Sometimes when I’m in a McDonalds I am served by someone my age, perhaps older. What is the difference between me and them? I get anxious thinking about. I wonder if you could be marked for life working at such a place. Does your identify you to people as a certain class of person?

Does it determine your place in society? I wonder this because I’m not so please by what my own job says about myself. If I lost my job, would I be making a mistake if I took such a job to get by?

I know people who are extremely hardworking and capable, but they just can’t get their foot in the door in a well-paying job. I think there’s a stigma after a while, there certainly isn’t any other difference between them and the people who are paid more.
I think maybe the best case is one of the following options.

1) Get a job in a vertical company. If you get a job in a vertical company, you will be able to rise up internally. I have done this, though I feel as if I won’t rise up any more than I already have. If I was in a more “meritocratic” company, I could feasibly be recognized for my hard work and my long term value.

Of course, more likely, I’m valued for short term things. Like how I am handling work day to day, or how “simple” I’m making my bosses life. This of course equals staying out of the limelight (not to take any of the attention away from him) and my ability to do as much work as possible. My bosses interest in not searching for or training a new person makes them very unable to make you rise up above them or laterally away from them. This is the limit to how my boss determines my value. They really truly cannot see beyond that so much as they can’t see beyond their own fanciful need to feel loved when they trap you in a meeting and force you to laugh at their jokes. I used to believe that the boss of the department was trying to make things “lighter” in meetings by using the first 20 minutes for jokes. I now realize that is in itself the reason they hold them in the first place (it’s cynical I know, and boy am I impressive for realizing meetings are useless, call Scott Adams).

2) Freelance, start your own company. Maybe the best idea, but one of the biggest leaps. Employment is ubiquitous in this day and age. Working in an office is pretty demoralizing if you ask me. The Office, Dilbert, Office Space and pretty everything else in the universe depicts the office as the opposite of a productive logical entity. I certainly wonder how any institution could be so incredibly full of dead-weight and waste while still equalling gigantic profit-driven successes.

It’s not very hard to accept these types of problems, you see self-interested behaviour from top to bottom. I believe very strongly that the limits of the human mind have made it impossible to organize a group larger than 1-200 people towards a common goal. The further away you get from the center the more you find people who lack the vision or drive from the center wheel of the organization.

People are aware the there are big budget issues, and they take notice of it when talking about whether a project or certain money will come down the pipe. But their day-to-day actions are still to try and milk as much as they can for their own group. They don’t plan any more tightly or narrow their costs any more than they are forced. They file away that as an excuse when asking for money and that’s pretty much all they’ll ever do with it.