How do I stop feeling guilty about reading when I'm young and could be working (whether that's for a job or making...

I spend about three minutes masturbating in the morning after I wake up and complete my rigorous exercise regimen of jumping jacks, pushups, and crunches. After I wipe my ejaculate on the underside of my comforter I head downstairs and enjoy an apple toaster strudel with a sugar glaze on top and try to avert my mother's sad gaze as she gets ready for work. I lay in bed while I absorb the energy from my strudel and queue up a vintage Gianna Michaels video on my laptop. Once the worst of the indigestion wears off (I have IBS) I slather baby oil over my phallus and take my fleshlight cast from Gianna's anus herself and take her to pound town for another twenty minutes matching the video stroke for stroke. Except usually I have to skip ahead to the last few minutes so I don't expel my gametes too early senpai.

Make work out of reading.

This is a pretty interesting modern example of Marx's theory of worker alienation. Justifying your NEET lifestyle is on the other hand, is fucking retarded.

think about this: has anyone ever been protested for reading too many books? on the other hand people with too much cash always have haters mad about it...therefor getting cash is a better way to feel smug. like you feel smug for reading complete dostoyevsky and pynchon, but that hedge fund manager with 2 billion in his bank account also feels smug as shit, but in addition to his smugness he also has a really nice penthouse condo. so it's like "smug in a basement" or "smug in a penthouse"?

Investigate why other people work. You'll quickly find that few people like their jobs; most go to work because they need money and/or approval from others.

Money will always be a need but its pull can be lessened by living modestly. This is the part where capitalistic society fucks you, having taught you to want more and more. Veblen's "theory of the leisure class" is a cool social psych take on economics, ultimately painting "normal" work and spending habits as increasingly oppressive and simultaneously futile in terms of providing satisfaction.

And as far as approval from other people, just look how poorly desiring that works out for others. People are miserable when they count on others to be happy, whether they're successful or not. Make your own rules and live by them. If you think that being "lazy" in favor of cultivating yourself is the right thing to do, do it. If you're using reading as a cop-out when you really think the right thing to do would be to work or further a career, then do that instead.

but what if working hard makes someone happy? then they're happy AND they have more cash than you.

This is true and it fucking terrifies me, dude. I was a dropout loser who evaded steady work his whole life, only ever having contract jobs and doing dubiously legal shit in fits and bursts, and when I finally got a 9-5 I was basically screaming inside my mind all day. Meanwhile my coworkers were grateful as fuck that the job was "easy" and allowed them to listen to music. Eight straight hours of doing Tayloristic shuffling at the prole factory, and they were happy about it, because they could listen to pop music while they did it. I couldn't get my mind to stop craving more complex stimulation. Even after a year.

Thank Christ I escaped. I really think you do need to basically deform your conscious mind so that you don't care about being a lever-pulling monkey all day.

I keep thinking that society used to offer people some kind of reward for this shit. It used to be a lifestyle. You busted ass, but at least you knew and liked your coworkers, you had a career, you had ambitions of being promoted maybe, I don't know. You were like Joe Factorynigger and you came home every day to talk about how Jim at work asked you to be his best man, and how a new consulting position opened up and they're considering you for it, and your kids are going to college, and things mean other things and stuff makes some kind of sense. Now you come home from CUBE-SORTING SANDWICH ENGINEERING where Punjar yelled at you all day and you're pretty sure your soulless coworkers are legally dead, and you jerk off to TV shows and try unsuccessfully to get laid on OKCupid with broads working in HR who took 6 years to graduate with a B- in Psychology.

What's the point? What do you get out of this? There aren't even unions anymore in a meaningful sense. It's all massive lobbies. There are no classes. Society has denatured like melted playdough into a poo slurry with vague and indistinct colours blending into one another where there used to be hard divisions and communities. Politics and society mean nothing anymore. Mass has replaced the social, and
>people are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

Meanwhile, the neo-cogs are convinced they are still the cogs of yore, when being a cog had some kind of dignity attached to it. They live better than 90% of present humanity, live better than the nobility of past centuries did, but they're chronically depressed on cocktails of pills and masturbating themselves into prostatitis. But it's okay, because you're a Sandwich Friendship Engineer, Second Class, until next year when you'll be a Bagel Wellness Experience Technician, or living with your mom while you wait for responses from your fourth technical retraining program applications.

