20 Reasons Why A 9 To 5 Job Sucks

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
— Lily Tomlin, Comedian

A 9 to 5 job is modern slavery.

A job severely restricts your freedom. Servitude is the antithesis of freedom.

I don’t know anybody who is not miserable working a 9-5 job. A 9 to 5 job sucks the lifeblood out of you.

A job is not a road to greatness. It’s a road to mediocrity.

Here are 20 reasons why:

1. A 9 To 5 Job Destroys Your Most Precious Asset: Time

Time=Life.

Time is your most precious asset. At a 9 to 5 job, time is a liability, not an asset.

Unlike money, time is not a renewable resource. When you run out of your time on the earth, you die. Nobody ever managed to escape from this reality. But, it’s a human weakness to act as if our time on earth is unlimited and corporations exploit this weakness to the end.

“Thank God It’s Friday!” is the motto of every 9 to 5 worker.

From Monday to Friday, you pray for days to go by fast. Time going by fast means life going by fast. You don’t have unlimited time for living. At a 9 to 5 job, you are literally praying to get closer to death.

Life does not begin on Friday night and end on Monday morning. Aren’t there 7 days within a week, instead of 2? What law did you break to fall into this prison? Were you born to sell your soul for a weekend?

Every Friday night, bars and nightclubs are crowded. Isn’t it embarrassing that someone else decides the time for you to have fun? Isn’t exchanging 5 days for 2 days in return a bad deal? Don’t you feel cheated?

Moreover, your free time is not so free either. Even on the weekends or weekday nights, the constant worry and dread of the imminent and inevitable return to work is spirit-crushing.

I don’t know a single person who feels happy on a Sunday. It’s supposed to be a free day but the awareness that you have to go back to work tomorrow eats you up inside.

You also spend a considerable amount of recovery time from work.

Then there’s the time you waste in traffic. Your employer doesn’t count the time you spend in traffic as payable time.

Additionally, a lot of jobs will require you to work overtime.

When all is said and done, years and decades go by without being able to find enough time for your family, kids, girlfriend, and your other interests.

You have only one life and at a 9 to 5 job you are expected to hand it to a stranger.

2. You Constantly Worry About Losing Your Job

A myriad of reasons can cause you to lose your job.

A bad performance review, an economic recession, upsetting the wrong people, your skills going obsolete, your line of work getting abolished due to automation, and so on. You’re expected to put your heart and soul into a job where you can be fired for reasons completely out of your control.

While you can -partially- control your performance on the job, you can only hope all other things to go well.

The fairness of performance reviews is also dubious. You are at the mercy of a few people who may decide to fire you, downgrade you, or transfer you. If you are lucky, you get promoted and get a minuscule pay raise, of course with additional responsibility.

3. You’ll Never Get Rich Or Retire Early With A 9 To 5 Job

A 9 to 5 job is not designed to make you rich. You work to make your boss rich.

It’s a law of economics that the entrepreneur gets all the profits and the worker gets survival wage. You can acquire degrees and skills to increase your salary beyond survival wage, but that doesn’t get you too far. When the system is designed to pay you survival wage, there’s only so much you can do about it.

Pay raise is limited. Have you ever heard of anyone getting a 1000% pay raise? Even when you bust your ass off in your spare time and acquire a master’s degree in your field, you will get a measly 3% raise and that’s when you are lucky.

Also, your tax payment will be conveniently removed from your salary before you even touch it.

Unless you are a professional athlete, singer, entertainer, actor or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you will not get rich by a job. The odds of becoming famous are so small that you have better odds to win the lottery.

Retiring early is only a dream when you are not rich. Life is lived when you are young enough to enjoy it, not when you are too old. In fact, a lot of people find out that they still have to work beyond the retirement age because they don’t have enough money.

4. Workplace Hierarchy Causes Unnecessary Stress

Workplace hierarchy is proven to cause additional stress for humans. The lower you are in the hierarchy the more stressed out you will be.

