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    • Pack it up, by and large this is the experience now. Skeleton crews, no training, get out there and make it happen. They've drilled down their extraction formula to vacuum all that it can in the shortest amount of time. I'm watching it happen in real time as my company purchases many others, it is the birth of a monopoly, and they're using the same tactics as any "Big X". Its all just about funneling money upwards, the rest be damned. They told me I'd make 65k at 1 year, I'm coming up to my 4th year here still under that. Nobody at the top cares. Each one is just another duke out to carve his feifdom.

    • Perfectly said. You speak my experience, here in the US.

      I feel like we've been taken hostage, forced to watch atrocities, and made powerless to stop them. I remember being outright mocked by my adults when I tried to do the least thing to change it all. I thought by the time I was an adult, I could do something... but those same adults are still alive. They're still mocking me.

      A snapshot; when I was in high school, I watched No Child Left Behind pass. I wasn't old enough to vote. I knew how fucked every single student would be who came after me. I talked about it with my classmates! Not one had anything positive to say about it! I called my representatives. No one listened. They told me to grow up and change it myself, then stood in my way when I tried.

      I hate knowing that the dread over it all and the soul-crushing inability to change anything is still going to be preferable to trying to survive what's coming. It only makes me feel more guilty.

      • Thanks for the reply, yeah, a lot of the negative emotions stem from grief, and I think that grief is actually perfectly rational when we consider grief as an emotion that can interface with modalities other than individual relations.

        The biosphere of this planet is being obliterated and sea surface temperatures are off the charts, it makes sense that we grieve for these things as we do other forms of more individual death, but we rarely extend the grace to ourselves to let us just feel those emotions without contorting them into guilt about “feeling bad for no reason about things we can’t control”.

        CBT is like “you can’t control this thing, there for it is a waste of time investing negative energy in thinking about it” and it is great advice if the thing you are worrying about is an asteroid randomly coming out of the sky and crushing you, or what someone else’s opinion of you is.

        It becomes harder to apply when the situation is rather that you are having trouble enjoying the riverboat ride when you know you are headed over a waterfall (but the river is lazy and calm here, sit down have a drink!).

    • I'm in my early 40s, and my experience is a polar opposite of yours. I worked for a company straight out of college that, like your experience, didn't value me or really want to train me.

      After 5 years, I moved to a nonprofit and just celebrated my 14 year anniversary there. They have bankrolled several professional certifications and have a genuine interest in developing my career. I have moved into a leadership position, and while I have always been challenged in my growth process, and don't make near as much as I could at a for-profit company, my salary and work life balance is fantastic.

      What industry are you in? Cybersecurity for me. Maybe a different employer might make a difference for you? I'm not sure what your details are, but there are jobs like mine out there.

      I couldn't imagine starting at ground zero today, however. I can appreciate just how hard today's youth have it, which likely will be similar for my young boys as they reach working age.

      • What industry are you in?

        GIS, geology and land surveying are the fields I have experience in.

        I know there are jobs out there that are good, but there is a part of me inside that is broken from the way that I can feel myself and other people my age being rejected from having a future. Even if I get lucky and get a nice job, I got lucky, things didn't get better for everybody and.... I don't know it makes sparking fires in my heart like trying to start a campfire with a bunch of damp logs. You can kinda do it.. but it always feels like you are putting in more energy than you are getting out.

        I couldn’t imagine starting at ground zero today, however. I can appreciate just how hard today’s youth have it, which likely will be similar for my young boys as they reach working age.

        How do you raise a generation into adulthood while teaching them that they have the privilege of being the particular generation to witness the destruction of our planet as we know it? To understand that their elders are not holders of stories and wisdom but strangers from the world before who still cling violently to their past realities? I know it is a distraction to speak of one generation vs. another generation, that the causes of these problems have to do with wealth inequality and capitalism not some genetic wiring to a particular generation of people (generalizations are always wrong too)... but while recognizing that there is no war but the class war... I also feel compelled to take the long view (I am trained as a geologist after all) that this is a unique period of history where by and large the parents of one generation collectively abandoned a sense of responsibility towards passing on a world to the children of the next generation (and their children and so on). There is a ravine here, between future generations (my generation included) and my parents generation, and I am convinced it will be a ravine that will be spoken of for a very very very long time (it isn't hyperbolic to say thousands of years assuming humanity goes on that long). It is weird to be living through the middle of it forming.

      • Are they hiring ?

      • but there are jobs like mine out there

        I think the issue is that jobs that aren't like your job exist. Glad you're doing good. We all deserve to thrive, not just survive.

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