Andrew (R.S Admin) @ajroach42@retro.social

@Luke It's hard!

And, like, there are tricks you can do to cope, but that's all they are. Tricks for coping. A compromise, so that 10 impossible things become fewer impossible things.

@THGentleman Sounds like DC.

@HappyWizard That's a good callout. I can't imagine how much worse this will get when I get to that point.

But, shit, y'all.

This capitalist propaganda really runs deep in folks.

Deprogramming is going to be a Task and a Half, y'all.

Anyway,

I didn't know the FoF like that, or at all really, and I haven't really talked to the friend in a while, and it's pretty likely that the FoF is young and naive and believes that they are being helpful, so it doesn't do me any good to jump in guns blazing.

I'm just going to convince them that I'm mean and contrarian.

I don't have the kind of relationship with either of them that would result in my comments having the desired effect.

If you live in a fantasy world where 8 hours means 8 hours, and you magically don't have to commute, and you can make it through your workday with your executive function well enough intact to stick to some kind of a schedule in the evenings, then maybe you can meet the bare minimum for not being miserable.

If you're like the average person in this country, you can't. Claiming that it's "just a matter of scheduling" is actively harmful.

The cards were stacked against us. There was no way we were going to schedule our way out of that.

My experience, of course, is not universal.

Funny thing is, it was the average experience for the average American at the time. It was representative of what life is like for most people.

I lived 22 miles from my office, and it could take up to 3 hours to get home, and up to an hour and a half to get there. I wasn't paid well enough to live any closer.

This was without kids. This is with me being reasonably able bodied. This is with me working a good job, and living in a cheap neighborhood so that I could get by.

I lived with two other people, all of us fighting the same battle, trying to share that burden. It didn't matter.

And, you know, some weekends I missed doing all the things I was supposed to do because I hadn't slept all week, because there was a wreck on the beltway three days in a row, and I didn't make it home before 10pm, and still had to eat somehow, and so my saturday or sunday evaporated in to 10 hours of depression and sickness sleeping.

Grocery Shopping, cleaning, meal prep, new tires, oil changes, dealing with those bureaucracies such as the DMV, the tax office, the tag office, etc.

Lets not forget weekends! (I routinely worked Saturdays, but I'll pretend that didn't happen for the sake of people who have normal jobs.)

I could reasonably get away with handling yard work and car stuff on Saturdays and Sundays, as long as I didn't try to have any kind of a social life, but mostly they were spent dealing with the overflow from the things I couldn't get to during the normal work day:

Add sleep, and be generous and assume that I got enough of it: 8 + 12 = 20.

That leaves me 4 hours to grocery shop, cook, clean, exercise, read or watch television, and take care of every errand that piled up during the day because I was working so much.

If I removed all recreation from my work week, and got lucky with short lines at the grocery store, or ate a lot of takeout, I could make it work, but only just.

Do you not commute? Where does that fit in to your schedule?

For me, when I was commuting, it was 1 hour to work, 4 hours at work 1 hour for lunch, 40 hours at work, 2 hours home. This, by the way, is within spitting distance of average for the American commuter. They mostly have 1.5 hour commutes, they mostly have company enforced hour long lunch breaks. Their 8 hour day is mostly 9 + 1.5 + 1.5

My 8 hour job cost me 12.

I just had an exchange on bookface, and decided to just dip instead of participating in it, but I'm still seething over it, so we're going to discuss it here.

Post from friend: It's impossible to live while working 40 hours unless you have someone doing labor for you. It's a relic from an era with housewives as the norm.

Comment from friend of friend: It's really just a matter of scheduling. [two dense paragraphs about how to schedule your day if you work exactly 8 hours and have no commute.]

@bhtooefr Thank you!!! Suddenly, it's usable again.

I have the GNU Imp on my work machine, and I hate that all the icons are monochrome.

What do I have to do to get some color channel information in to my tool icons???

@rage probably not? https://blaseball.com/

Someone wanna explain what a blaseball is to me?