
The Bitter Truth is that I, along with almost everybody I know, is "Under Employed." We all have jobs but the rising cost of living and lack of increased incomes (aka raises--remember them) has most of us struggling to get by. Draining our savings accounts and jacking up our credit card balances in order to avoid going under. There was a time where you were properly rewarded for working hard at your job. Nowadays most people are doing what used to be the jobs of 3 or 4 employees for what companies used to pay the mail room guy.
The mantra for most of my friends (and the majority of employers) is "Well at least you have a job." As if having a way to make a living is a gift from the God's you should savor rather than something your earned by getting a good education and learning the the skills needed to do it. If you complain to much remember "You can be replaced!" Usually by someone younger, hungrier, stupider than you who is willing to work for much less than you make now. Hell, they might even work for free!
Sadly, the two industries I made a good living in are now dying. The music business that threw lavish parties and sold millions of CDs in the 1980s and 1990 is now a scared husk of it's former self struggling to figure out how to create streams of income. And print publishing fades away more and more as the weeks past with circulation dwindling away to pathetically low levels. And most of them now jumping online decades too late are not paying for material. Hence the employees working for free. Young fresh faced kids just out of college are glad to give their sloppily constructed diatribes away because, "If I write for them for free now. Then maybe they will pay me later." Sorry, Hunter S. Thompson wanna be if you giving something away for free, when you ask for money later they will just find the next line of people willing to work for free. All you have done taken any perceived value away from the end product.
In these tough economic times we are all broke and facing the same fight. Oddly enough though knowing that we are all struggling to make ends meet is not comforting. Misery may love company but it doesn't make me feel better to know all my talented, creative and hard working friends are having it as rough as me and that's The Bitter Truth
The mantra for most of my friends (and the majority of employers) is "Well at least you have a job." As if having a way to make a living is a gift from the God's you should savor rather than something your earned by getting a good education and learning the the skills needed to do it. If you complain to much remember "You can be replaced!" Usually by someone younger, hungrier, stupider than you who is willing to work for much less than you make now. Hell, they might even work for free!
Sadly, the two industries I made a good living in are now dying. The music business that threw lavish parties and sold millions of CDs in the 1980s and 1990 is now a scared husk of it's former self struggling to figure out how to create streams of income. And print publishing fades away more and more as the weeks past with circulation dwindling away to pathetically low levels. And most of them now jumping online decades too late are not paying for material. Hence the employees working for free. Young fresh faced kids just out of college are glad to give their sloppily constructed diatribes away because, "If I write for them for free now. Then maybe they will pay me later." Sorry, Hunter S. Thompson wanna be if you giving something away for free, when you ask for money later they will just find the next line of people willing to work for free. All you have done taken any perceived value away from the end product.
In these tough economic times we are all broke and facing the same fight. Oddly enough though knowing that we are all struggling to make ends meet is not comforting. Misery may love company but it doesn't make me feel better to know all my talented, creative and hard working friends are having it as rough as me and that's The Bitter Truth