Work sucks.

Those aren't new words, they aren't the secrets of the universe, and they certainly don’t take a degree in philosophy to say them. We knew that, knew that those two words had been the mantra of the working class since time immemorial. Since capitalism, with its highest heights, created the proletariat masses ripe for exploitation. For centuries work has continued to suck, all for a promise that was once given of relief.

Industrialization created corporations with far more power than the old guild system ever had. It created new barons of industry who were able to re-create feudalism in the dust of nation states. Technology in the mid to late 20th century allowed corporations to take the monopolies of yester-year and globalize them, effectively creating corporations that are genuinely too big to fail. That’s the capitalist nightmare, billions dying to feed the machine of the market.

Slavery was done away with, but there were still chains. When the only way to survive is to take a job, even if it kills you slowly, then you are not free. When one of the biggest consequences for crime is to have to pay, through labor or settlement, than the prisoners are slaves to the system. And, of course, crime is just another expence for the rich while the poor are forced into genuine torture.

This is the structure of ability, the worker has to dedicate more and more of their time and labor for less and less of what it is worth. Only in those situations where people’s contributions are entirely taken from them, in forms of slavery, is there less fairness than in a capitalism where the life of any employee is only worth as much as they produce.

At the start of the twenty-first century the idea that mechanized industry would take the jobs of the working class stopped being the bright light of the future and instead became a horror story that was used to fear-monger the country. Only in retrofuturism, inspired by the era of shows like the Jetsons, did the idea of a mechanized workforce continue to be a hope rather than the greatest of fears.

For decades into the twenty first century workers fought for a universal basic income. Billions thought it was a great idea, writers incorporated it into their visions of the future, and yet it never came to fruition. The optimistic ideas, which authors named baseline as a way of making it cute and easy to remember, that people would live lives of leisure while robots took all the real work became a pipe dream. Instead, groups began gaining praise for not mechanizing.

Continuing to exploit people became good PR, just because they hadn’t been replaced by robots or sent overseas. Instead of seeing a bright future, Luddites controlled the narrative, and corporations became more and more in control of the world and it’s people. Many of the brightest of the youngest generation slowly decided it was simply their lot in life and gave up, doing what was easy and accepting their new overlords. Making new jobs became the ultimate goal of the economy, even if it meant crippling the development of the future while simply making the rich richer.

Even as other countries around the world created that Baseline income, while other countries progressed, the United States held onto that outdated concept of wealth and equality. That working was a more important human right that the freedoms instilled by letting go of the chokehold debt and wages had on the majority of the population. Even into the 2040s, as war ravaged the rest of the world, the US was on the verge of a breakdown as the corporations became more and more powerful.

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Anything less than perfect job security, even for those who wanted more and in their current place did nothing but cripple the current economy by working at jobs that could be more efficiently done by mechanization, was a gateway into socialism and communism. It was a gateway to become like the imperialist nature of the formerly eastern bloc countries, and the fear-mongering only became more and more strong as war ranged destroying the illusion that European countries were above the squables that have existed throughout the entirety of world history.

The American Empire collapsed to feed the machine. The people were dying at the hands of capitalism, and trying to change things required too much energy. The only ones that were in control were the corporations. The US continued to have the highest rates of poverty, crime and social stratification… even as the United States became more of a memory than reality. The politicians told everyone that it was worth it…  being so close to the mark.

Long ago, these politics could have been fascinating. Thousands of people would have tried to learn more about it, research, philosophize about what the world collapsing around them meant. It didn’t work out. The people who should have been working at it, the political analysts whose entire education was dedicated to learning more, were forced to near-death flipping burgers. Degrees went out the window, being burned to warm houses, as debt increased forcing the social totem poll to become longer and longer between the bottom and the top.

This was meant to be the American Dream. This was meant to be a way for people to get excited for the world, to move forward. Instead, everyone was simply exhausted. Instead of the American Dream, For me and many others, it’s the American Nightmare.

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Saha sighed as he finished writing his blog post. He used his beat up VR rig to do it, using an old blogging website that had existed before he was born. He had to write it up in Flatspace, the old way computers had been set up in the early twenty first century, before interactive VR had become the norm. Sometimes he liked the peacefulness of writing like he was in those early days.

Sasha couldn’t afford an apartment solely on his own, not with the money from the job he was too scared to leave. He could have lived with friends, but everyone he was close to lived states or even countries away. Instead he’d moved back in with his mom for college, getting the smallest room in the little building. He’d tried to pay his share, but it simply wasn’t worth it, his money just went down the dual toilet of paying off student loans and paying for his addictions.

Sasha wasn’t a drug addict, he was a gamer, and sometimes he wondered if that was worse. His twin addictions of audiobooks he listened to nearly constantly and videogames he barely played were his biggest money sink. His backlog of both was hundreds long, and constantly growing as he impulsively bought more and more. His room was small, and he was glad that most of his possessions were digital, because otherwise it would be cluttered. Most of the room was taken up by his bed, loosely covered by the wires of his VR rig, still warm from his using it just before. It was one of the earliest neuro-magnetic links, and it was covered in scratches and little things written on it. He often fiddled with sharp stuff, carving into everything he owned in an effort to make it his own.