You are like a baby on irony level

>I couldn't get my mind to stop craving more complex stimulation. Even after a year.

so why didn't u get a more challenging job ya fucking moron?

I did. I'm in a PhD program now.

What's a "challenging" job, anyway? My friend is in a "challenging" job and all it did was kill his spirit, because "applying himself" to "challenges" means fucking nothing when you're in a dystopian corporate hellhole where there's no reward for doing well, or where you're actually punished for doing well, and eighteen thousand ranks of condescending faggot managers and submanagers who live and breathe bureaucracy constantly loom over you.

Sounds like you got memed into studying soul crushing shit.
I'm a photographer and I spend all day taking pictures of cute girls and places, have traveled to every continent and live in a comfy place.

so grow a pair of balls and start a business, fucking baby

>what's a challenging job

developing a self driving car? developing software that can parse natural language? finding ways to reduce the cost of launching things into orbit? finding a vaccine for aids?

if you can't think of a challenging job you probably aren't smart enough to do it anyways

>finding a vaccine for aids?
its called not being a faggot

No, I enjoy my studies (and being paid to do them). The soul-crushing job was the 9-5 wageslavery.

Will you throw your copy of Atlas Shrugged at me if I say you're a moron? That thing hurts.

There is less class mobility in America than in third world countries. It's effectively a plutocracy. "Starting a business" is a meme except for very lucky people. Even for the lucky few who have ideas that will be good enough to make them rich or something, the barriers to getting off the ground are huge. You need to gamble with your entire life to get starting capital.

Your solution to "wage-slavery is oppressive" is "do something that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of education, plus extensive grooming in adolescence to pass the entry exams to get into that education."

What you are suggesting is available almost entirely to the rich, who don't need it to live decent lives anyways since daddy will just give them a job. Only a few poor people lucky and precocious enough to recognise their talents while very young and seize upon them immediately can escape by this route. There are tons and tons of poor people working shit jobs who would have done well in prestigious academic or professional vocations, because they didn't have parents providing them with the leisure and private schooling to do well and make connections. It's not even just about knowledge, it's about knowing how to write retarded entry essays and fly across the country on parental money to do internships in high school. Shitty public schools don't provide that kind of thing, and middle class parents who are barely managing to tread water and whose lives are upended by a pet becoming ill don't have the wherewithal to help.

Upper middle class Americans are the most disgusting pigs in history.

6000 job titles, I'm sure one of them will fit my passion exactly... Which is learning to levitate... Oh wait, job titles are the indication of a highly repeatable process set forth by (or for) someone else... You literally have to become a rounded down square peg to fit in the circular hole as op suggests perhaps only for a time but that is still putting your will last where it learns to forget itself.

Kinda funny how its only ok to be a NEET when you're an old fuck about to die.

I'm always down for a good days work, but its a funny thing.

You seem to only be able to detect smugness, some things are unverifiable.

>. Even for the lucky few who have ideas that will be good enough to make them rich or something, the barriers to getting off the ground are huge.

hence the part about growing a pair of balls, moron.

>Your solution to "wage-slavery is oppressive" is "do something that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of education, plus extensive grooming in adolescence to pass the entry exams to get into that education."

uh, yet you say you're doing a Phd now? do you even read the shit you write?

Read like an hour daily and sundays for like 7 hours. Never had a problem.

Is that why people that have a job never buy a single book?

I get paid about $40k annually to do my hobby. I'm OK. I'm more worried about all my friends and family who are doomed to shitty lives because they didn't "grow a pair of balls" and found a magical business like in fantasy Americana where the spirit of the entrepreneur blazes eternal and everyone eats steak and potatoes.

Stop basing your economic principles off emotive dismissals of individual gumption. Or go scoff at hobos for not getting a job, I don't know.

