The cost of being alive.
For those of you who don’t already know, I’m a 22 year old professional, finding my way in the working world in England. From the second I completed my exams at High School I was into my first job instantly, no way would my proud mother allow her youngest to wallow after completing 5 gruelling years of High School education, nope I was off to fend for myself.
Before I get to my point, please allow me to give you a little background information on my life. I grew up with primarily one parent. My mother and father separated when I was very young, and my father sadly passed away when I was 10 years old. My mother did a great job raising 3 kids (me being the youngest) and put her life on hold to give us everything we needed and wanted. I always wanted to take the pressure off my mother and provide for myself when I left school so going to work was never a problem, infact it has taught me the value of money, something that I think alot of my friends who still leech money from their parents may never understand, so I’ve learnt important lessons early in life. However I have also learnt just how hard it is to live these days.
Back to the present, I’ve now been working for 6 years full time but I have little to show for it. I “rent” a home, I have no car and cannot drive, I do not have the disposable income to live an active social life and have therefore drifted away from many of the friends I hold dear to me. In England you are taxed for pretty much everything apart from the air you breathe, and it’s becoming intolerable. So in this financial blight I now find myself immersed in, I took it upon myself to find a better paid job. I left my job as Web Operations Co-ordinator at Odeon Cinemas to work for a locally based Computer Hardware retailer, one of the biggest in the UK. They offered me good money and the prospects looked good so I jumped at the chance, but sadly things don’t always work out as you intend them to. The company I began to work for were extremely ill managed and highly unprofessional and terrible under-belly of racial and sexiest hatred was apparent and I simply couldn’t work in that atmosphere and resigned after 3 weeks.
That now leaves me out of work, with shit loads of bills to pay and no one to support me. Fortunately I am reasonably experienced enough to find another job but for the moment I am in the abyss! My point is that it seems we are born to provide the fatcats of our governments with more money. Despite the fact that I’ve worked my ass off for 6 years I have fuck all to show for it, and now I have to break into my savings to survive my hopefully temporary unemployment. The cost of living just went up folks, if you want to live these days you have to pay for it. They say it’s for law enforcement (that you never fucking see), health services (that you’ll never fucking use) but really it’s to line the pockets of those that govern our lives and to fund their wars across the globe.
I want to live, but I’m not sure I can afford to anymore.
2 replies on “Enjoy The Silence 9”
wow.. that was ridiculously powerful man, a very strong, very bold statement, that i think anyone these days can relate to on some level. Excellent article, hang in there though man.
Dude I feel ya on this, I have been in the “real world” far too long. I have been on my own basically since I was 19 and never really found anything that paid the bills all too well. And I know first hand that bein unemployeed and broke sucks! Good luck my man!