Reading this made me think about life & the world & where everything is heading and that was not a good feeling :( Think you're right on about this. Everything feels so bleak and pointless. At my job right now I'm doing stupid busywork fiddling with the UI for some garbage product nobody is going to buy so that some asshole venture capitalists can enrichen themselves. And since I'm living at home not paying rent most of that is going towards stocks which are of course doing dismally. And a new job would maybe pay more (whopee) and then I could be making richer and more prestigious venture capitalists money working on a product that's competently evil instead of just not very good. Or if I wasn't doing anything things would be pretty much the same except with too much free time and I'd feel a little guilty but if I got fired tomorrow it'd be kinda whatever. Which is a very privledged take I know but aaaa what's the point of doing things if it barely makes your life better and probably makes the world worse off overall. I think that's a lot of the appeal of FIRE, certainly is for me at least. What else is worth spending money on other than getting Out. Anyways sorry if this was off topic just what your comment reminded me of
I remain optimistic. I mean, look - we know that the cruelty is optional. We know that brutality and deprivation won't get anyone back to the office. We know that when rents go up, people move in together or move out of town. David Rosenberg is fond of saying "the cure for high prices is high prices." Nothing we're doing right now is steady-state; on Mother's Day we went for a walk in a neighborhood I love and I realized I hadn't seen a single house for sale in there for the duration of the pandemic. Everybody there decided it was a great place to hunker down and that if they sold at a profit, they'd have to buy somewhere else and no thanks. If you can sit this bullshit out, you are sitting this bullshit out. I haven't been on a plane since February 2020 and that's not by accident. I've been rearranging everything I can to help our employees do more with less. Online scheduling, online billing, infrastructure changes, etc. It's not just because I can't hire my way out of the problem, or the fact that I'm too cheap to give everyone raises (when your income is determined by insurance company contracts that change every five years, inflation is a problem). It's that everyone's patience is hanging by a thread, our capacity to be kind to others has been exhausted and people suck right now and I don't see it getting better any time soon. But I mean look. If you can do your job remotely, why not move to rural Kentucky? Maybe vote out Mitch McConnell while you're at it. There's a real network effect to metropolises but it's too expensive right now, and if you set up somewhere else you get to be a big fish in a small pond. I think things will get better. Historically? They always do. That's just reversion to the mean. It just sucks living through history.