Видео

27:26 that's about 2 minutes and 30 seconds each day she spent not working. So, not even the 15 minute break she's legally allotted. Not even time to clear your mind between tasks

❤❤❤❤❤

i usually get turned off really easily by video essays with a decided lack of visuals but your cadence and scripting is very engaging. excellent video 💯

never thought i would see work and play as something that is not different. not the worst cleaner reminds me of the powerwash simulator.

Just found you! Banging video, phenomenal, chefs kiss levels of mind boggling introspective slap my ass critical thinking! I love it! Hard subscribed! Can’t wait for more ❤❤

When you said "paying their friends' bills isn't charity because they get something in return: they get each other" i DID start crying a little bit!!

So glad you’re on youtube now! Deleted tiktok but when I had it, every time I saw a video of yours I would listen intently without fail. Same is true when I get an hour straight of content 🙂 So impressed by your ability to quickly and effectively distill large social issues and make connections throughout history and media types. I rarely comment but I appreciate your videos so much I felt compelled to!

35:12 this reminds me of the singing woman outside Winston's window in 1984. Not necessary the woman’s role but the outer appreciation of someone able live a moment. I hope people will be able find a mode of work that feels natural and meaningful.

Unfortunately, i don't see this getting any better. In fact it will likely get much worse. Americans simply don't have a class consiousness to speak of.

Me, I'm Elysium heads

This is a very well put together video, thank you!

loving this yap sesh

I remember really liking the first book but stopping in the middle of the second. I keep regretting that and thinking I'll go back and reread and really finish the series this time.. This may be just the motivation i need! Side note, as a Berserk fan, I remember IMMEDIATELY clocking the guts/griffith influence in the two main characters lol.

this was so eye opening and beautiful. thank you.

Working as a systems software developer in a company that recently went public and was acquired by a parent. One of the most exhausting things about that acquisition is the amount of corporate speak and drivel that has come down the pipeline that we're expected to pretend to care about. Everyone on my team has features to design and implement and test, system architecture to read up on, bugs to fix, code to review, etc., and in between all of that we're inundated with corporate emails and trainings and finance meetings that interrupt the work that we're being payed to do. Great video, and your monologue of how you feel about your job rings very true to me.

Biz rizz is the most embarrassing thing a human being has ever spoken

Thank you for drawing on the robust scientific consensus about animal training to explain work without coercion. ❤

thank you for this video, i think about the "hopueful on main" chapter ideas all the time

This is an absolutely incredible video. I struggle to find the words to describe how I feel about the work culture in America but you perfectly articulated it all and more. I’ve seen it devour my friends and wound the soul of my family. 6 months into my first “real” job I knew I wouldn’t survive a normal 9-5. I ended up starting my own business with its own up and downs but I do feel the work I does helps people, and I feel very thankful for that.

This rules, thanks for making it. That quote from the double fine doc by Matt fucking Booty was so harrowing when I first saw it. I'm glad someone recognized the madness happening there and called it out for what it was. I work in the games industry and was laid off a couple months ago, and not only are my personal projects my lifeline during unemployment -- both structurally, to stave off depression, and financially, albeit in a small way, they're also the kindling of the entire reason I fucking got into this into the first place. Everything important I learned about making games, I learned myself -- and brought that to work. It's fucking agonizing to hear that the entire reason my resume was good enough to get into this industry is also radioactive the moment I make it in. My last job was shitty in many ways, but I am thankful that my last employer had the sense to realize moonlighting was worth allowing folks to do.

Incredible video. Also, I majored in English and spent many years blogging for small BnB tech companies. I actually did try and I’d stand by anything I ever wrote. But so many of those sites are dead now, and gone is all the fruit of my labor 😅

This was an incredible video, and very thought-provoking. Thank you for making this. I look forward to more of your content.

I'm lucky to live in Europe. I get a entire months worth holiday or vacation for you Americans guaranteed and protected by government this applies from the lowly service worker too. My company cannot fire me on a whim and must give me 1-2 months of heads up and full pay before I leave the door. I have to be given breaks for every 6-8 hours worked. I have to paid overtime for every hour worked outside my contract. It's crazy that America is so overworked.

