Chipotle Maxxing

On the day of this historic inauguration, I ramble incoherently about hair nets

So, I’ve been busy being gainfully employed, and everybody (including myself) is now getting hyped on Trump’s flurry of Executive Orders, but before that, the Rightosphere had been abuzz with debates about the relative merits of working fast food. I may have missed my chance to weigh in, but I write about ransacking corporate America and such, so I wanted to throw in my two cents.

Muh Bootstraps

From what I can tell, this rigamarole began with the above dogshit poast by Chris Rufo, suggesting young Rightoids who are having trouble finding a job could go work at Panda Express. There are, of course, all kinds of things wrong with this post, including his uncritical acceptance of the government unemployment figures, without acknowledging the shenanigans the bean counters pull with “workforce participation rates” and so on when they calculate these numbers. For those who are old enough to remember the “Great Recovery” under Obama, they pulled the same shit. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t working now. When the government weatherman tells you it’s sunny outside, but you can look out your window and see that it’s raining, you’re not going to believe the government, you’re going to believe your own eyes.

Also, I don’t know where he is getting his numbers, because, in my area, an Assistant Manager at Panda Express make $20 an hour, which is about $42k a year. And the idea of “working at Chipotle for a few years and working up to store manager” is completely retarded. By definition, there are always more employees at a Chipotle than managers. If everyone tried to go work at Chipotle “for a few years” hoping to become store managers, only one person per store would actually achieve this. And that’s assuming the position even opened up.

So no, Chris Rufo’s solution to youth unemployment is not tenable. However, I gotta say, a lot of the responses to Rufo were giving me strong “r/antiwork” vibes, and the Bootstrap Enjoyer in me was gritting his teeth in disgust. You folks realize you actually do have to work to earn money and purchase food, right? Of course, you should be advocating for your own interests politically, supporting anti-immigration politicians, and so on. But, you also can’t just sit around and wait for Daddy Trump to hand you a high-paying white-collar job. You do actually have to get off your ass and make something happen. The number of people (assumedly young people) claiming that retail jobs were beneath them, or that this was some kind of serfdom is absurd.

Now, if you know me, you know that I feel some kind of way about Corporate America myself. But, I wasn’t always the curmudgeonly old grifter you see before you today. I have, believe it or not, worked very hard at various points in my life. I think a lot of young people today were raised on this hippy bullshit idea of “following your passion,” and platitudes such as “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life!” This is bullshit. The reason you are being paid to work is that nobody is willing to do the task for free. Because it’s not fun. But, we’ve been led to believe that we all have some innate “passion” that, if we simply follow our hearts and do what speaks to us, then, somehow, we will be happy.

In the movie Office Space, there is a scene where the protagonist is trying to convince his friends to help him commit financial crimes against their employer, and he call out the bullshit of the education-industrial complexes focus on “following your passion.” I don’t remember the exact quote and I’m not going to look it up, but essentially, he says: Remember when your high school guidance councilor would ask you that question “What would you do if you had a million dollars” and then whatever your answer was, that was what you should do as a career. Like, if you wanted to fix up old cars then you should be an auto mechanic. Well, that question is bullshit, because if everybody followed that advice, there would be no janitors, because nobody would clean up shit all day if they had a million dollars. Note that $1 million was a lot of money 25 years ago.

But, this whole idea that you should “follow your passion” is bullshit. You should follow the money, and bring your passion with you. This is actually a Mike Rowe-ism, who I know falls firmly in the Bootstrapper camp, but it’s a piece of advice that’s worth considering. I can’t remember what podcast it was on, but Rowe was discussing (as he often does) the many years he spent hosting Dirty Jobs, and he was explaining how many of the people he featured in the show were actually quite wealthy. In particular, there was a guy who owned his own septic cleaning business. For sure, this guy did not grow up dreaming of cleaning out septic tanks. But, at some point, probably in his late teens or early twenties, he saw an opportunity to make some money by working as a septic technician. After a few years, he saved up enough money to buy a truck and start his own business. He did a good job, his business did well, he was able to buy a few more trucks and hire some guys. He still cleans up shit for a living, but he’s also a millionaire. He owns his own home, he was able to provide for a family. The moral of the story was: Don’t follow your passion, but always take it with you.

Now, Rowe has a tendency to fetishize blue-collar work, and I’m not suggesting that you should get a job cleaning septic tanks per se. But, I think the fundamental insight is sound. I had a similar experience on my journey to becoming a software engineer. I was not a “computer guy” growing up, I was not into tech stuff at all. If you had asked people I went to high school with what they thought I would be when I grew up, “dead” probably would have been high on the list, “engineer” would not be on the list at all. I was a skate punk and a degenerate.

Nevertheless, when I left the military I had the wherewithal to utilize the GI Bill and go to college. I still didn’t “know” what I wanted to major in, but I tentatively chose Economics because I wanted to make money and I foolishly believed economists knew about money. This is largely false. But, I was required to take an introductory programming class my freshman year. It was pretty simple stuff, “if” statements, “while” loops, that sort of thing. But, I did notice that many of the other students struggled in this class, whereas I did not. Seeing as how I seemed to have a comparative advantage in this regard, and knowing that engineers make lots of money, I switched majors.

I had literally never written a line of code in my life until I was 24. I was not “passionate” about computers. But, once I chose this particular trajectory, I went all in and became, for many years, quite the try-hard. I read Medium articles about new technologies, and books by Bob Martin. For a year or two I got so far up my own ass about functional programming that I wrote a Python package to properly optimize tail recursion because the base interpreter doesn’t support it. As a result, I’m actually quite a good software engineer, and, while I got burned out on the tech sector in general for a myriad of reasons, my expertise has certainly come in handy when job stacking. Because I can get done in a few hours what might take a less experienced developer a few days, I can sandbag assignments and work multiple jobs without getting bad performance reviews. But, this is because, at one point, I did care about doing a good job and honing my craft.

Which is to say simply that yes, working fast food is beneath me. But, dear hypothetical Zoomer reader, working fast food is not beneath you. I have worked fast food. I worked at McDonalds, I worked at Wendys, I worked at Target (which is not fast food but I count it in the category of “shit-tier wagecuck jobs”). If you need groceries, than you should probably get whatever job you can find. That doesn’t mean you should stop advocating for yourself politically. That doesn’t mean you should stop applying to jobs in your chosen field. But, take whatever opportunities present themselves, you may find yourself five years from now, doing something for a living that you never would have imagined. Hopefully, you won’t still be working retail. But, maybe you will be that one guy Chris Rufo heard about who makes $100k at Chipotle.

But this idea that certain work is “beneath” you is very gay. I got word that Trump just signed an executive order - we are calling people gay again. Anyway, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I guess, Chris Rufo is gay, but so are you. Subscribe to my Substack so I can berate you further.