The Silent Pandemics Everyone Is Afraid to Talk About (Or Are Unaware Of)
8-hour work days are for factory workers
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Now to today’s article…
2020 was wild.
No one ever believed a pandemic could happen. SARs and bird flu were a joke to most of us in the West. Then covid hit.
What a sh*t show.
95% of countries f*cked it up and we all got sick. Even talking about the pandemic became a crime on social media. I know several people who had their online presence erased for being a little, how shall we say, outspoken.
The pandemic quickly turned into an IQ test.
Covid was a loud pandemic that destroyed our world for a few years. But what are the silent pandemics that wreak havoc quietly on us?
1. Salaries go down over time
Employers don’t want to offer pay rises.
Paying more money for you to do the same job isn’t in their best interests. Businesses need to make maximum profit and that means paying you the least amount possible.
It’s why the “we are family” nonsense at many workplaces is fakery at its highest. Work isn’t family. All it takes is a pandemic or recession and your job can easily be cut off to save money or make it look like the CEO is cutting costs.
The biggest stat we don’t talk about is that real wages haven’t risen since 1965.
This is because the purchasing power of money is hard to measure. Prices go up and people think their homes became more valuable. But the currencies we use to buy stuff are nothing more than monopoly money.
A government and central bank can create infinite amounts of money with zero ramifications. When all this funny money is factored in, the sad truth is our salaries didn’t go up at all because our purchasing power is being eroded.
2. Tech bros pretend to be our saviors
I’m sick of tech bros.
You know who they are. The guy who started Uber pretending he cared about making taxis more honest. Adam Douchebag who started WeWork which was nothing more than a real estate Ponzi Scheme.
The worst tech bros are the ones that run the main social media apps we use.
They think they’re gods. They think they can tell us what to read. Even if we follow a topic, if they want to push a political agenda, they’ll use human editors to push down certain topics and make other ones appear more popular.
Big tech controls the public conversation.
And they can be manipulated…and even bought
That’s why we need publicly transparent algorithms and decentralized content networks that no one tech bro can control.
Big tech isn’t comprised of a smarter form of human. And a lot of technology is screwing up our lives, not making it better.
Tech is about making money. Let’s stop falling for their virtue-signalling narrative.
3. Junk food destroys energy that is the foundation of potential
Junk food makes us feel good.
I love me a good chocolate cake on a Sunday afternoon. What no one talks about is what junk food does to our energy. When you spike the crap out of your glucose levels multiple times a day it wears you out.
You feel tired and, therefore, don’t feel like working or playing with your kid.
Junk food is marketed to us like it’s harmless and we’re just having fun and singing kumbaya in the park.
But a lack of energy prevents us from hitting our goals that make our lives worth living. Don’t get me started on the dietary recommendations from health organizations. They make recommendations based on how much food companies pay them.
It’s about as honest as a casino telling you gambling is harmless and your chances of hitting the jackpot are good.
The key to living a good life with high energy isn’t a secret.
I recently watched the new documentary “Secrets of The Blue Zone.” There are places all over the world that have people living well past the age of 100.
These communities exercise, socialize, take care of their elderly (and don’t stick ‘em in homes), do charitable work, invest in gardens, eat more plants, unwind, and find purpose. None of this stuff should surprise us.
Yet here we are.
We treat health and food like it’s a mystery that requires Indiana Jones to come and solve it on his day off from an archaeological adventure.
Go visit a blue zone if you’re confused about how to live a good life. They even manufactured one in the middle of California, showing anything is possible when we get out of our own way and stop BSing ourselves with Doritos and chocolate milk ads.
4. Rich people run the world, not politicians
Politicians can only function with money.
That money mostly comes from corporations and rich people. So if either of those need a problem solved they can throw money at it to get the politicians to support it. This is nothing new and shouldn’t surprise you.
Yesterday I read about YOLO Elon Musk and his Starlink satellites. Whether he intervened in the Ukraine/Russia war is still not clear to me.
What is clear is that a private citizen and one of his businesses — a satellite internet company — holds a lot of power. If he turns internet on then one side gets an advantage. If he turns internet off the other side gets an advantage.
Now tell me again how rich people don’t are just like us.
They’re not. I’m not mad at it because it’s just a fact. But don’t be naive. Money does run the world. And some people have more power in their hands than they probably should.
Why? Because government allows it. And they get paid money to fund their campaigns to allow it.
5. The news is there to entertain you. Anger and rage is the only way.
The news stopped being informative decades ago.
