I had to laugh when someone reached out today with a writing gig that could only pay in exposure.
Buddy, I've been barely holding my life together on gigs that went from paying to nonpaying, unreliable classes, and seasons of high editing demand followed by crickets.
I'm freaking done with adding more uncertainty to life in a field that pays peanuts. At this point, I'm waiting out the next coronal mass ejection like any sane person, and looking forward to a better economy on the other side. 🙃
@MLClark See, that's (a small) part of the reason I love having a fairly physical yet highly skilled job.
People don't generally ask you to work for free when your job is physical, because they instinctively/intuitively know that's not reasonable... while it's just as unreasonable to ask someone to work for free doing non-physical work, that doesn't generally occur to most people on an instinctive level the way it seems to with physical work. Probably some evolutionary quirk.
I'm deeply glad to know that you're not exploited in your labour.
That "highly skilled" component is key; there's a lot of screwing around with pay rates for apprenticeships in construction and electrical especially, and massive wage theft among so-called "unskilled" labour fields with large immigrant pools.
But if you've hit that sweet spot of being a respected skilled physical labourer, hot damn. That is fantastic. Long may you receive the compensation you're due. 👍🏻
@MLClark Thanks! I hope you find a way to do the things you love without being exploited yourself.
Yep - also 'unskilled' IME often means getting seen/treated as an entirely replaceable faceless drone; white collar often involves unreasonable expectations of being "always on", plus it's not great for one's health & nearly all white collar fields are fundamentally threatened by AI (seriously, f*** AI, that shit should basically be regulated out of existence for purely eco-econo-social reasons).
😅 Oh, you'll love this, then: the venture I was asked to contribute free labour to also *boasted* that all the art for the site would be AI only. GTFO with that nonsense.
Seriously, though: I know from your posts that there are still a lot of rough times on your end, so I'm genuinely super glad to hear that being asked to do work for less than your value isn't one of the challenges you currently face. I hope the others ease up soon! You deserve not to live with so much stress.
@MLClark Oh, that's a whole new level of messed up... It blows my mind that anyone would be *proud* of that. They had to have been totally tone deaf.
Well, I consider myself very fortunate; my life may be very lacking in a few areas, but compared to a lot of people I have it pretty good.
Honestly, the biggest thing would probably be finding a life partner because while I can bring in an income, cook, clean, &c... I'm *extremely* apathetic about doing anything that solely benefits me.
@MLClark And for what it's worth, thank you for your kind words; I appreciate them.
I bring some (okay maybe a lot) of the stress on myself, constantly thinking about major issues and whatnot - but a lot of that comes from isolation. Too much thinking and not enough living does weird things to people; some people go batty, & others just become... y'know, what I am.
Compared to a lot of people my difficulties are minor; I don't really have room to complain. There's only so much one can expect.
I brought a lot of stress on myself, too, when I lived in Canada. I was a "calculating venter"; I'd overshare all the problems I was working through, as a way of getting a handle on them & trying to rationalize my way through them.
Even outside that context, it took years to break the toxic habit.
When you live a cerebral life most of the time, it's super hard to imagine there might be other ways to work through stress. So you're doing the best you can. Be kind to yourself, eh?