I notice that many people with a poverty consciousness recoil from a prosperous job in favor of a lower-paying job because they believe the lower-paying job will be easier. The higher-paying job, they fear, will wear them down.
I think much of the time this is self-defeating. If you track your time, plan your time, and have the courage to live by your commitments, you’re not usually going to get worn down. Instead, you’ll feel energized by living out your vision. Plenty of people earn tons of money and look after their families and enjoy a prosperous life. How do they do it? They track their time, plan their time, and live according to their values.
Generally speaking, people in lower-paying jobs, I suspect, are treated with less respect by their employers than those in higher-paying jobs. We all tend to treat high-earners with more respect than low-earners.
* Bullying at work. I notice that about half the employees I know well feel that they are bullied at work. I suspect that this perception inevitably feeds back to unhappy childhoods. I don’t encounter happy people who feel they are bullied at work. Instead, everyone I know well who is bullied at work, is chronically depressed and has the same sort of problems with family and community. It seems like they are replicating unhelpful patterns from childhood and blaming them on their work place.
I think we all exert a force field and have a profound influence on how people treat us.
Also, I’ve never known anyone who’s filed a complaint at work who’s benefited by so doing. In most cases I know, this act leads to increased unhappiness and often termination of employment.
I have a history of idealizing and devaluing people (common trait of narcissists). I put certain people on a pedestal, and then resent what I’ve done and so I go out of my way to cut them down and consequently blow up the most important relationships in my life.
L. writes:
I know where you’re coming from. You sound like someone with insecurity issues. The whole Jewish thing seems to have appealed to you because of how highly accomplished they are on average and apparently you felt attracted to the idea of becoming like them, of being one of them. (I don’t buy FOR ONE SECOND that you ever really bought into their pseudo-theological mumble-jumble, by the way, and I’ve told u that before).
In my particular case, when I seriously considered converting to Orthodox Judaism in my twenties (gosh, I cringe just to think of that nowadays ?), I was absolutely aware of how powerful and successful those people were, but what animated me then was my search for a firmer identity than that which the generic, kosher, Christian, gentile, cuckservatism that I subscribed to back then could offer me. Like, I looked at modern England, Italy and France (some 700 years of history each), I looked at modern Germany (200 years of history only), I looked at Christianity (2000 of history) and when I compared them to Judaism I thought I saw a kind of identity much, much more solid and legitimate and real than them all.
But then I realised after some time that all the Jewish professors at the Hebrew department where I was taking courses at the university didn’t really give two shits to the religious dimension of Judaism. They all strongly identified as Zionist Jews but they were all secular and they seemed to be all leftwing. I though “what the fuck? How is this possible? I thought this was a religion but there seems to be something else at play here.”
Nowadays I identify as an Agnostic, pro-White non-white man. That’s who I am. If there’s indeed a transcendental reality out there, whatever its nature may be, it’s definitely not accurately described by any man-made religions and much less by the Semitic doctrines.
But anyways, if you still have all these emotional issues after all these years of having converted to Judaism, then maybe it didn’t really work out for you after all, if you still feel this kind of void in yourself.
I myself find great consolation and peace of mind in the astonishing European cultural and artistic accomplishments, specially literature. Shakespeare, Dante, Marcel Proust and Tolstoy (these particular 4 authors) are to me what the Torah seems to be to you.