Climb the Corporate Ladder or Die

We have built a system where you have to be on top to thrive.

I don’t really have any desire to climb the corporate ladder in life, and my job doesn’t really afford me that privilege anyway. I am a grant writer by trade, and any job that would allow me to climb the corporate ladder would take me away from grant writing, which I don’t want. Alternatively, I could become a freelancer and be my own boss, but I don’t want that either.

So, as it stands, I’m more or less stuck as a grant writer until I feel like changing careers. That’s perfectly fine by me except for one thing: inflation.

Inflation right now is a bitch, and working for a nonprofit somewhat limits my raise potential because nonprofits are often shoestring affairs, so I’m usually lucky to get a 2% COLA. Unfortunately, inflation is something like 9% from a year ago, and I’m pretty sure we can all do basic math. So, unless I either (a) job hop, (b) go into a management role, or © go freelance, I am stuck at my current earning level more or less forever. Considering I don’t want to job hop right now and the other two are already off the table, I guess I’m hosed.

That’s the problem, though. I make a decent living doing what I’m doing right now, but it’s not quite enough to be truly comfortable. We’ve had a string of big bills and emergencies lately, inflation continues to rampage, and my savings is rapidly drying up. Plus, gods forbid either my partner or I get really sick, at which point we are more or less totally ruined thanks to the terrible healthcare system in America.

The surefire way to fix this is more money, and the surefire way to get more money is to climb the corporate ladder, but not everyone wants to do that. Plus, there is only so much room at the top, and the current class of billionaires seems hellbent on keeping as much wealth for themselves as possible at the expense of literally everyone else and the entire world.

By and large, in order to have a decent quality of life, you have to be at (or near enough to) the top of the earnings scale. If you work any kind of job in the middle quintile or below, just consider yourself screwed unless you can bash your way through to a higher-level role. Even still, there are people in the top 20% living paycheck to paycheck, and more than one six-figure income family with a nice McMansion and no debt has been destroyed by a cancer diagnosis.

That’s terrible. Americans are overworked and underpaid, we have no guaranteed time off and fewer benefits than most Europeans, and our happiness and quality of life are both objectively worse than most of the industrialized world. We have built a society where you have to be at the top to have a decent quality of life, and that kind of system is one of the most god-awful abominations I can think of.

There are so many things I could point to that would explain this to some degree or another — corporate greed, profits over people, and the requirement that companies pay the shareholders above all others all spring to mind. There are also less explicit things like the huge push toward entrepreneurship, the eternal hustle, and “being your own boss” as ways to make more money than you would in the rat race. It’s part of the reason so many people lose money at pyramid schemes — I mean multi-level marketing companies.

All of this is unsustainable. Not everyone can climb the ladder and be at the top, and not everyone can be an entrepreneur. There have to be front-line workers to do things like bag our groceries and take our orders at Mcdonald’s, and if you think that teenagers and college students can fill those roles forever, I have bad news for you.

Even so, not everyone wants to be a manager or an entrepreneur. I thought I did at one point, but the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do it. There are millions more like me — people who are happy to be executive assistants, waiters, and salespeople. Why must they be perpetually disenfranchised by a system where the only way to live a comfortable life is to be at the top?

You know the whole promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that everyone talks about? The American Dream, as it were? That’s supposed to be for everyone. Not just the Elon Musks of the world. Not just the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Not just the tech bros that found startups with millions in other peoples’ money. Everyone.

For all the people who whine about “meritocracy” and other stuff like that, you are missing the point. Yes, you should get rewarded for being successful, and financial incentives are a good way to do that. However, at this point, we are rewarding those at the top by depriving everyone else, and that is inhumane. You should not be deprived of a comfortable, happy life because you are not a high-earning manager or entrepreneur.

The modern billionaire class has gained their wealth largely on the backs of their employees, who generally get crapped on for the privilege of working at an Amazon warehouse. Even getting paid $18 an hour sucks when you have to step and fetch boxes in terrible conditions without bathroom breaks, all while the CEO makes more money in a minute than you do in a year.

The boomers that currently run the world, all the septuagenarians and octogenarians who are in our government, have made themselves rich at the younger generations’ expense. They are currently clinging onto power thanks to their superior healthcare and longer lives, paid for in the blood of Gen X, Millennials, and now Gen Z. It is literally in their best interest to keep us poor and angry at each other rather than them because maybe they can squeeze a few more years out of their lives and wreck the economy a bit more.

And so, for so many people, we have two options: climb the corporate ladder or die. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense — I mean that if you don’t continue to climb the management ladder or try to be an entrepreneur, you run a very good risk of never retiring and dying relatively young. This is the world that we have been given by our elders — one of class warfare, where nearly everyone stands on the precipice of financial ruin at any point and the planet may not sustain humanity 100 years from now.

But hey, all the Amazon and Tesla shareholders are making bank right now, so who gives a damn?

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