Are you ashamed of the work you do to pay your bills?
The kind of work you do to make a living doesn't matter, as long as it is honest work
Good day, my friends,
The topic of work and Substack came up in a post on Notes. I responded there, but I had some other thoughts to share about it, so I am writing this post.
Here is the post from Notes that sparked this article:
I have never felt any shame about being a delivery driver. It is honest work, and it is a necessary function in our society. People order many things online, and they must be delivered to their homes. Otherwise, each customer would have to trek to the warehouse depot, a package locker or some similar building to pick up their order themselves. Delivery drivers are the last mile, we are the final step in the service chain to get you the goods you have ordered.
As far as Substack goes, I would like to make a living off of it too. It would be great to just spend my time writing, without having to do any other kind of work. But that is a tough thing to achieve unless you are already a public figure or a social media personality with a large following. Such people are blessed because they can instantly have thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the blink of an eye, and can monetize a certain number of them to achieve a comfortable living.
Of course, I write content that sort of fits into the “dissident right” category, and that means my potential audience is probably much smaller than some of the woke communists who spew whatever the latest commie narrative is in the regime media. They can tap into those larger woke networks to gain subscribers.
Their counterparts on the right are the Con Inc. trash writers. They all say more or less the same thing, and most of them are on somebody’s payroll. They must stay within certain ideological boundaries, or they will be terminated by whoever is paying them. The Con Inc. writers bore me, you can predict what they are going to say before they say it, just as you can with the woke communists.
I have seen certain writers here on Substack who started out one way, but have clearly changed their content to get on the Con Inc. gravy train. I will name no names, but I am sure you have heard of them if you read any dissident right content. I have tuned these people out completely, you can tell they are tailoring their output to try to get aboard the Con Inc. ship. After all, there’s good money there, so it’s not surprising to me that some writers will sell their souls to get their hands on that sweet Con Inc. cash. 🙄
As for me, I do not aspire to be a Con Inc. writer, nor will I toe the woke communist line on anything. I write what I write, and what you get from me is what I actually think. You might or might not agree with me, but you at least know some corporation or political organization is not paying me to spam you with “influencer” trash to sway your mind one way or another.
Now, getting back to the point of this article, for me, writing is one of the things I do because I genuinely enjoy it, as well as to try to earn a living. As much as I can, I have tried to blend it well with doing deliveries in the real world. As much as I like writing, sometimes it is nice to get out from behind the keyboard and do something physical. When I am doing deliveries, my mind is in another place most of the time as I am focused on the task at hand to do my job and then go home.
So I am not ashamed of doing deliveries any more than I am of being a writer here on Substack. If I could earn a living simply by writing, I would love it. But I might also keep a little time to go do some deliveries here and there, even if I didn’t need the money to survive. That way, I would have one foot in the online world and one in the real world.
I will have more to say about being a delivery driver in another article. Some of you might enjoy tales of my battles with vicious dogs, crazy customers, terrible weather, and other stories from being on the road. But, suffice to say, I will never be ashamed of doing deliveries to pay my bills.
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Good one - right on
I've been fortunate to mostly work in jobs that I love...that is until bureaucratic knuckleheads took over and changed things. I was a firefighter/paramedic for 15 years, which is arguably the coolest job on the planet. I always tell people that at some point, every boy wants to grow up to be a fireman. But I've seen far too many of those boys become young adult men become disillusioned very quickly with the realities of the profession.
However, it goes without saying that it was honest and meaningful work, and I am privileged I had the opportunity to do it for as long as I did. Again, knuckleheads took over, and it doesn't quite have the same traditional feeling that it used to. From there, I moved on to become an ICU nurse, and just recently at the age of 44 became a nurse anesthetist. I'm now been in the medical field in some capacity for over 20 years, with blue-collar fireman work, to grunt ICU nurse work, to having a doctorate degree in nurse anesthesia. Yes, it's all meaningful work, no I'm not embarrassed by most of it (as a male, being a bedside nurse kinda sucked), but there are certainly days where I wish I would've listened to my dad when I was in high school, and woulda/shoulda paid more attention in woodshop class, learned a trade and became a journeyman. I romanticize the idea to his day. I love physical labor.