Open the vibrato, a negative energy video jumped into view, the video is a city in the early morning street, with a song "I am too difficult, God, recently I am under a lot of pressure" commentary, a person who just left work is spitting: a few thousand dollars a month with a salary, in addition to eating and drinking rent, there is almost nothing left in the pocket. Don't dare to get sick, don't dare to quit!
Click on the comments, and find that many people are also crying and shouting tired.
However, there are also a few people who are afraid: it is not the poor that beat you, but that you are poor and do not work hard, but you have time to shoot vibrato here.
Seeing this comment, I couldn't help but light up a red heart for it, thinking: Good!
But within a few days, I was ashamed of my actions, even though I only liked it at the time. What makes me ashamed is the book that I just turned over, called "My Life at the Bottom.". There is a sentence in the book that pokes my heart hard: from childhood to adulthood, we have always been taught to say: only hard work is the way to success. But no one has ever told us that even if you work hard, you will inevitably fall into poverty, and even fall deeper and deeper.
It turns out that the most distant distance in the world is not that you are richer than you, but that you want to work hard but have no extra time and energy to invest in yourself, because the daily work of three o'clock has squeezed out all your energy. Therefore, the person who vibrated in the early morning is not not working hard, it may be that he is too tired, want to send a video to vent, after today, he still has to get up early to work, in order to support his family to meet new challenges.
The author of the book, Barbara Allenrick, a best-selling American author, was suddenly curious about how people with no professional abilities lived on meager salaries. In order to figure this out, she decided to hide her identity and status and become a member of the low-level labor force. During this period, she prepared only the necessary items and belongings for herself, and when she encountered any difficulties, she resolutely refused to turn to her family and friends. In the years of "undercover", she has worked as a waiter, cleaner and salesman, and has an unforgettable feeling for the living conditions of the bottom personnel in terms of salary, housing, medical care and employment relations, and then wrote this best-selling book that has been on Amazon's list for 12 consecutive years.
Although the current situation described in this book is the United States, "poor busy" is also a cruel fact that is not uncommon in China. We work hard, but wages can't keep up with the rate of price increases. We are struggling with subsistence, but buying a car and a house is always a distant dream.
Although no matter what kind of industry the work, it is worthy of respect by others. But in real life, people at the bottom are still inevitably subjected to all kinds of insults.
For example, to be a waiter to undergo a urine test, you must take off your pants to pee in front of others; doing a "surprise personality test" is actually a demonstration to you by the company, in my floor, there can be no secrets hidden from me; employees are not allowed to talk to each other during work hours, it is best to keep your mouth shut, do not be caught by the manager; the manager will randomly search the employee's purse, in order to prevent them from stealing the company's belongings.
There is also a very impressive scene where a housekeeping company, in order to impress customers with good service, actually asks employees to kneel on the floor and wipe the floor, on the grounds that the stains on the floor will not be missed. Even if the key company tramples on the dignity of employees, it is difficult to say that it is difficult to meet strange guests. For example, you try to clean every bit of shit in the toilet and clean every pubic hair in the bathtub, but some guests, instead of being grateful, deliberately leave a little dust in the carpet to verify whether you are lazy at work.
Also, when the author Barbara was working as a nurse in a nursing home, because the patients were all Alzheimer's patients, the table and the floor were full of food scraps, and the manager asked her to clean up, with her fingernails a little bit to buckle.
Even if Barbara only came to experience life temporarily, the intensity of this work made her feel overwhelmed for a while. The work in the service industry is really hard to thank. She couldn't help but admit that the reason I was able to work an hour without getting tired was because of decades of above-average medical care, a high-protein diet, and gym workouts that cost $400 to $500 a year.
Luckily, Barbara is only temporarily trapped here, and her life is a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, her colleagues, the real people at the bottom, have to endure discrimination day after day, do heavy physical work, and earn meager salaries.
But when you get down on your knees day after day and rub the floor, and your body and muscles are hurt by a continuous hunchback, who pays for your physical and mental health?
What makes Barbara angry is that most of these low-level personnel do not know how to "defend their rights", and a colleague sprained his ankle, but insisted on limping to continue working, and did not dare to ask the manager for leave. They humbly curry favor with their superiors, fearing losing their jobs and making life worse. They believe that as long as they work well, they have the hope of changing their lives. However, the law of "hard work can succeed" has obviously failed in this society. You will find that even if you work hard, life is still difficult.
Barbara, who plays the bottom of the staff, has an important experience during her time as a waiter: they will not let you rest every second, and they will take as much as you pay.
The manager will supervise whether you are lazy or not stealing food in the kitchen. Ironically, although the manager is also a migrant worker, they are on the side of the boss. Instead of understanding you, they will squeeze out every ounce of your strength.
