Welcome to Hell. (Job Hunt Day 0)

Have you ever had a really terrible, soul-destroying job?

I invite you to imagine this scenario: You wake up to your alarm blaring at 7am, and the first thing you feel when opening your eyes for the day is this overwhelming, nearly cosmic sense of dread. You pry yourself from your soft, warm bed and look with bleary eyes at the day ahead of you. Starting at 8am sharp, you will find yourself sitting in the same position for eight-to-nine hours, staring at a screen until your head throbs with an incessant, dull ache. There is a list of items that is never-ending, and it details how your day will be spent.

• 20% is sending emails, letters, and making phone calls to sell a service that the average person has a 1 in 1000 change of ever needing. Most people do not respond, and those who do are annoyed or angry to hear from you.
• The next 70% is writing, editing, and emailing stupidly expensive contracts for the half-hearted promise that, in the case of an emergency, the person who pays these high prices might (emphasis on MIGHT) receive financial help to recover. If you make any mistake while writing, editing, or emailing these contracts, it will forfeit any help that the client purchased, and you will only find out during the next emergency.
• 10% of your day is spent dealing with the nonsensical payments for these contracts, which are almost all billed by AI and algorithmic systems that are difficult for YOU to understand, much less your clients who is usually 70 years or older and barely knows how computers work.
• The other 10% is spent explaining to impoverished people, or those on a fixed income, that prices for these contracts are rising every day, and they are required to pay their bills by law- whether or not they can actually afford them.

Everyone you speak to acts like you are stupid. You're stupid for not knowing who the person calling is, even though they're nothing more than voices on a phone and financial details to you. You're stupid for not understanding the rules to these contracts, which change every day and are different for every person you work with. You're stupid for having to look stuff up, or ask questions, and you're even more stupid for making a mistake as small as forgetting to change a name on a form because it could ruin someone's life.

And between the panic, stress, and dread that is sewn into every second of those 8-to-nine hours, you are painfully aware that nothing you do matters. 37.5% of your daily life is being pissed away doing something you hate. If your job were to evaporate tomorrow, the world would be a better place for it.

This is how I spent the last 3 years of my life, and what the late David Graeber has deemed a "bullshit job" in both his 2013 article 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs' and in his 2018 follow-up book, 'Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.'

I rented the digital copy of Bullshit Jobs from my local library nearly one year ago after a dispute with a coworker and attempt at quitting my job landed me in a fully remote position for the corporate office of my company. Graeber's theory haunted me, as he pointed out that the entire financial sector- what Les Leopold calls FIRE: Finance, Insurance and Real estate' in his book 'Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice'- was a completely unnecessary contribution to society.

My official title was either "Personal Lines Account Manager," or "CSR" for an insurance agency. To borrow from the taxonomy in Graeber's work: I was a "duct-taper" for a conglomerate of "goons" who pushed insurance policies from an assortment of servicing companies for generous commission cuts. In theory, once a policy was sold it would have been handed off to me by the goon and I would spend my time babysitting it. The client could call me to make changes, ask questions, or request that I make the policy cheaper by re-writing it with a different company. This way, our clients had a reliable person to go to and make sense of their complex contracts and advocate for them. Sounds good, right?

Well, the rub is that the customers themselves didn't sign off on my paychecks. The companies who sold the services did. I was not there to help, I was there to be an extra layer protecting these companies from legal repercussions.

It was nothing but bloat. There was nothing I did on a daily basis that the client couldn't call the servicing company directly for. (In fact, often my customers thought I was the servicing company!) When I did something wrong, the servicing company would reject coverage and place the financial burden on us, the agency, to take care of the client. Which, I suppose would have been fine- if the rules surrounding coverages were not an uninhibited, ever-changing landscape of general fuckery.

Just in the few years I spent working in insurance I saw servicing companies jack up the cost for their policies while increasing the number of things that they wouldn't cover, and narrowing the guidelines of what they would accept. Since last January alone, four of the servicing companies we sold for stopped offering insurance to individual people to focus on selling to companies- with one company issuing a notice to all their clients that they would be cancelling every one of their personal individual policies and wouldn't be offering any new individual policies in the future.

Why would they do this? Well, the short answer is Global Warming. We, as peons, weren't allowed to say it but that's the truth. As it cost more and more to build and repair houses the cost of storms was ever-growing. If you don't know about the surge in violent weather events hitting America (and everywhere else) as a result of the earth heating up, then your ignorance is willful at this point.

Private insurance companies only make money when the money paid out is less than the money they've collected. Whenever a claim is denied, that is dollars being fed into the company coffers. We've seen this in action when hurricane Helene ravaged the southern united states back in September, and again with the Los Angeles wildfires that have recently been consuming California. State farm and other insurance companies cancelled the fire coverage on thousands of people siting that the area was too expensive to cover. After all, if they spend all the money taking care of their customers, who will pay the shareholders?!

Seeing this happen on the ground level, being punished for it as more and more of my clients speak to me with venom for the company I represent, has me feeling like a certain green Mario brother. I tried my best to muscle through it, motivated by the prospect of potential homelessness should I go without the paycheck that barely covers my bills. However, after the last week, I've come to the conclusion that this job is poisoning very my soul. I've never felt more anxious, exhausted and miserable than I have stressing out over deductibles and premium payments. Every day feels like an episode of Squid Games where I'm playing 'spot the difference' between plain black-and-white documents while someone holds a gun to my head.

I've reached my breaking point, and I'm ready to quit.

However, I'm no dummy (despite the many people who'd disagree.) I know the current job market is more rough than an electric sander straight to the gonads. It is the Gen-Z rallying cry: There are no jobs. The process for applying is terrible, with people sending upwards of fifty applications without any response. When they do get a reply, the interview process is grueling and unrewarding. If they are lucky enough to land that last interview, often the pay and benefits are lack-luster at best. According to the Cost of Living by State Index provided by WorldPopulationReview.com, the average American household spends $61,334 on expenses like rent, food, utilities, healthcare, etc... Yet, the median income is only $44,225. When it takes $3,888 a month to maintain a household, seeing job offers starting at $9/hour is disheartening to put it mildly.

If I'm going to suffer through this process, then I at least want to make a spectacle out of it. After all, misery loves company, and the only difference between science and screwing around is writing stuff down.

Hence, this blog. I'm going through hell and I'm taking you with me, dear reader. I've got my spreadsheets ready to collect data and my eyes fixed on the naked oligarchy forming before me. Be it for historical documentation, or just to keep myself sane, I will be your Virgil taking you through the decaying hell scape that is participating in late-stage Capitalism. I mean, what else am I going to do now that the Supreme Court's ruled in favor of the TikTok ban?

So I hope you can join me, dear reader, as we make the descent. I look forward to seeing you on the other side.