They were also designed to create buzz. These little gems are like wasps’ nests dropped in a school bus.

I consider myself a true conservative with a serious liberal twist. In other words I’m a free thinking independent.

Franklin Schneider has hit it right on the nail. What he has to say is a powerful truth about today’s working environment reality. I applaud his comments and his intelligent, poignant writing that comes from life experience.

The criticisms I read about here regarding liberal vs conservative views on this issue seem absurd. This has nothign to do with your political orientation. The misery of mass production employment hits us all deeply in the gut – unless one doesn’t have any. What Schneider is writing about is bigger than all this petty politcal bickering he is speaking about HUMANITY.

I think that says something about Schneider as a writer — that he was able to make that much of an impression with the Washington City Paper article this phrase is from.

Disagree with him if you will, but the guy can write.

Also, just because you believe “men are supposed to work” doesn’t make that a universal truth. Not everyone is cut out for the mainstream, and maybe those who remove themselves SHOULD do just that.

The other day, someone was complaining to me about people on welfare. I said: Would you rather have them being lazy in some store, making your life impossible, or removing themselves from the workforce? They agree the latter.

As for the be a man comments, if you compare different cultures, and even different periods of American history, you’ll find the view that men must work to the point of physical or mental exhaustion in order to qualify as real men is a recently established cultural norm, not a universal gender role. Modern Western Europeans, and Executives and Laborers alike from ’50s America, worked far less than their Modern American counterparts, all the while not thinking of themselves as less masculine.

In the end, your suggestions all involve work for corporate America, since the corporate model is almost always necessary to raise the capital to engage in the business ventures you mentioned. It will still involve the type of bureaucracy that Schneider seems to have a problem with, whether he’s in a cube or under the sun. As for starting your own company – it’s not exactly clear what Schneider does for a living (in his office) and whether he could realistically compete with pre-existing companies in that field.

I’m off to go fuck myself. Don’t confuse being opinionated with being smart.

Schneider now has a cynical, disaffected attitude towards work because he finds that modern corporate work environments prize team work and mediocrity over individual initiative and hard work. Rather than actually being rewarded for his unique contributions, he finds himself locked in an H.R. orchestrated nightmare of team building exercises, industrial psychology tests, and even creating instructions on the creative process for his replacement in the form of a spreadsheet.

Having experienced several iterations of that kind of work environment, now we find that Schneider has just given up on finding a fulfilling work environment. Having been turned down for numerous jobs myself for no other reason than coming up with a personality profile different from the one some faceless HR rep thought was ideal, I can see where he is coming from.

Modern corporate America doesn’t seem a team is made up of the contributions of many distinct people working toward a common goal. It wants people who are non-distinct and easily replaceable, even though that means the end product will suffer.

[Editor --- Who said you have to work in an office for "corporate America"? Don't like the cube environment? Get out and bust your ass for 10 hours a day on a construction site. Or pull 3-15 hitches on tug boats and barges running up and down the Mississippi River.

Go fuck yourself. Because at the task of being a man, you will have failed miserably.]