machine

I’ve sold my soul to be a cog in corporate bullshit. It’s a living. If just barely.

It always comes back to time. It’s a scarce resource and the working class is being robbed. I’m being robbed. Not just of money, but of time. I work long hours to cover the work that used to be a team. Now, it’s just me. I wake up in the morning before the sun rises, go to work, and stay until past sunset.

When I took the job I was so excited, no more mandatory overtime. I’d be able to see thee sun again. They made me salaried and I thought this was a good thing. I thought this made me better.

At the time I was still pretty fresh out of the cult. I had been manipulated for my entire lifetime to think about status, to think that I needed to be better than everyone else, that I needed to be perfect. A promotion to a salary position made me feel better, but now I know otherwise. Now, it just means I am closer to a slave. It means my overtime is unpaid.

As time went on, the team dwindled and the workload became more. The sun in my life faded to a distant memory once again.

Last year my reward was to be told I was average on my performance assessment, and my compensation was a 0.5% salary increase. They knew better than to call it a raise when inflation was higher.

Each year I work harder, and earn less. My purchasing power for groceries has declined, but the corporate profits increase. I’m not just a slave to my company, but to the entire system. A single, unimportant cog. If I stopped working, I would be replaced by someone else willing to sell their soul.

There’s so many things I’d like to do in life if I had the time or the money. If I didn’t have to worry about just surviving. The path just is not clear, and every moment I write in this journal is time lost that could be spent working towards escaping the machine.