I don't know if you have noticed that when we go shopping, most of the service staff rarely sits, even if they are very tired, but also to present a good posture to our customers. And if we meet a sitting employee, we will feel that he is lazy and unprofessional. But without taking it into account, he may be too tired. What's even more tragic is that because many companies stipulate that employees can't sit down and rest, many service personnel have varicose veins.
Chicken soup for the soul tells us that stealing and slipping is doomed to not last long, and only practical and diligent work can make it possible to excel. However, Barbara told us from her own experience: If you do this in the service industry, sooner or later you will be exhausted!
Because, your diligence is taken for granted by the manager, and no one appreciates how much labor you have put in. And once you've done your job actively and efficiently, what awaits you is not praise and rest, but another round of newly assigned tasks.
So, you'd better be sleek, don't let the manager find out how capable or "lazy" you are, and whether there are customers coming to you or not, you'd better pretend to be busy. If you have nothing to do, you can go find some chores to do, sweep the floor, wipe the table or something.
Remember: heroic performances hardly pay off, and the trick is how to allocate your energy so that you can have some left for tomorrow.
If you are young and vigorous, you may be quick to throw off the resignation report and go straight away. But when you start taking responsibility, being forced by life, and looking down on illness, you feel trepidation as long as you don't get paid for a week.
Because of poverty, you have no poetry and far away, your eyes only have work, dreams are all reprimands from leaders, a small mistake can make you like a big enemy, and a praise can also make you happy for half a day. As a low-level person, in order to live, for money, you eventually have to lower your posture and humblely earn the bread of life.
Barbara calculated for herself that an ordinary person without academic qualifications would work for $6 to $7 an hour, $50 a day, and about $1,250 a month. If you want to find a house closer to the company, the rent will probably be more than $600, which is too expensive for people who earn just over $1,000 a month! So, she could only choose a house that was farther away. Deducting the rent, and then removing food and drink, her month's salary is basically nothing.
So in the U.S., if you're single, you'd better have to find a second job to support yourself. Many of Barbara's colleagues, including herself, juggle two jobs at the same time. Luckily than her colleagues, Barbara has no children to raise, otherwise life would be even more unimaginable.
In addition to work, Barbara's place is also very poor. Because of financial hardship, she had to move several times. He fought with the landlord for a few dollars of rent and bargained. Other couples, even if they join forces, have to squeeze into a rental house with other families and endure the inconvenience of sharing a bathroom and kitchen.
Barbara lamented that it was not the real people who lived here, but the laborers who were put in jars, and kept in a place that was not baked by the heat in order to go to work.
Cleaners, waiters, caregivers, etc. are relatively humble, but this society relies on these low-level people to maintain its operation. However, these people are clearly the core of this society, but they feel inferior. In front of their employers, they are begging like a beggar.
In fact, this society has never lacked poor people, and the reason why you have not seen it is because society is more willing to pass on the good side to you. It's like no matter how depressed you are, you have to dress up and go out. Today's TV screens are always active with all kinds of celebrities, while the poor are forgotten in the corner. And these "selective seeings" also confuse our optic nerves, thinking that the world is getting better and better. Everyone can eat well, live well, and live well.
So much so that it is hard to imagine that some poor people will take half of their cigarettes back into the cigarette box and continue to smoke them until the next break; the toothache is almost dead, but you have to check which medical institution has the cheapest fees first; you want to buy new clothes, but you are hoping that a stained piece of clothing will have more room to reduce the price.
In the past few years of the author Barbara's life at the bottom, one of the obvious feelings is that she finds herself getting older. She said: "I began to work on this experiment with a scientific spirit, thinking that it was like a mathematical proposition, but in the process of the experiment, it was too long to work, too much need to focus on the matter in front of me, so that I unconsciously became a narrow-minded person." The experiment turned into a trial for me, and apparently I didn't pass. ”
In fact, the experience of Barbara's life at the bottom is also the current state of life of many of our working class. Despite his dissatisfaction with the status quo, he still tried his best to please his boss and carefully handle his relationship with colleagues. We are not afraid of suffering, we are not afraid of being tired, we are afraid that we will not be able to get enough economic support after suffering hardship and suffering. When we don't have the strength to pay rent, eat three meals a day, and save money to buy a house, we will feel confused: what is the purpose of being so busy all day long? Have you worked hard for so many years to become a barely subsistence low-level person? If the money we earn is simply not enough to save, what future is there in this way?
Maybe no one can give us a standard answer to this question, and it is difficult for us to figure it out and solve it ourselves. Many of us are still stuck in this vortex.
Still, I want you to understand that when you start selling your time in hours, one thing you may not necessarily understand is that what you're really selling is your own life.