Posts Tagged ‘wage stagnation’

📈 The Productivity Scam 📉

Posted: July 19, 2025 in Excess and Algorithms
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How Hustle Culture Masks Wage Stagnation and Serves the System That Exploits Us

“If you just work harder, you’ll make it.”
That’s the lie. That’s the scam.

We’ve been sold a fantasy of upward mobility that depends not on policy, fairness, or collective progress, but on our willingness to self-destruct in the name of ambition. Hustle culture tells us that success is just a matter of willpower. Wake up earlier. Grind longer. Outwork everyone. Sleep less. Want it more.

Meanwhile, corporations rake in record profits. Wages flatline. Healthcare, housing, and higher education become luxury items. But you? You’re still thinking it’s your fault.

Let’s pull back the curtain.

Hustle Culture Is Corporate Propaganda

Productivity influencers. 5AM club bros. “No days off” as a flex.

This isn’t just personal ambition — it’s been industrialized. We’re encouraged to track every breath, stack habits, bullet-journal our burnout, and turn our identities into brands. This isn’t motivation. It’s manipulation.

By reframing overwork as a virtue, the system turns our exhaustion into a badge of honor. You’re not supposed to question why you have to hustle this hard just to survive. You’re just supposed to optimize better.

Productivity Went Up — Wages Did Not

Since 1979, worker productivity in the U.S. has risen by more than 60%. But hourly wages? Up only about 17%. Where did the gains go? Straight into the hands of shareholders, executives, and the asset-owning class.

You’ve probably felt it. Working longer hours just to keep up. Side hustles becoming lifelines. And still, rent rises faster than your paycheck. It’s not laziness. It’s a rigged game.

📊 From 1979 to 2020, U.S. productivity grew 61.8% while hourly pay rose just 17.5%. — Economic Policy Institute

Hustle culture isn’t closing the gap. It’s hiding it.

Burnout Isn’t a Personal Failure

Internalized capitalism teaches us to equate self-worth with output. When we feel overwhelmed, we don’t blame the system — we blame ourselves.

But the exhaustion isn’t a bug. It’s the feature.

We’ve been taught that if we feel burned out, we just need better time management. A better planner. A better morning routine. We keep trying to fix the machine — when the problem is that we’re not machines at all.

“You are not lazy, unmotivated, or stuck. After years of living in survival mode, you are exhausted. There is a difference.” — Nedra Glover Tawwab

The Scam Serves Power

There’s a reason hustle culture has been monetized and weaponized by the very systems profiting off your labor.

Big Tech sells you productivity tools. Influencers push affiliate codes for morning journals and nootropics. Employers glorify “passion” to justify unpaid overtime. Gig apps track your every second. Even rest has been turned into another thing to optimize.

The more exhausted you are, the less likely you are to resist. The scam isn’t just psychological — it’s strategic.

Opting Out Is the First Step

Quiet quitting. Labor strikes. The rise of “lazy girl jobs.” These are signals of something deeper — a refusal to keep feeding a system that only takes.

We don’t need to hustle harder. We need to stop normalizing a world where burnout is inevitable, and survival is treated like success.

Stop optimizing. Start organizing.
The system is broken — not you.

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The productivity scam is working. We hustle, they profit. This isn’t about success. It’s about survival. Visual essay by @anarchyroll ☯️ Wisdom is Resistance 🗞 anarchyjc.com #burnout #hustleculture #productivityscam #visualessay #anarchyroll

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Wage Stagnation is the Silent Killer of #Economic Equality

Posted: July 15, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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by @anarchyroll
7/14/2014

Wages have not kept up with inflation or the consumer price index for over thirty years. That is what is meant when you hear people talk about wage stagnation.

As long as wages remain stagnant compared to how much stuff costs there will never be a fully robust economic recovery.

Wage stagnation is why there is currently an all time record high of income inequality in America.

This is why you don’t need a degree in economics to understand why all debates over economic issues in America are made to seem overly complicated on purpose. Because if people were paid more for their time and effort, they could buy more things. But wouldn’t those things then be more expensive? Yes, but people would be making more money. It would be a cycle, kind of like the cycle our economy is on now but less vicious and soul crushing for the generationally poor.

You’ve heard about class warfare between the 1% of earners who possess more wealth than the other 99% of earners in the country, right? That is the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movements and protests. Why is there such a gap in income equality? Why is there class warfare? Why is there a sentiment that the “game” that is the US economy is rigged and the American Dream is dead? The underlying cause/answer is wage stagnation.

Wage stagnation is not an accident, it has been done very much on purpose for almost half a century. The haves don’t want to pay the have-nots an honest salary for their honest work and have been allowed to get away with it. The 1% could make the choice to pay their workers more. But other than it being the right thing to do, why? After all, paying the masses a living wage would mean less one-percenters could afford private yachts, jets, and islands.

Wage stagnation is tied directly to the rise in consumer debt (people use credit to pay for necessities they don’t have the money to have because they don’t get paid enough), student loan debt (parents and students need to take loans because they don’t get paid enough to pay for college tuition), and mortgage debt (not being paid enough to afford a home). Being able to afford a home is the center piece of the American Dream. To afford property, not simply to achieve financial prosperity as many would have you believe.

Until wage stagnation is addressed and done away with, very little else matters in terms of turning around America’s economy for 99% of the population. To deny this is to deny reality, or be apart of the minority of the population that is benefiting from the system as it is currently constructed. There is no gray area or in between.

A living wage is the only humane solution to this problem. But traditionally, humanity and the American economy don’t always go hand in hand. The fierce resistance to paying a living wage in America is only the most recent example.