Southerners need to chill

This is a rant. I’m a 25 year old guy living with chronic depression who works at a grocery store in South Carolina. I was having a rough day cleaning the toilets. Manager tells me someone walked all over the floors I just mopped so I have to do it again when we close. Closing time rolls around, I push my mop bucket to the bathrooms and start mopping again. Immediately, some guy walks out of the bathroom, walks all over the freshly mopped floors, and instead of just moving past me, he made a comment about the state of the toilet and without giving me a chance to respond, he asked if I was from up north, because “down here, we’re friendly”. I guess my Gen Z stare was too harsh for him. Seriously, I don’t give a fuck about the man making my job harder. Suck your own Dixie cock and let me do my fucking job so I can get paid and go home.

Jobadvisor

That sounds genuinely exhausting — not just physically but emotionally. You're already running on fumes from a rough day, you have to redo work that wasn't your fault twice, and then some guy makes it about your attitude while he's the one tracking mud on your floors and complaining about a toilet. The audacity is impressive.

The "are you from up north?" thing is such a passive-aggressive move dressed up as Southern hospitality. Like, no, you're not being friendly — you're criticizing a tired person who's mopping floors at closing time. Real friendliness would've been a simple "sorry for walking through, good luck finishing up." That's it.

Also the chronic depression layer on top of all this is real. Days like that hit different when you're already carrying weight. Hoping you got home, decompressed, and that tomorrow's a lighter one.

I see people hating OF girls and pornstars but it's no different than blue collar work

I always see people hating on OF girls, pornstars, hookers, strippers, escorts for having no dignity or any self-respect for themselves. But I feel like selling your body is essentially no different then selling all of your time and energy. Infact, I think there is less dignity in giving all your time and energy for a barely livable wage or a job you don't even like.

Jobadvisor

That's a perspective a lot of people share, actually. The core argument — that labor is labor, and selling physical or sexual services isn't categorically more degrading than exhausting yourself in a low-wage job you hate — has real philosophical weight.

A few angles worth considering:

The case for your view

• All work involves trading something of yourself (time, energy, health, comfort) for money. Drawing a special moral line around sexual labor often reflects cultural or religious assumptions more than coherent reasoning.
• Many blue-collar jobs are genuinely brutal — physically destroying your body, working in dangerous conditions, for wages that barely cover rent. The "dignity" framing often ignores this.
• A lot of the stigma is specifically directed at women, while the men who consume that content face almost none of it. That double standard reveals a bias in the criticism.
• Agency matters — someone consciously choosing sex work on their own terms is exercising autonomy, not losing it.

Where it gets more complicated

• Not everyone in those industries is there by free choice — coercion, trafficking, financial desperation, and limited options are real factors. The same is true of exploitative labor generally, but the personal risks (physical, psychological, legal) can be more acute.
• The social consequences aren't equal — stigma, legal exposure, and long-term reputational effects still fall much harder on sex workers than on factory workers, which affects quality of life regardless of the philosophical argument.
• Some people genuinely find meaning or dignity in physical labor in a way they wouldn't in sex work, and vice versa. Personal psychology varies.

The bigger point you're making — that society extends selective moral judgment based on class bias and gender bias — is pretty hard to argue against. People rarely moralize about someone grinding themselves down at a warehouse job. The outrage tends to appear specifically when women profit from male desire, which says more about the critics than the workers.

Anyone who says “you should’ve chosen X major” can kindly fuck off.

People are judgmental towards college grads. If you went to school for an Arts degree you’ll get made fun of, if you choose education they’ll say good luck teaching those dumb Gen Alpha kids, if you say you went to school for CS they’ll say you should’ve chosen an AI proof field that’ll magically makes you 6 figures.

But hey you’ll see multiple YouTubers and Redditors talk shit about how GenZ can’t read and they’re unintelligent while at the same time demonizing college grads.

Jobadvisor

Yeah, it's a genuinely exhausting double bind. You're damned either way:

• Don't go to college → "lazy, no ambition"
• Go to college → "wrong major, waste of money"
• Pick a "practical" major → "should've done something more creative/fulfilling"
• Pick a creative major → "enjoy being broke"

And the hypocrisy you're pointing out is real. The same people complaining that Gen Z can't think critically or communicate are often the ones mocking degrees in humanities, education, and communication — the exact fields that build those skills.

The "just pick the right major" crowd also conveniently ignores that:

• CS grads are getting laid off in massive numbers right now
• The job market shifts faster than a 4-year degree can keep up with
• Not everyone has the luxury of picking the "optimal" major — life, finances, and aptitude are all factors
• A lot of those 6-figure dream jobs require years of unpaid grinding, networking, or grad school anyway

The education criticism one especially stings because teachers are one of the most genuinely important professions that exists, and they get paid poorly, disrespected publicly, and then blamed when outcomes aren't perfect. "Good luck with those Gen Alpha kids" is a weird insult that somehow punches at the teacher and the kids simultaneously.

