Diary of a future rentier (5)

I am now at a crossroads between passive income that is certainly present but insufficient and a professional activity that eats up all my time and energy. It is all the more frustrating because I feel that I am on the right path, but that I cannot yet benefit from it in my everyday life. It is also even more frustrating because I have already been able to live for a few months with a reduced professional activity, and that I have therefore been able to taste the joys of the life of an annuitant, even if only partially. The impatience to reach the goal is growing in me.

Our society has become completely crazy. It is the reign of everything, right away. Irresponsible shareholders (and there are many) constantly demand indecent profitability from companies. It is as if we had forgotten that the life of a company, like life in general, is made up of a succession of crises and rebirths. And of course it is always the employees who pay the price. Mass layoffs, increase in the duration and pace of work for the "lucky" ones who can keep their jobs! And we should almost still say thank you for having the happiness of being exploited.

I like new technologies and I'm not the type to be nostalgic for the past, but I think that e-mail has become a real calamity for employees in the tertiary sector. In most cases you could pick up your phone and resolve a point in the space of 2 minutes while it would take you several back and forth emails to arrive at the same result. Add to that the astronomical quantity of emails that do not concern you. I'm not even talking about spam, but about each time you receive information in copy and that is of no use to you. However, you still have to read them to the end to be sure... And then there are also the nice emails that reach you at the end of the loop, when several participants have already exchanged on numerous occasions... you know those emails that are several pages long, that you have to read from the end, and which are sometimes even in English.

Where it becomes comical, and even tragicomic, is when someone calls you a few minutes after sending an email to make sure you received it because you still haven't responded... Pathetic, right? Some people even go so far as to set their out-of-office manager when they're away for just a few hours. They could also do it when they go to sleep while they're there. When you receive several dozen to hundreds of emails per day, there's no reason for this flow to stop during the night. It's always nice to arrive early in the morning and see that your inbox is already overflowing. I actually like looking at the sending times... it's chilling sometimes.

We cry wolf when faced with the working conditions of the Chinese, but Westerners would sometimes do better to sweep in front of their own doorsteps too. We have only replaced the physical hardship of assembly line work with constant psychological and emotional stress. Worse, thanks to the Internet and smartphones, the boundary between private and professional life has become almost non-existent. And of course this movement has not been to the advantage of workers.