1) I was unbelievably lucky to stumble into something where I had natural talent.
2) I was unbelievably lucky to do it in a country where education was about 1/10th the cost of American education, which was the only reason I ever could have done it, and then to transfer to the American system only when I got a free ride.
3) The infinite luck it took to get me to this point only heightens my awareness of how unbelievably unlikely it is for other people to do it too.

Not only did I have to be super precocious, in ways that aren't likely to be the case for the vast majority of people (who might nevertheless be just as talented or more talented, especially moreso than the retard richfags clogging up universities), I had to actually seize upon it, which happened basically by chance.

I am phenomenally lucky. I won like five lotteries in a row to be where I am now. Meanwhile I know supergenius engineers and independent lit scholars who basically fucked their lives permanently in adolescence, because their dumbass poorfag parents were too stressed or stupid to realize that their kid was talented, or that his talents would flourish at university. Most often they were just too poor to afford the kind of education necessary to push their kid to real greatness. One bad year or financial crisis and the kid had to drop out and support his parents. One slip-up due to stress and depression and they had lost their one shot.

Meanwhile, every single person I've encountered at my richfag university is a feckless baby who needs to go on vacations paid for by their parents every six weeks, producing shit derivative scholarship because they're only here by technicality. Infinite leisure is a nice launchpad to success.

There is a fine line between stupidity and bravery

tl;dr working class pleb feels guilty for not failing like everyone else he knows

>just be a billionaire, bro

But I really really like the job I am studying for...

This was a very stupid post, and you should feel bad for posting it.

why would the only one getting a good job are talented people? No one wants a shitty job for all their lives

>people who work don't read
But isn't writing books a job?

>all these people complaining about being in a capitalist system

Hate to break this to you, but all other systems are trash or don't work Pham. I for one accept (and to some extent respect) our capitalist overlords. I eat pretty well, have a bed to sleep in, and can find 2 hours each day to read and 6 hours on the weekend. Sure I'm trapped in a cycle of debt, still I'm content none the less.
I know it sounds edgy as fuck but seriously, know your role.

why are you posting in this thread?
did you take adderall a few hours ago?

Welcome to post-modern society: where nothing is really that bad, but nothing is great either. Everything is just nothing.

This is the future we chose.

Capitalism only works as intended if it's regulated by the state. The kind of free market capitalism that has engulfed the western world leads to a rise in corporatism, which is to blame for the current state of society.

A market without state intervention is bad for everyone.

Well, just do whatever you want to do, however you need to understand that you will live in a society where people have got a different purpose than yours. When you finally got this you might live as you want and not as other people want, but you need to be prepared for an economic sacrifice and probably a shitty life in economical terms.
Or you live as a sheep with some money and debts or you live as you want and accept the shit that comes with it.

jokes on me i'm disabled

work's for saps. read a little bob black and you'll feel better.

Kekked

You can't. Suffer the children.

I love you man.

Thank you for being honest and showing up all these cunts who have no idea how to respond to you. There is so much truth to what you are saying, and I appreciate that you are self aware enough to realize that you 'stumbled' into something you could be great at instead of acting like anyone could have just gotten good as long as they worked hard enough.

Why don't you want something better, given we have more than enough resources to achieve that?

Capitalism regulated by the state *is* corporatism user

How though

I'm down for a good day's work myself, but I like being in "control." I like producing something and the end of the day looking at what I produced and being proud of it.

I used to do house painting and stuff, which I liked don't get me wrong, but I was always rushed. I hated it so I quit. While now a NEET, I do get the odd job of painting something or building something at my own pace. I do a good job, and I beam with pride once it's done. I've resisted getting a job because a) 98% is simply busywork which I am not into, nor am I into making money for someone else and b) I enjoy my odd jobs.

spend one timed hour at least every day reading however many pages

What the fuck are student loans? What the fuck is community college? Most upper middle class people do well at productive jobs even if they were helped by their parents. You sort of people would call a man who buys his son a toy a disgusting pig because he doesn't buy every Tom, Dick and Harry a toy too. How is ressentiment going?

