suppose you’ve read Dickens,’ thinking I hadn’t. So I said, 'Yeah, I read him at school.’ In the end he said, 'Oh, I can’t interview her,’ and left the stage."
Excluding the crucial fact that office jobs pay you an income….if staying home to raise children and do chores and bake bread was really so much easier and more joyful than working in an office on some objective level, why aren’t men doing it? Why aren’t they chomping at the bit to be ~leisurely house husbands~ to a working wife? Why aren’t they stepping up to depend solely on someone else’s income in exchange for round-the-clock domestic labor, if it’s really as blissful and their propaganda suggests? Curious.
ALT
