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I want you to imagine briefly, for a few moments if you will, how it feels to do the most menial work that you can imagine, whether that’s washing dishes in a restaurant, flipping burgers all day long, scrubbing toilets in a train station for minimal wages or worse yet, being employed in the gig economy of set fees for set tasks of limited duration for so little money that you simply can’t get by.
I want you to imagine what it is to work your guts out in the most degrading of ways only to find that you don’t have enough money to cover the basics, that the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is something that you’ll never experience. It’s always the poor and the desperate that wind up working in the gig economy. It might be good if there wasn’t just so much competition from others just like you. It’s dog eat dog out there and your particular bite is just too small, too weak and too ineffectual to get you what you’d like or deserve. The gig economy is a symptom of societal collapse, that capitalists have got it too good and is not something to be celebrated. In the best traditions of feral business practices, it’s right up there with embezzling money except in this case the multimillion dollar companies that employ people in the gig economy are embezzlers of time. Time is the most precious resource, something that once spent can never be returned so it’s only fair that you get a decent rate of pay in return for it. The only people that win in the world of the gig economy are almost completely feral. They were human once but now have not so much as an ounce of compassion, they can’t afford it, it might cost them all that they’ve gained.
In this scenario you don’t have a career, you are lucky if you have a job. As you age your prospects get even poorer, as your body declines so does your capacity for manual work. Sickness might stop you from earning a living, but if you are lucky the state might step in with some benefits assuming of course that you’ve earned enough money to have paid some national insurance. If that’s the case you might be one of the lucky ones who through ill health qualify for the poor man’s version of early retirement, the rest of your life being spent on state handouts and sickness benefits. This is not a life lived well, especially in the wake of a hard life of struggle resulting in non-achievement.
On your way to work you pay through the nose for a bus, a train is simply an extravagant expense that doesn’t even guarantee you a seat. You frequently run out of money before your next pay packet, prices always rise, but your rate of pay is fixed. You’d like to treat yourself to a night out, but a pint of beer is worth more than your hourly pay. You are short of everything from clothes to food and know full well what it is to choose between heating and eating. Eating always wins because your body compels you to live, but your home is as cold as a crypt in winter. You dream of global warming, that night-time temperatures might be pleasant, that winters be mild, that you get by with one or two extra thick sweaters to keep you warm. You might go to bed with a hot water bottle, wearing gloves and a beanie hat, the very image of a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge.
Life is joyless, happiness is something that other people experience in the movies or on TV, something you might glimpse in the corner of somebody else’s eye when you are on the bus, assuming of course that they are doing better than you and that your experience is not the norm, but either way contentment is not for you, you are too busy trying to survive. You are a second-class citizen, a child of a lesser god, one that presumably didn’t study economics because if he had then you’d never have been born into your present circumstances, a nation in terminal decline, the best jobs having been shipped to India and China, simply because the peoples of Asia are cheap.
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” ―
Cheap is good at least as far as the government is concerned, and through reasons of fiscal necessity the same must apply to you. You are forced to buy bargain food that you suspect will do more harm to your body than good. You’d cook more but you don’t have the time nor the energy as the bulk of your day is spent, working commuting and sleeping. As much as 21% of your meagre income is spent annually on commuting to and from work so that you can pay rent to the parasite in chief that you colloquially refer to as the ‘landlord.’ You’re a cash cow as far as he is concerned and is more than happy to take 52% of your income should you be unlucky enough to live in London which is the only British city that the politicians actively seem to care about, usually because they own multiple properties and rental empires themselves.
“Yes the truth is that men’s ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.” ― Politics
Money in the bank or ‘savings,’ are things that other people have, but you don’t and probably never will. The national minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation and the government’s living wage is essentially meaningless as employers are not obliged to offer it to you.
If you get into difficulties, the welfare state is unforgiving, more likely to say ‘no,’ than yes, the implication is clear, the government is quite happy for you to starve or sell your organs for money before they help you. Poor people understand the value of ‘no,’ in a way that rich people seldom comprehend.
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.” ― Karl Marx
You care little for and do not trust the civic institutions that once protected you such as the police and the NHS because they have become the possessions of an ideology that doesn’t include you or your needs. It’s been years since you’ve seen a bobby on the beat, let alone one whizzing past for the briefest of moments in a patrol car. Yet they all turn up for TikTok dances and gay pride parades and have a willingness to ‘check your thinking,’ should you say the wrong thing on social media. Your politicians serve an agenda that doesn’t include you and your speech is not only under threat but often compelled as you encounter more and more public servants and bank staff with their pronouns on their name badges. You can’t remember the last time you saw a doctor, it’s impossible to get a GP appointment, not that you can afford to take time off on the sick. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid.
You don’t see any point in voting for politicians that represent each other whilst wearing matching shirts in Bali all the while uttering their matching catchphrases of ‘build back better,’ and ‘Global Britain,’ at the same time that all of the world’s problems are being dumped at your door within the area in which you live, the character of which has changed from typically Anglo-Saxon to be more like the middle east or Africa as a result of all of the mass migration that has been thrown at you without your conscious consent. Should you raise any concerns about this you are immediately castigated as a racist and are constantly pilloried and propagandised in the media, by a political and media class that clearly sees you as the ‘other.’
“If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.”
―
You don’t watch TV because the people who provide it suspect you of racism, homophobia, transphobia and so on, despite you being nothing of the sort. They think that you are ill-educated, ‘thick,’ and as such ask government departments for their technical help and expertise whenever they need a script for their next soap opera that is filled with the political narratives of big government and big corporations working hand in glove to give you the orthodox message that you seemingly need, should you question this, you’re the fascist!
“As government expands, liberty contracts.” ―
Should you have children then you discover that you are not actually their parent, the state it appears, is, they decide what is appropriate for your child and what instruction they should receive especially around sexuality, climate change and your own nation’s history.
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” ―Plato
You feel that the country has gone of the rails, or that you’re on a fairground ride, a big dipper or rollercoaster but you never decided to get on and you can’t get off. You are a mere passenger, forced to watch as a tumultuous life passes you by. Your destiny is in the hands of people who do not care for you. This once made you angry, but that anger has become depression, but your GP will prescribe you anti-depressants over the phone or via zoom if you need them.
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” ― Victor Frankl
