Comment on Quit Your Useless Job with Rutger Bregman [1:17:57]

• very_well_lost@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I watched about half of it (which is all I could make time for since I have a ‘useless’ job of my own that limits my time). Maybe that wasn’t enough to understand the point, and if that’s true then my bad for posting a reactionary reply. Oops.

  But, if the first half is a representative slice of the whole video, then I don’t think my response is unreasonable. To summarize, the guest runs a non-profit that aims to pay Ivy League grads who have high-prestige “bullshit” jobs to switch careers and go work for NGOs, charitable organizations, etc. (I’m actually a bit confused about this point because he says he wants to pay them, but also acknowledges multiple times that they’ll be taking a pay cut? Maybe he clears that up in the last half, I didn’t know.)

  I didn’t go to an Ivy League college. I do have a soul-sucking bullshit job that I only keep because it pays my bills and allows me to support the people who depend on me. I suspect the vast, vast majority of people who interact with this content will either be in the same boat as me, or will be people of even less privilege. In either case, we’re the ones who are gonna be served this video, but we’re not the ones who would ever benefit from this plan. Do you wanna bribe Harvard grads to quit their job at McKinsey and go work for Habitat for Humanity instead? Cool. Great. But the millions of us who don’t have fancy diplomas and six-figure jobs — the people this content is served to — get to continue slaving away and dying inside a little more each day while the most privileged people in our society get to be taken care of while also being given the moral highground? Forgive me, but I don’t really see what problem this is solving. This feels like a vanity project to make rich tech bros and layers feel better about themselves while the system remains fundamentally broken and the same toxic incentives that created this corporate hellscape remain just as toxic and just as incentivizing as ever.

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