Thursday, June 9, 2016

Why you hate your coworkers

Interesting thought: We tend to weight the value of our experience when we create a memory. Negative memories are remembered with much more vivid strength than positive ones (estimates are three to ten times the strength). If you are constantly interacting with an individual person, their unpleasant or negative character traits will be much more noticeable and memorable than your positive interactions. Over time, you will be much more inclined to remember and characterize that person by your negative experiences than your positive ones. This is a real memory optimization phenomenon that all human minds are subject to. THE NATURAL RESULT of this memory feature is that we tend to learn to dislike the people we work with constantly. This is not very pronounced in day jobs like acting, but in ordinary 9 to 5 office work it is very pronounced. We learn to hate the people we work with. In my limited experience, this seems to be a common experience in the USA workplace -- especially in the factory or the office.

 80% of all working Americans dislike their job.

The natural result of this phenomenon is that long term employees of 20 years (or more) are frequently seen as "not good enough" and they get fired or laid off for no substantial reasons. This is a real career issue and one of the reasons that the labor movement was started. Unions exist to protect your long term employment and protect your life.

They also get laid off cause management thinks "We could get a kid out of college and pay them $15k + less, so ..." I worked at a firm and they continually hired kids with no experience out of college cause they knew they could pay them less. They all ended up staying only a max of 2 years as they went on to graduate school etc.- but the firm would just go get more recent college grads and rinse repeat.


That is true also. But the danger of this phenomenon is that no one is immune. I have to work to ameliorate the symptoms myself. If you work for a small company for twenty years, you are in big danger. In other words: "The more people get to know you, the more probable it is that they will dislike you" This seems to be a universal principle of human society.

 There is no employer in America that has any interest in providing you with a living. The ONLY thing any employer is interested in is maximizing profit which means getting the most work for the least money. This is why Academics have tenure. This is why labor unions exist. This is why Supreme court judges get a job for life.

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