This seems to be the problem with today's corporate society. Workers, especially younger ones, are expected to take any job they can regardless of how many hours it offers or how much it pays. Often this is just the minimum wage, a piddling £6.31 per hour. In return, the employer demands all your time.
They don't even need to tell you to work every hour and like it (although, as I've already pointed out, many of them do). At £6.31 an hour you're going to need to work over forty hours a week if you want any kind of life of your own. Which just seems counter productive. Work your life away at a job you hate and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll be able to afford a life!
If you've ever met these types of people, then they probably had the same effect on you as they had on me, they motivated you to get off your arse and work to be or do something else.
Most people have a dream job that they want to do, or something that they're passionate about that they hope will one day give us the money to devote ourselves to it full time. We all have dreams. Lots of us realised that we need to put in the work to make these dreams happen.
Some people in my generation were lucky enough to figure this out early. So we did what we needed to do to achieve our goals, we went to university, took apprenticeships, worked unpaid internships and did whatever we had to do to make our CVs sparkle or to learn the basics of the business we want to spend the rest of our lives in.
Our reward for all the years, debt, hard work, humiliating coffee runs and dwindling bank balances? To be dumped right back where we started from, with only minimum wage jobs and zero hour contracts to life off. That is if we didn't end up on the dole, filling out thousands of job applications every month and dreaming of the miraculous reply, all under the threat of draconion sanctions and unpaid workfare positions which devour your life without even the prospect of a fair pay packet to make them worth it.
I realise that dreaming something doesn't entitle you to it and hard work doesn't pay off nearly as often as it should. And I also know that there are quite a few people who did manage to succeed, who made it into their dream careers. There are even people who failed along the way but manage to stumble into their true calling be accident. But these success stories are flukes, outlying data that would probably amount to a tiny blip on any graph that studied it.
For most of us, employers and the job market demand perfection from us. Err even slightly, make one lousy mistake and you'll end up with the same minimum wage, life-devouring jobs that we were trying to avoid.
But yet; MPs, the corrupt media and tabloid readers -- all people with such a depressing stranglehold over culture -- demand that we give our lives and dreams to jobs that we hate for insufficient pay. Demanding loyalty to a society that treats us like bottom feeding scroungers and berating us like Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist if we ever want more.
Because there is more. There are rewards in society, we just don't seem to be getting them. They're reserved for the elites, the special people.
The Royal Family gets a sickening amount of money per year from the public purse, somewhere in the region of £202.4 (source: http://republic.org.uk/what-we-want/royal-finances). I'd offer a more exact estimate, but the Royal Family is immune to Freedom of Information requests so the true figure is shrouded in secrecy. In addition to whatever living expenses we pay them, we also pay for when they want to go swanning around the world 'on tour.' Their security costs alone would be enough to pay for a modest start-up company with a generous pay scheme for its workers.
MPs recently got an 11% pay rise at a time when everybody else's wages were falling (if we were even lucky enough to get wages at all), not to mention their very generous expenses package that ensures they don't have to pay for their own food, lodging or travel -- the stuff that usually cripples the rest of us.
There are also private companies -- the likes of G4S and ATOS -- that rake in fat government contracts and huge pay packets, where do you think that money comes from? It's all on us again.
The average wage is supposedly £26,000. I would argue that this is totally flawed. Look for a job that offers £26,000 a year, look how much specialised training, experience and perfection you're expected to have just for the opportunity. Even the jobs that offer between £16,000 to £18,000 seem to expect the world from their applicants.
That's if you can even find these sorts of jobs at all. Most of the jobs I see just just offer the minimum wage or close to it, and they still expect the maximum from their workers. Good luck even getting one of these, you're going to be competing with thousands of other people. The government has created a buyer's market at the very bottom. Employers can afford to make their applicants jump through whatever hoops they want, because they know there's always going to be more.
I'm so angry at this society that expects me to devalue myself to pay for someone else's luxury.
Yeah, tax money does pay for essential public services that we all use, too. The same public services that the government is desperately trying to cut and privatise wherever they can. They sold the Royal Mail to foreign investors for a fraction of what it was worth, they're cutting funding for the NHS and trying to make people pay for their own medical care, we've already lost our public transport to private companies long ago (and the fares keep going up anyway!). We're still paying the same, if not more, tax than we did years ago and we're getting less public services in return.
And why isn't everybody else so angry about this? Why do we continue to keep prostrating ourselves for zero hour contracts and competing in Battle Royale style challenges to earn one measly minimum wage position that we're only going to end up hating anyway?
Because the tabloids and the people who own them, tell us to. Even if we don't read them ourselves, there are people who do. A heartbreakingly big portion of the population. Usually these tabloid readers are ordinary people who hate their jobs, mostly the same embittered and miserable 'lifers' that inspired us to try to achieve more in the first place. These people are miserable in their jobs, so therefore everybody else should be.
I would argue that if you're miserable in your job and you hate where you work and you aren't getting paid enough and every day your happiness gets harder and harder to summon -- you should quit. You should be allowed to quit and you should be supported by a fair benefits system that will help you along until you find what you want, with no sanctions or threats of workfare to bully you into something that you're going to hate.
Failing that, there should be a universal basic income like the one up for referendum in Switzerland. A guaranteed income for everybody, regardless of employment, where you still have the option of working if you want to earn more.
We are fortunate enough to live in a country with enough money to make sure everybody is happy. We just need to share it out a bit more.
But this isn't a popular opinion, because the people who earn the most from this system also control the media and the media controls what people think.
And short of pushing them all from a very high cliff, I don't know what we can do to fix things.
I might be wrong about all of this. Maybe everybody else is happy with their jobs and earning enough to survive and it's just me that's moaning over nothing. Are you enjoying your job at the moment? If so, let me know in the comments.
And tell me how I can work in your amazing job too, you lucky bastard.