Corporatism isn't a free market. Free markets need governments to provide antitrust laws and to tax/regulate to correct for market failures. I swear to God, the idea of free markets has been corrupted by their opponents to make it suggest that a free market society will just have monopolies. Most regulations protect vested interests and big business, licencing fucks over everyone else in society aside from the holders of licences.

this (about where you said you liked to look back on your day's work and feel satisfied)

I pick fruit with my uncle (inb4 mexican), and the most fun part of the job after the banter and the sunshine is deconstructing every act and trying to predict how many baskets we will pick, how many fruits in a basket, to average a year's fruit output, to fill the tractor with more and more fruit, to see it leave and see another come back, to average how many lines of trees will fill how many tractors, to work out how many percent of the field we've picked so far, to predict how many tractors we can fill in an afternoon, to compare weathers, the best one being cloudy but warm, to talk about and to each other, to make endless shite puns based on a model, in short, the real-life version of XP grinding.

I have this autistic satisfaction in seeing a simple task achieved over and over until the tasks pile up and boom, I've done something satisfying with my day's work.

But this is only satisfying because my uncle is my boss but also my friend, I work in the sunny fields and the mood is high. Also, at the end of the day, to go back to the place where the fruit go so we can have a beer and a chat with the guys who sort out the fruit, we can ride on the tractor's backside and we roleplay Mad Max. Fun Work.

i actually think he was dead on but was wondering why he should bother because i'm in a similar place and wouldn't bother in such a thread unless i had taken adderall a while ago, didn't crush the beads and now i'm fucked, awake

OP here, posting for the first time apart from the OP.

You guys may say "read only in your free time" but there's always money to be made and if your job has set hours then you are probably not that rich.

The only way I can motivate myself to read is by telling myself that it will make me look more educated and interesting and therefore increase my ability to blend with rich / educated people and make more money etc.

Yes, I am really cucked.

you need wandering time to come up with something good
it's all about the weird ideas
you only have no free time if your method is grinding; in the medium-to-long term, that doesn't work
(there, now have both)

What kind of money do you make? That sounds wonderful.

...

>suggest that a free market society will just have monopolies

How can you say that they won't? Anti trust laws are fundamentally based on judgements that must be tailored for the specific industry they apply to. Microsoft can effectively be a monopoly by locking people into features and devices that must be compatible with other stuff they are using, which is something a food supplier can't do to the consumer in the same way.

Spotted the retard. Are you really that uncreative that you couldn't find ways to stimulate your mind on your computer while doing easy work. Listen to podcasts, lectures, music, news, audiobooks. Jesus Christ. It's much worse to occupy your mind with tedious semi-complex problems so you can't just daydream or focus on something else. I am aiming for the dumbest, easiest job possible.

That doesn't sound very fulfilling user.

There are no personal computers allowed in the coal mine, jackass.

You'd rather have your mind enslaved (force your conscience to stay frozen on some dumb task) during your shift and forced to pump out spreadsheets concerning some work specific analysis, maybe interact with people all day trying to sell/shmooze to them or maybe make some write-up that you must make clever and witty, but the topic is out of your control so you are stuck writing about some absolutely mindless topic. No thanks, I'll stick to my podcasts, zombie job, and free time to pursue my REAL independent endeavors.

> people are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions
So true

Remember the big picture familial. Let it soak in. As we grow older we will have conscious growing shared experiences. Our parents are going to pass, friends and relatives will die young or by suicide(board members have left us quietly), our idols will die one by one(they already are), our own organs will go through stages of deterioration, our spouses will cheat and our relationships will become that of convenience rather than affection, we will achieve our goals and find them empty becoming disillusioned with one thing after another and our eyes may be opened to that which has true value.

Anxiety over how you percieve that others percieve you is empty anxiety, every pair of eyes in which you see and judge yourself will pass away into the void of non-presence(death or distance), and in reality peoples judgments are more of a reflection of themselves than of you. The deeply conscious will accept you as you are, and they cannot be disappointed, but only saddened. And that sadness won't be of you, but shared with you. As I see it, the greatest sadness can only come from the shame of a setting life lived in fear rather than one lived as a protector and cultivator of those things which you have found to be truly valuable, of a life lived courageously.

Fuck the opinions of the spooks, do what you want.