I find it funny, if a little despairing, that all these questions are answered long time ago by the communists, we have very concrete measures to implement in order to make all this happen, I mean like, work being pleasant for people (that's one of our ideology's main pillars), how to structure the entire society in order for this to happen. But nobody cares, let alone listens. When we approach people with our ideas, they just reject all and everything

as a first year uni student, studying BUSINESS this video really hits. im dreading the time when i have to leave education to get a corporate job and make an evil corporation marginally richer. it just depresses the hell out of me. thanks for make this video, im going to be thinking about it for a while

the closest i've ever felt to feeling "fulfilled" at a job was when i worked big industrial sewing machines making leather products (primarily guitar straps). it was difficult on my hands and at times mind numbing to repeat the same action literal hundreds of times. i dont have any kind of passion for guitars or leather working in general but i loved having the feeling of accomplishment that i made something tangible. i actually really enjoyed helping the ceo with a side project where i was almost entirely in control of the process and the way the materials were organized and got to work with my boss on different styles of straps. i looked forward to working on it during the last hour of my shift everyday. and even with all of this i still developed alcoholism at only 22 to cope with how my life was structured because of work. my next job as a gas station attendant made it exponentially worse and nearly killed me because of the existential dread i tried to bury with vodka and the promise that i would be dead instead of having to life through another day. I started my new job at an extremely physically demanding job 3 days ago and i am already in pain and exhausted and it is the first time in a long time i considered stopping at a liquor store after almost a year of being sober from the stuff. its exhausting in a way that nothing else is and i appreciate this video for being so upfront with the horror of existence in this system. i wish i could just create. i think in another kinder life im basketweaving for a community i care about

Brilliant work, thank you!

very thorough review of a book series i read a few years ago

I love you and your now husband of yours.

Really hope this video gets to more people. We need to start opening up about our realities more. I belong to a country that is very exploited in terms of work. Corporations come here, hire us, only to pay less for our job and making us work more hours. We are all so miserable but we pretend it’s “necessary.” We tell ourselves being exploited means we’re strong. It fucking sucks.

Love the video. Any chance you could start posting the books you reference or quote so we can add them to our lists without having to track down where you speak about it. Thank you!!

I used to work warehouse, I've been working corporate for 2 years and I hate i want nothing more than to go back to warehouse but it just doesn't pay enough

Great video. Would love a list of all the books you read for this

amazing stuff here. thanks so much.

Pagemelt rules

This is a greatttt video essay. I’ve been thinking about this topic non stop as I enter my 3rd year of college on my 6th major change trying to figure out what to fucking major in if I want to make a modest living and protect myself and my family but also not want to kill myself because I have mental and physical health issues that are triggered by stress. I have always been a well rounded scholarship student, but I am super passionate about graphic design and art. I did graphic design for two semesters at a private liberal arts college and hated it. I saw ppl with practically no talent but good appearances and well connected rich families get internships before they even knew how to use photoshop. Their work sucks. All they do is party, but they won’t Venmo you for an Uber and act like they can’t afford anything bc they are a “broke college student,” despite getting allowances and rent paid by their parents. But they are 100% more set for their careers than I will ever be, no matter how hard I work or slave away at a computer. My professors told me my personal style was “too much,” even though I was getting great responses from other creatives, and their last job was doing corporate design for Monsanto campaigns 15 years ago. So I switched to advertising and visual communications, but then I realized how useless and meaningless it felt to do something so abstracted from what I love in a saturated market that doesn’t bring tangible value to the world. I transferred to a new school with a better more creative design program that appreciates my style, but I decided not to follow through because of how competitive and uncertain it is, and switch to accounting, my original major before I did design, because I just need something boring and stable and I’m good at math. I hate corporate America and finance, but I don’t care. I can’t care. I need stability and benefits to survive, and I can’t do super strenuous physical work due to a back injury, and I don’t wanna do a job that overworks me and uses up all my talent in advertising management. I hope to use the finance info I learn to help start my own creative business on the side later on in life, but it makes me so angry to think of how many people are in the art world using working class values and aesthetics to further their own personal suffering narrative to “improve” their art and make themselves a more complex, virtuous image, only to make kinda shitty nonsense art that is soulless, while I know so many people who are so talented and creative but have to give up their hobbies and creative endeavors to support themselves and their families doing something else that demoralizes and drains them.

I recently found your channel and love your production style, really well paced and communicating great takes and pontification. Also your husbands music is dope.

really enjoying the video so far, very well thought out and it's fun to listen while i crochet. but i think you might want to raise the camera slightly or sit lower since it cuts off the top of your head

This is such a sentimental well thought out take on the world of work and I'm all for it. I like your introspective take and I'd love to see more content like this. You've earned my sub, great job putting this video together!