Here’s a document about stress. You can see the proof of how the workplace hierarchy is slowly killing workers as they are placed lower in a workplace hierarchy.

Nobody in the workplace is immune to hierarchy except the boss.

You have to beg permission like a dog for trivial things such as a doctor visit, your kids’ school registration or being stuck in traffic. It’s utterly humiliating for a grown-up man. Even when you are genuinely sick, people will think you are faking it to avoid going to work.

You are constantly watched by your superiors. All your mistakes are duly recorded to be used against you in the future. Life already has powerful mechanisms to punish you for your mistakes. A job provides additional ways to punish you.

You are expected to perform high at all times. Even if you work like a dog for 51 weeks, 1 week of slacking may result in receiving a warning.

Job stress also negatively affects your sexual performance.

5. A 9 To 5 Job Is Bad For Your Physical Health

Sitting on a chair all day long is bad for your posture, bone health, and muscles. The human body is not designed to sit all day.

Lots of people turn to alcohol and drugs to release the tension of workplace stress, which doesn’t help to be healthier.

A 9 to 5 job also leaves little time and willpower for exercise. You need an enormous level of willpower to go to the gym after a day of work. And, if you worked overtime, you can completely forget about the gym (By the way, I developed my bodyweight training routine when I was working a corporate job, because I had little time left from work to go to the gym. It worked wonders for me as I built a lean, muscular, and athletic body with six-pack abs. Feel free to check it out here).

The workplace is constantly looking for ways to occupy your weekends too. It’s not uncommon to be forced to take training about something you don’t care about, of course on a weekend day.

6. A 9 To 5 Job Reduces You To A Cog

A corporation never wants to depend on individuals because this makes the business vulnerable to the whims of the employees. Even the CEO of the company is expendable.

No matter how hard you work, they don’t want you to be indispensable. You can be easily replaced, and you know it.

Your employer sees you as a number on the balance sheet. He’s looking for ways to cut your pay or completely get rid of you by automating what you doing. The moment your cost to the company exceeds the value you provide, you will be fired.

7. A 9 To 5 Job Is Impotent To Create Residual Income

For you, of course. Not for the boss.

At a 9 to 5 job, you don’t own the work you produce. All the work you do is owned by the boss. The moment you stop working is the moment you stop making money.

Maybe you spent years on a great project. Maybe you created a great product. Doesn’t matter. Your work will continue to bear fruit after you leave your job, but the fruits will be collected by the boss.

A 9 to 5 job is designed to allow you only to get by. Not to make you residual income.

Never be a minion, always be an owner.

8. A 9 To 5 Job Rarely Provides You With Real World Money Making Skills

The productivity of a company is achieved by the specialization of labor. Remember, you are only a cog. Your experience will be limited to your specialized work.

Making money in the real world requires a lot more than one specialized skill. This is why a worker gets devastated when he loses his job. He inherently knows that what he learned on the job will not help him make money himself, so he desperately starts to look for another job where he can convert his specialized skill into money.

9. A 9 To 5 Job Is The Antithesis Of Self-Reliance

A man’s ultimate goal in life is self-reliance. A 9 to 5 job is far from being conducive to self-reliance.

You don’t control your time. You don’t control your income. You are at the mercy of someone else. You depend on people that don’t care about you. You relinquish power to someone capable of making you a victim.

You depend not only on your employer but also the government, a good economy, and your coworkers.

10. A 9 To 5 Job Severely Restricts Your Mobility

You are tied to a location just because your job is there. You know that the weather is better in another city, or the girls are prettier in yet another city or country but you are tied to the location of your job.

If the city of your job is big enough, you will find it difficult to go to another part of the city let alone going to another city.

11. A 9 To 5 Job Is Addictive

A paycheck is a drug. Once you give in, the workplace becomes a prison getting harder to escape year by year. A job keeps you just above the water. Decades pass quickly and when you wake up, you will have nothing to show for.