All the main TV news anchors need viewers and attention. The easiest way is to piss you off and make you angry. It’s to pit us against each other so we’ll talk and engage.
The news is arsenic for your mind. There are smarter ways to stay informed.
6. We’re overworked
The modern job is an endless pile of tasks.
Email is a full-time job. Zoom meetings never end. There’s no start and end time to the work day. Business now runs 24/7. You’re either clocked in or someone else is who can do the job faster, better, cheaper.
The way to compete is to work longer and harder.
It’s why I dropped out of this nightmare 2.5 years ago. With all the noise of the workday, it’s hard to stay sane and think. There’s always a crisis at work. Revenue is down. Or customers have stopped caring. Or there’s some dumb restructure that’s supposed to make a huge difference.
Or a new CEO has started and wants to stamp their version of sh*t on the company so they can advance their career and move on to an even better company in a year.
The modern company is a mental asylum. No one knows what the hell they’re doing or why they’re doing it.
This isn’t bad though. It’s an opportunity. It’s why one-person businesses are catching on and the freelance economy is booming. There are smarter ways to work.
7. 8-hour work days are for factory workers
This idea needs to die.
How many hours you work has nothing to do with value created. 8-hour workdays are more of a performance to show senior leaders you’re working. But if you can do your work in 4 hours by working smarter, not harder, then that should be fine.
8. You’re a more profitable member of society if you’re sick
The American healthcare system fascinates me.
The goal is to get you sick so they can give you expensive cancer treatments. Or to wait until your hit breaking point and nearly have a mental breakdown so they can prescribe an opioid and really screw you up.
If all goes well you’ll become a drug addict who’s hooked on pills. Nice.
9. We could all drive electric cars if we wanted
Cars that use gas are no longer needed.
Teslas are everywhere because they work. The reason we don’t all drive electric cars is because the oil companies make too much money by screwing with the price at the pump. We have the technology to go fully electric right now.
We don’t do it because of big business, not human willingness.
10. Commuting to an office is pointless
It clogs up the roads. And it wastes 2-4 hours a day of our time.
Maybe we can go to the office once a week. But every day? Stupid. The big problem with an office is you need to live near one. And that means paying sky-high prices for properties close to big cities.
The entire footprint of cities would change if companies could stop demanding workers go to an office to show up and tick a box.
One day we’ll live in the metaverse and Zoom will be considered “in-person.”
11. Eating loads of meat isn’t good
I don’t care whether you’re a meat eater or a happy-go-lucky vegan.
Eating tonnes of meat is unnecessary on every level. All the slaughtering of animals is a giant waste. And we take up huge amounts of land to raise these animals and to have this pleasure. If we just reduced meat consumption we could still hit our dietary needs and simultaneously fix so many environmental problems.
It’s a human luxury to have meat several times a day.
12. Incentives drive behavior
The best example is charities.
On the outside they exist to help those less fortunate. On the inside it’s a giant tax write-off for wealthy people who’ve had a big year in earnings.
It’s not something to be upset by, but it is worth knowing why humans do what they do, so you’re not misled by their true incentive.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
13. Most of us live a life of distraction
This is the final silent pandemic:
The WALL-E kid’s movie from 2008 has become reality.
Walk down the street and you’ll see a bunch of zombie-like creatures staring at phones. They’re completely unaware of their surroundings, which is why local councils have put pedestrian signals on the ground, because people are always looking down at their phones instead of at the car heading straight for them at 80 mph.
For many people, babysitting their phone has become their main priority. And they’re not even aware of it. SCARY.
Tech is everywhere and it takes us out of the present.
Other people’s priorities have been given to us on a silver platter in the form of notifications. We spend more time on the internet than we do in reality.
Think about that for a sec. That’s no exaggeration.
The bizarre conclusion
You might say after reading all this that I’ve become cynical.
The reality is I’m just trying to be real. Once we can see the truth only then can we create the solutions and have an impact.
Awareness is what leads to understanding. We can’t solve all of these problems overnight. Often the best solution is just to do the opposite of each of these silent pandemics. Or to slowly open your mind to the idea there’s more to life than what we’re led to believe.
The future is actually bright. We’re not screwed. The opportunity to evolve and grow has never been more possible. Technology has made many of life’s mysteries solvable.
So become aware of the silent pandemics, do your best to overcome them, then spread the word of any solutions you find.
We’re only doomed if we let doomers run the world.
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8 hour days are absurd and so are 5 day work weeks. Most work schedules in the knowledge economy should be outcome based, not time based.
Tim, I love your unabashed honesty. Thank you for publishing what most are thinking but are afraid to share.