These days, life feels a lot like a treadmill. Just when it seems like you might be getting closer to your goals, the treadmill speeds up. Now you’re once again struggling to keep up with bills, rate increases, and costly disasters. It feels like no matter how hard you work, you never actually get anywhere.
Eventually many of us will fall off the treadmill. That can look like burnout. It can look like spiraling into addiction to cope with the futility of working as hard as you can but never getting anywhere. It can look like bankruptcy and homelessness.
Meanwhile, the same billionaires that are actively working to ensure that you can’t make ends meet are now generously offering you the solution: a machine that steals the work of your fellow working poor and regurgitates a shittier free version at the push of a button. And of course, there are multiple tiers of slightly less shitty paid versions available.
This is the increasingly broken system we live under—a system designed to extract as much as possible from us and give as little as possible back. A system designed to keep us too busy trying to survive to do anything to improve our situation.
We’re deluding ourselves if we think that AI will put this treadmill on easy mode for long. In order to survive, we’re going to have to fight back. We’re going to have to refuse to accept that the only way to survive exploitation is to exploit others. We’re going to have to break the treadmill.
If you find this situation as infuriating as I do, here are some things you can do to fight back. Alone, our individual impact is small. Together, we can force the system to change.
Shop Local
The first steps to refusing to play by the rules of this system are easy to take, even if you’re of limited means. Starve the companies that are actively enshittifying our world. Shop local and from small retailers. Whenever possible, buy from small artists or artisans rather than large companies.
Do It Yourself
A large chunk of the money big business extracts from us is in the form of convenience fees. Whether its DoorDash bringing food to your door, Instacart doing you shopping for you, or your dealership insisting you come to them to replace a dead tail light, there are tons of little jobs we’ve gotten used to outsourcing that we could take back to save money and maximize our own independence. It feels great to be able to do your own small repairs and cook your own meals. It’s also vastly cheaper.
In today’s world, “I don’t know how” isn’t a barrier. The internet is an amazing resource, and we all have computers in our pockets. From cooking to changing your car’s oil to household fixes, you can find step-by-step instructions for almost anything online. And if you struggle with telling fact from AI-generated “information,” there are also some great free media literacy materials out there.
Shun Middlemen & Boycott Exploitive Businesses
Does the company or individual you’re buying from have their own website? Buy direct and cut out middlemen like Amazon. Amazon and its ilk provide no added value. Meanwhile, they fix prices and take a hefty cut of every sale made on their platform. They also fund union busting, depress local wages, and use your money to lobby against your interests.
Companies like Walmart and Dollar General are a parasitic drain on society. They fix prices and provide lower quality goods to drain as much profit as possible from shoppers, while simultaneously paying such low wages that their employees are forced to utilize public assistance.
The same goes for convenience services like Door Dash, Uber Eats, and Instacart. These are companies that have opted into every conceivable way to drain you bank account, from hidden fees to secret upcharges to surge and surveillance pricing. By accepting the minor inconvenience of picking up your own takeout and doing your own grocery shopping, you can simultaneously save money and curb the power of these businesses.
Practice Worker Solidarity
First, boycott companies that treat their workers badly. This is one of the reasons I shop at Amazon as little as possible. I haven’t gotten coffee at Starbucks in years, and have discovered some great local coffee spots as a result. It costs very little to refuse to cross a picket line.
Second, one of the smallest yet most revolutionary things you can do is just be decent to customer service people. In a world where companies are always looking for new ways to stiff their employees and make their lives suck, we as customers can fight back by being considerate and courteous. Let’s bring back treating customer service workers like human beings!
Third, tip! In countries where tipping is customary (especially the US), it’s more essential to worker survival than ever. My mother’s rule was simple: if you’re too broke to tip, you’re too broke to eat out. Like it or not, the employer is relying on you to help pay their employees. If you don’t like it, don’t frequent those businesses. If you refuse to tip, you’re not hurting the business– they still get 100% of their cut. You’re just stiffing working class people like yourself. If you want to punish companies that rely on tip income to pay their workers, simply take your business elsewhere.
Support the Right to Repair Movement
If you can afford to, it’s worth it to buy repairable items that are designed to last. As large, monopolistic companies try to lock in customers by making repair manuals and replacement parts illegal to sell or share, it’s more important than ever to support right-to-repair legislation.
Stop Voting Against Your Own Interests
Immigrants aren’t the reason you’re poor. Nor is it that people like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg are being taxed or regulated too much. The reason you’re poor is probably that you were born poor and our current system makes it nearly impossible to climb out of that hole. It’s hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you’re too poor to buy boots.
There will also never be a tax cut big enough to improve your bottom line. Famously, cuts to payroll taxes in recent years simply led to a bigger bill come tax time. You owe about the same amount; it just didn’t come out of your pay in advance. This has led to significant financial stress for many workers. Meanwhile, those actually wealthy enough to benefit from tax cuts will absolutely cut the programs and agencies you rely on.
“But I’m not on food stamps!” Great! Do you hope to get to use the Social Security benefits you’ve been paying into since you started working? Do you want the public infrastructure you use to get to work to be maintained? Do you like getting mail via the USPS, and enjoy how it keeps rates lower at competing carriers like FedEx and UPS? Would you like the EPA to keep your air and water from getting poisoned by companies owned by billionaires who live thousands of miles away? If you answered yes to any of these, then the party currently in power in the United States has been taking a chainsaw to the programs and agencies that make your life livable.
While we’re at it, in the current political climate it might be worth picturing how much it’d cost to have to go out of state or out of country to receive life-saving medical care for yourself or a family member. Or how much it might cost to bury them after restrictive laws cause their death. Maybe don’t vote for the people pushing such restrictions. Instead, support candidates and ballot measures protecting things like medical privacy, the ability to access the full range of healthcare options, and the right to choose.
If any of this is of concern to you, then you can and should be voting like those issues matter. Not for politicians who promise to take a chainsaw to the government, but for those who promise to make it work to benefit all of us– not just the 1% with their unimaginably massive hoards of money. We will never see a better future if we keep voting for people who see us as nothing more than a disposable resource. This country was founded on our labor and is fueled by our taxes. It should not be run almost entirely by and for people who’ve never done an honest days’ work.
Support Policies That Benefit All Of Us
Now that we’ve talked about fighting the parasites, both of the corporate and political varieties, let’s talk about ways to improve all of our quality of life.
- Enact true universal healthcare. End the strangle hold the for-profit system has on our healthcare. The richest nation in the world should not have the poorest patient outcomes or the most medical debt.
- Make the minimum wage a living wage, as it was intended to be. When the minimum wage was initially created, FDR explicitly stated that it was meant to provide a decent living, not a starting point for teenagers.
- Enact universal basic income. Pull people out of poverty and unchain them from the treadmill. Stop the money transfer from the poorest to the richest.
- Tax the rich and make the uber wealthy pay their fair share. It’s obscene that people making billions pay less in tax than people making less than $100k.
The Treadmill Is A Tool Of Torture. Let’s End It!
I hope this post has given you something to think about, and I hope you’ll choose to take steps to improve the world we live in. I’ll leave you with a fun historical fact: early treadmills were a form of physical punishment in British prisons in the 1800s (no, really!) Today, the never-ending struggle to earn money faster than prices increase feels eerily familiar. Don’t you think it’s time we break the treadmill of struggle and poverty?