This is the best video essay on captive prince that I've seen. Thank you so much for your insightful and knowledgeable analysis. I've added this to my captive prince video library and I'll re-watch it when I reread the books next.

A) Thank you for keeping me company while I make my first ever bundt cake, B) this video took me viscerally back to my retail/customer service days, which I exited by getting a dream job in the gaming industry... which required such an enormous weekly word count from me that I now have permanent hand pain! Which I guess makes a nice change from all the foot and back pain I had working in a shop 40 hours a week. Abolishing work so we can live and build community sounds amazing to me. Great vid, well worth all the time you spent on it.

Very glad the algo brought this to me, most thoughtful youtube essay I've seen in a while :) Love your work

hard work as a virtue is such bullshit in my opinion. I do not laud anyone who works hard if it clearly takes a cost on your physical, mental, and social wellbeing without fair reward in some way. The reward could be enjoyment mind you which is often more important than others. Hard work for diminutive returns to me feels offensive, as if my work is valued so little that I can't afford to live. Hard work is a virtue only in what it is in service towards, I will never laud somehow working hard to create a more effective nerve agent knowing it results more death, the virtue is measured consequentially.

Kid you’re brilliant and you have good vocabulary words. This is some level of hell, I’m trying to figure out how to live in the wind.

really beautiful video. I was watching office space again recently for the first time since I was a kid and was persistently thinking about Graeber’s work throughout so I’m glad to see those connections validated and explored so thoroughly here. thank you!!

I mean this from the bottom of my heart: this is one of the best videos on youtube. The first thirty minutes changed my brain chemistry. I am less optimistic about the solution of making work like play. I don't see any reality where that doesn't result in something way more dystopian than the current system. Just look at the horrors of "hip" startup culture and the side hustle economy.

One of the worst “meme-y movie criticism quips” I used to see all the time was “what the hell happened in 1999? All these movies (American Beauty, Fight Club, Office Space) are about how these privileged white men are dissatisfied with their stable, easy office jobs.” First off, we’re now picking up on the fact that they were probably Bullshit Jobs in the David Graeber sense, but also, Initech is not a stable job! The movie is literally about a series of large scale layoffs! Peter is only spared from getting laid off because the hypnotism makes him unable to say anything but his own unfiltered truth, and that endears him to the Bobs. It shows how little “playing the corporate game” actually saves your job or your career. Also, look at Tom. His identity is so tied up in his career that, when he’s laid off, he’s so inconsolable that he’s driven to end his life. He had mentioned ideas and hobbies that he had, but so much of himself was devoted to work. Only when he’s hit by a car and physically unable to work does he devote himself to his passions, and even that is only possible because of the large injury settlement he receives. I think of all the movies I mentioned above, Office Space is probably the most honest about what it was like to work in corporate America at that time. In 2024, with the gig economy in full swing and large swaths of people unable to find long term, meaningful employment, it’s common to look at times of “stability” with rose colored glasses, but not everything was great. The dot com bubble was less than a year from bursting, and many people were about to be laid off in a very similar way to Michael and Samir. (Also, the second you mentioned LitFic not being upfront about finances, I immediately thought, “oh, like Detransition, Baby.” How are we this in sync?)

I want to thank you for this video. I've just ended my third re-read of this book. And what I kept thinking is that it saddens me how misunderstood this book is. As you said I think this should be a single long book because the first book, just by itself results deeply disturbing and difficult to read. But if you keep going you will be met with a beautiful story that still brings deep reflection without utilizing a deep narration. While other characters are quite... Segregated to their roles, not so deeply scrutinized, Damen and Laurent are impeccably built, with such deepness that made them so real to me. Also I can not stop saying how this is the best slow burn I've ever seen. I find more disturbing those "enemies to lovers" where characters despise eachother and then when they find themselves a palm apart they kiss and are suddenly in love. Like wtf? I feel like people stopped at the first book also because they thought THIS is what was going to happen. But no. We don't realize it like neither does Damen. How they start to tolerate eachothers, then it's a pact and then a friendship of sort. Is gradual, natural and with all of the doubt and internal turmoil you talked about. I just love these books and these two so much (also, I've just re read the summer palace and cried the whole time because I'm just so happy for them)

I can’t wait for the next video 2 Years from now ❤

"sand the texture of your soul" is exactly what i feel my corporate job is trying to do to me everyday