A beginner s Guide to Wage Slavery: 5 Life Lessons in the Poem “I am a Wage Slave” by Stephen Pennell
We all get to a point in our lives where, as our parents always say: we need to study well at school, go to college and work hard there and get the best dream job out there, get hired by someone to basically live off a decent job with a decent income.
Isn’t this right? Haven’t we been taught like this all our lives?
Lets see what this poem has to say about this:
Time, time and time again
So, how long do we actually get to work for a “full-time” job? 8–9 or even 10 hours a day of work is how much we are supposed to spend to get the tasks done per day, right?
Call it 8 to 5, 9 to 5, 8 to 6 or even 9 to 6 job, those are the amount of hours we spend per day working to get a paycheck after wards (which we will talk about later)
BUT, how many hours do we have per day? do we really have 100 hours to spend per day? Because if we do exist in a perfect world, then working 10 hours a day is a must,a goal to achieve and a meaning to make for our lives.
In our real world, still, we only have 24 hours to spend, in which we want to produce for our work, eat, have fun by ourselves, spend time with family and should have enough hours of sleep to start the next day well.
But with this full-time job, we barely have time to get enough sleep, let alone time to spend around the closest people and pets to us and play around with them.
20 years from there, we wake up unable to process how fast and empty our lives have passed by, alone, miserable, with someone we care so little about because of this job. Is this really useful?
Time is never refundable, returnable or undo able, we cannot undo time in our lives. We only have one shot in this world, one lifetime to live fully, and time as the wheel that makes it progress. And the full-time job wastes our time, unfortunately, especially in our 20s and 30s, supposedly the best years of our lives.
Lesson learned: wage slavery and a full-time job wastes our precious time on this precious beloved Earth
The income we are given doesn’t do much at all
What income are we talking about here? The kind of income we receive by the end of each month in this full-time job. The kind that is claimed to be one which helps us sustain our months solidly, help us budget, assist us in saving money, is that really an income to count on?
And how long should we really count on such income for? is it really what it claims to be?
Paying for rent, feeding a car, a pet and paying for the tiniest thing all throughout the month, and then by the end of the month, the salary has run out because of serving all of these and more. Is this really sustainable income?
Lets face it: it doesn’t do much. In fact, it is barely enough, with the exchange rates fluctuating every day and the inflation invading our lives. That is the truth, it is never enough to live off of a paycheck that necessarily runs our every month.
And it is not even from our pride, given to us by someone we barely know, the same person we “work for” (called “boss” as if they are our masters and we are their slaves), based on the resume that compresses ans suppresses the “sufficient” skills and experiences convenient for the job, and based on the amount of hours spent in that same cubicle for a month doing the same tasks repeatedly.
Lesson learned: income given in a full-time job is just never efficient in making us happy, and sustain a decent life
We are not there as much as we want to
What I mean by this is: since we work all day spending those suffocating hours in a box with a machine that doesn’t feel our pain every second of every hour of every day, we go home exhausted, angry, frustrated and don’t have time for anyone, any pet or even ourselves.
We are just not there for any one of our family members getting sick, ourselves getting tired and sick, our pets getting sick or anything basically.
We skip pages of our daily lives book trying to get through the day, waiting for the next, knowing that the next day is going to be the same as the one before.
I am no “motivational coach” or “speaker” or whatever, I am someone who has been through this, got sick of my days, and life in the 3 months I spent in my full-time job and hated every aspect of living, fundamentally.
Lesson learned: so much more to say about this, but that is basically it, we do not have the amount of hours we wish to spend with our families after coming home from the full-time job.
We are supposed to obey all the time, aren’t we?
Yes indeed, in fact we have no choice.
We have to obey every word said to us in front of us or behind our backs, obey every command, every order, every task, every word to say in a speech, every move to make, everything basically.
Actually, we have to obey our boss so much that we have no room to expand our knowledge as we hoped in the initial interview, no room to get a bit creative with the processes the company works with, no room for the so-called “improvement”, no room for trying out different methods to solve problems if they ever occur, no room for complaint of any discomfort or inconvenience in time, seats position, the freezing air tingling your feet, the noise the windows make when it is windy all of a sudden outside, NOTHING.
Obeying all the time is what someone forgetting their identity does, to please their master, owner, superior boss for the sake of the advancement of the company/ firm/ institution, etc.
Because, nothing really matters: what you say, suggest, try to correct, try to fix, try to amend, nothing. It is all under his/her command: whichever gender the boss may have ( I am not entitled of anything)
I am not against those who love to do this for a living, I am just presenting the real deal here.
Lesson learned: should we really obey all the time? That’s up to you, how you can handle your job, boss, the overall atmosphere and what your personality commands you to do and feel.
Can we choose to be wage slaves? or are we inevitably wage slaves since childhood?
This is a tough question, honestly. I myself never thought I would ask this kind of question. But it gets me and triggers my nerves, I am afraid.
Yes we can choose to be wage slaves, the modern kind of slaves who get to choose their slavery.
We can choose to be so as long as follow the herd blindly, for the sake of the “reputation”, “status”, and “privilege” given in society, to do the common thing:
“climb the social ladder and hierarchy”
On the flip side, being inevitably destined for wage slavery since childhood is, I consider it, to be a form of intentional self deprecation, punishment and deprivation of freedoms: psychological, intellectual, physical, social and economic God-given freedoms.
Thereby, I do not think that we are fatally supposed to be wage slaves all our lives working under someone who pays us so little, we cannot afford to live the normal spoiled life we want to have, suffocate ourselves with SAVING MONEY! to survive this “impossible unaffordable” life.
I genuinely think that wage slavery remains a choice people wish to pursue (depending on their personality in the psychology terms) because we are in 2019. I mean look at the people who decided to work independently, those who started their businesses, or those who invest in real estate, stocks, shares and companies for a living.
They rebelled against a unified tide and went their own way to chase after what they want to benefit the society with, with the “unusual” way. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!
Lesson learned: Anything is really possible, if you really think about it, obsess over it and start building it no matter what others may think of you.
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