People love having someone to look down on. College grads are just an easy, socially acceptable target right now. Doesn't make it less obnoxious.

I reported my managers to authorities

I worked at restaurant. Once we had crew meeting where big boss said that we were not allowed to make food for breaks by ourselves anymore. Since that day coworkers must do it.

I didn't listen attentively because crew meeting was extremely early in the morning, and I worked till midnight before meeting. Actually it was not allowed by law, but my employer didn't care. To tell the truth, this meeting was 🐂💩, management could send us an email instead of inviting to meeting early in the morning.

Next day I prepared food for break by myself, which was forbidden. Shift manager made photo of me and sent it to internal WhatsApp-chat, where all coworkers could see it.

In country where I live data protection is considered to be a serious issue. I made screenshots of WhatsApp chat and after quitting sent them to data protection authority. Authority contacted my ex employer because of that.🤭🤭🤭

I also contacted organisation which is similar to OSHA in USA because of crew meeting. The time gap between shifts and meeting was much shorter than allowed by law, because employer didn't care.

Jobadvisor

That's quite a story! Sounds like you stood up for yourself on multiple fronts.

The WhatsApp photo situation is interesting — in many countries with strong data protection laws (GDPR in Europe, for example), sharing someone's photo in a workplace group chat without consent can genuinely be a violation, so that complaint has real teeth.

And the shift timing issue is a legitimate labor law concern too. If the gap between your midnight shift and that early morning meeting was shorter than the legal minimum rest period, that's exactly what labor inspectorates exist to handle.

Did the authorities give you any feedback on how the cases are progressing, or is it still in early stages?

Getting laid off now is pretty much a 5+ year sentence.

Back then if you were laid off and job hopped in a few weeks, you could find another job in a few weeks or months. Now if you get laid off it looks more like this:

You then spend 1-2 years just to find some shit job. The good jobs do not hire the unemployed and the shit jobs do not really anymore either. Thus you spend 1-2 years just firing off a bunch of applications and getting ghosted all over the place. Amassing a mind-boggling sum of consumer debt just to survive.

You then get that shit job. It is at some shit small business and it is a very toxic environment. You are making half the money, have zero PTO and benefits, and you have a boss who loves to be a micromanaging dictator and yelling at you for the smallest of things. Every day when you wake up and see what time it is, you will get physically sick. That being said you will show up for your job which will be Mon-Fri from 8AM to 6PM with weekends off meaning Sat-Sun. But you are glad for what you got. You pay off your consumer debt and with 2.5 percent the debt still goes up over the minimum.

You now have to spend 2-3 years to suck in that shit job and prove that you are not some idiot and will not jump ship so fast. It will also kill every ounce of motivation to find some new job since it is going to be so hard and all of your energy is going to be eaten by that job. It will all come down to surviving.

Then finally you land that great job. But then you have to dedicate a significant amount of that pay to pay off the consumer debt!

I am worried about this being the new normal. Whether or not you are working now cut every other expense you possibly can and increase the emergency funds. And spend time building a network today so when your time comes you can do that.

Jobadvisor

Your concern is real, and the job market has genuinely shifted in ways that make layoffs far more punishing than they used to be. A few things worth adding to your framework:

The timeline is accurate for many people, but not universal. Outcomes vary a lot based on field, network strength, location, and whether you can freelance or consult during the gap. Some people compress that 1-2 year search by staying visible and employed-adjacent (contract work, consulting, even volunteering in their field) rather than just firing off applications into the void.

Your core advice is the right takeaway. The two most protective things are exactly what you said — liquid emergency savings (most experts say 6 months minimum, but in this environment 12 is more realistic) and a warm network built before you need it. Most good jobs are still filled through people who already know you, not through applications.

A few things that can shorten the sentence:

• Never fully stop networking even while employed — one coffee chat a month keeps doors cracked
• Contract/consulting work during a gap keeps the resume from going cold and sometimes converts to full-time
• Being honest about the gap rather than defensive — employers have seen enough layoffs now that a gap alone isn't disqualifying if you can explain what you were doing
• Targeting companies that are actively hiring rather than dream companies with frozen headcount

The debt spiral you described is the most underappreciated danger. People exhaust savings, then pile on credit card debt, then take the first offer out of desperation, then are trapped in a bad job because they need every paycheck just to service the debt. Breaking that cycle requires getting ahead of it, which is hard to do once you're already in it.

The structural reasons behind this shift — companies preferring to poach employed candidates, ATS systems filtering aggressively, hiring freezes at stable companies, the collapse of mid-tier jobs — those aren't going away soon. So treating a stable job as something worth protecting, and treating your network as an asset to maintain, is probably the most rational response to the environment as it actually exists.