The personal reality of inflation means everyone is working longer hours or angling hard for pay raises in order to maintain the same lifestyle of yesteryear. Everyone but a few privileged banking and war making elite is falling behind. To maintain their lifestyles, the elite must further and further cloister into diminishing spaces. When they can no longer maintain their support staffs, primarily their healthcare and private security needs, they will tumble out into the economic environment they have wrought for everyone else.
You are not alone in facing down the immense challenge of inflation. The first step to alleviating your circumstances is to realize that likely everyone you’re working with is feeling under the gun, even if they haven’t acknowledged it to themselves. People are simply more stressed than they used to be. There is a crunch that is on. Your coworkers probably don’t even have economic literacy to describe the forces greater than themselves, guiding their lives.
My suggestion is to take a minute, at your busy work place, to take a deep breath and simply notice how everyone around you is rushing to make the business work or simply to mood manage and “hang on” in the face of this incredible pressure. You will begin to appreciate just how impersonal the small tiffs, power struggles, gossiping, laziness, and conniving is at your work place. Everyone around you was raised in the public school system by parents who did not peacefully parent. They speak the language of dominance or submission. When they transgress against you, they are simply following incentives. Inflation dictates terms, all the time.
Once you have taken that deep breath and had that moment of clarity, some call it “a point of discovery”, you will also uncouple to some extent from your own coping strategies that you’ve been busily employing to keep you going through the day.
The war masters and money changers need a mentally sedated work force that will simply plow through at great personal cost without a significant complaint or organized thwarting power to unseat them. Your misery is their high life. This is the nature of a fiat-based, child-abusing society where the masses are stunned into envy by the media, which is forever slathering us with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Do the captains of industry lend you a hand out of your shopping addictions, your need to keep up with the Joneses, the never ending technology you have to keep buying to stay relevant, or the taxes that seemingly go up without end? Of course not. Only the “working class” of the elites gives you any sort of instruction and it is largely through the “hustle culture” ethic that generally involves daisy-chaining debts together so your life is in hock to money lenders.
Where is all the love in this? Where is the virtue? Where is the commitment to justice and making the world a safer, freer place for children?
It is only to be found in philosophy.
There is nothing wrong with working hard. But working hard simply to dump the money into increasing bills and skyrocketing grocery prices with no why to guide you is exactly the position that the sociopathic ruling elite want you in. They want you to live for bread and circuses. They want you to live or die by the gossip of your surroundings. They want you to work for corrupt power structures that they keep in hock.
But if you work for philosophical universals, such as peaceful parenting or Bitcoin (or some would say Jesus Christ), then you suddenly begin to orient your life in such a way that steadily erodes their power over time. Sure, they will fight back. But the further you empower your life through philosophy, that is, by the extensive study of it (which includes self-knowledge), you stand a better chance than all these coworkers around you who long ago gave up the soul in their lives.
This is the way to no longer be bogged down in your job. It takes a simple reminder to yourself, every single shift. Every single work day. Know what you are working for! Align your incentives to the future people of a free society. No longer live and work in the cruelty of the money changers.
