I know my phone habits are killing me.

At least, they are killing my ability to maximize my productivity. I don’t care. There is nothing wrong with wasting time. Time is mine to waste, I get to decide what my legacy is. I lose hours a day in video games, both on my phone and on my switch. This was true long before the pandemic.

I am a serial shirker. I will only do the bare minimum of what is asked of me. Enough to be adequate, but never enough to stand out. Yet, I’m white enough and privileged enough to have crossed the six-figure income line before walking away from employment. I know what pieces of my job are important because harm will occur if I don’t perform them and I know what pieces of my job are only important because my boss likes them. I also know that what my boss wants and what is actually good for the people I help are often at odds.

I spent 11 years in the US workforce. I started out answering phones for Comcast for $13.00 an hour after graduating in 2008. That’s $27,000 a year and that’s with the bonus for working 4pm-1am. I made it one year. One year of being treated like the most useless piece of shit on the planet by everyone except my co-workers. I moved from that call center to another call center. An elite call center in Philadelphia that gave me $35,000 a year. As it turns out, it cost $10k a year to commute from New Jersey, but you’re willing to take a pay cut to be treated as a useless piece of shit by half the management team instead of the entire corporate ladder and customer base.