As the years go by, you develop the habit of dependency. You structure your life around your job. Habits are hard to break, so the longer you work at a 9 to 5 job, the tougher it becomes to quit and start your own business.

12. A 9 To 5 Job Gets Worse As You Get Older

In the normal course of life, experience is supposed to be a net positive. Unfortunately, a 9 to 5 job is not normal. It’s an elaborate lie fed to the masses, such that now it’s now believed to be a normalcy. It’s not.

Employers are looking for ways to get rid of older workers. It’s not uncommon for a business owner or manager to boast about how young is the workforce in his company.

Older people are a rarity among corporations.

Also, as you climb up the corporate ladder, you are more likely to be backstabbed. Your coworkers will try to pull the rug out from you.

13. A 9 To 5 Job Creates A False Sense Of Security

People think they played safe by choosing a 9 to 5 job, but nothing could be further from the truth.

9 to 5 workers dig their graves deeper by getting married, having kids, borrowing student loans, mortgages and car loans. When they realize they hate their jobs, they are already neck-deep in debt. It’s hard to quit your job when you are in debt or you have people to feed.

14. A 9 To 5 Job Kills Creativity

A 9 to 5 job kills creativity in a couple of ways.

First, since your work is regimented, there’s little room for creativity.

Second, it’s hard to be creative when you know that no matter what you create, you are unlikely to be rewarded proportionally. Maybe you will get a 4% wage increase instead of 3% and that’s it.

15. A 9 To 5 Job Provides No Role Models

When you climb up the corporate ladder, your responsibilities increase. More responsibility often means longer working hours. When you look at your managers, you see that they are working more than younger people. All the years they spent at the job not only didn’t allow them to retire at a younger age but also made them work even harder.

Sure, they are earning more than the workers lower in the hierarchy, but when you don’t have the time and freedom to enjoy the fruits of your work, everything is utterly pointless.

16. A 9 To 5 Job Prevents You From Speaking Your Mind

If you say something wrong you may lose your job, so it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

You can only say things that your masters allow you to say. You will never have fuck you money with a 9 to 5 job.

17. You Have To Put Up With Office Politics

Office politics is an unwritten rule for every 9 to 5 job. You can’t escape it. You have to deal with it.

You also have to work with people you hate. You have to put on a mask to act nice to the people you wouldn’t spend one second with outside the office.

18. A 9 To 5 Job Makes You Pay the Price for Other People’s Failures

It’s not uncommon at an office job the be told that you are performing well but the company is in dire straits or the economy is bad or your coworkers fucked up so you don’t get a promotion, pay raise, or worse, you should be fired.

19. A 9 To 5 Job Doesn’t Justify The Years You Spent At School

You graduate from college after years of hard work with dreams of making a change in the world. But not so quick. Because, 99% of the time you will be given a job that you could do perfectly after middle school.

You ask yourself. Did I study for almost 20 years to do this job?

Also, your college education rarely matches your job requirements.

20. Job Stability Is A Thing Of The Past

Gone are the days when you worked for a company for 40 years and retired there.

The prestige of having a stable job decreased.

Maybe your father married your mother just because he had a stable job.

Today, women don’t value job stability as much as they did before. Lots of gainfully employed men have a hard time finding women to get in relationships with.

Jobs pay less and less every day.

Your parents used to buy a house after 2-3 years of austerity. Now the house prices skyrocketed, so you need 15-30 years of austerity just to buy a decent home.

Until the end of the 1950s or so, the average man used to do OK in life. But today, the modern man has to either make it to the top or be miserable like the mass of men.

Being average no longer cuts it. This is why I wrote an entire book for the modern man to take full control of his life and cultivate the habits to make it to the top.

Conclusion

The way to avoid all this misery is to start your own business.

It’s not easy but it’s worth doing. The other option is getting a job and as you see, it’s guaranteed to make you miserable.

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