Probably Sleep Deprived @tragedy-at-its-peak - Tumblr Blog

Younger people, one thing I want you to understand about Millenials is that, overall, our parents taught their daughters to aim for careers and employment, but they didn't teach their sons to keep house. This causes a whole lot of Situations.

sweaterkittensahoy

My brothers are my half-brothers; they spent summers and some holidays with us. I love my brothers.

Their mother picked up after them. They were not required to take plates the kitchen or do the dishes or anything like that.

My mother, who would tell you she is for equality, came home one day, sighed at the mess of dirty dishes scattered about, and said, "Gayle, help me pick up."

"Those aren't my dishes," I said. "I picked up my dishes."

My mother sighed again. "Just help me pick up."

"No," I said again. "I didn't make that fucking mess."

She never approached my brothers and said, "Boys, in this house, you take your dishes to the kitchen." She did not tell our dad, "Hey, tell the boys they need to pick up after themselves."

It was, "Gayle, pick up the dishes."

And when I refused because it was not my fucking mess, I got lectured about being difficult.

See also: My brothers--in a classic dick-move of all siblings--figured out they could pop the lock on the bathroom door and throw it open, and I would freak out because I was in the shower and trying to get five fucking minutes of peace.

Guess who got yelled at for being "unreasonable"? Not the boys. Because a lot of moms of millennial boys still said shit like "boys will be boys" when they should have said "Boys, if you got body-slammed on the concrete, I'm not taking you to the hospital."

gwydionmisha

It was similar for Xers. I spent a lot of time in my 20's teaching romantic partners and friends basic household skills and having to be really hard ass about them carrying their weight.

It is stupid and infuriating and I hate that the "Boy Mom" trend is setting yet another generation up for unfairness and domestic strife.

vaspider

Yep.

rhincodono

One time when I was in high school, my mum came home w/ groceries. She needed help bringing all of them in. Did she ask my brother who was already outside playing basketball? No. Did she ask her husband who was sitting on his ass watching TV in the living room? Nope. She walked past both of them, through the house, and into my room where I was doing homework and yelled at me for not immediately coming out to help her.

I have been told that I am "the last of the millennials" or that I'm a "gen zer" or that I'm "on the cusp" by so many different people that I am 100% convinced this is not a generational problem. It is a societal problem. And millennial parents are not immune to raising their kids this way just bc they're younger than x'ers and boomers. Same goes for gen z'ers and every generation after us so long as misogyny remains the bedrock of society that it is.

rockatanskette

My parents did a lot to teach my brothers to keep house but the one that sticks with me and drives me a little crazy when it runs up against social expectations is that when we were 13+, everyone was on the dinner rotation. We didn’t have to make anything fancy and we didn’t have to do it alone, but once a week, dinner was our responsibility.

When I tell people this, they always, ALWAYS, assume I have sisters. They say shit like “oh I’d love to do that, but I have boys” and when I tell them I only have brothers, “oh you must have eaten a lot of burned dinners then!”

Like, no. To both of those statements. Sure we burned stuff when we were younger but we all learned to cook before 13, that was just the age where it became a scheduled chore. You know who did burn everything? My MOM. My Boomer dad did all the cooking because my mum didn’t want to and he was the one to help when we needed it, though my mum did help with prep/chopping things.

Fast forward to now, middle brother can make the best risotto I’ve ever had and my youngest brother is vegan and makes almost all his own meals because his partner isn’t and he doesn’t expect her to make two meals so he can eat.

The worst part of this social conditioning is how bullshit it is. I know this is not ingrained, I know people are teaching their sons to be assholes, and I look at my middle brother in his immaculate apartment with tasteful decor that he picked out himself and I look at my youngest brother who does all the clothes shopping for him and his partner because she struggles with it and it makes me want to just start biting people.

Men can be better than this, I GREW UP WITH THEM. I SAW IT. The parenting described above is fucking bullshit and it can be unlearned. My mum’s Russian and my dad’s a Boomer and they unlearned it, which means anybody can.

madanimalscientist

Seconding this. All of us got put into the dinner rotation as we got old enough for it. Gender didn't matter - knowing how to feed yourself is a universal thing. My mom is pretty conservative, but she was very clear on that - all of her kids would know how to feed themselves and take turns cooking dinner. But I know it's not as common as it should be - my brother had 3 housemates during college and he was the only one of them who knew any cooking. But the thing is, it totally can be. My siblings are all pretty awesome cooks, but it's because we got started helping young, got taught how to, and then it was made clear that it was expected of all of us to take turns feeding the family, regardless of gender. That was part of being a family.

#sexism #misogyny #the lack of parenting of boys is astounding #you can teach your kids to be better

mardyart

"A dagger, please fetch me a dagger"

#mcr #my chemical romance #saw them last year #have so much fun!

subaru-copilot

im so sorry that you're doomed by the narrative but i really need you to answer my message on Microsoft Teams

#i wish people wrote to me like this #the past year has been fucking he’ll #work stuff #school stuff

macgyvermedical

There's a podcast I listen to and they keep having this guy on who I have quickly come to hate. He is a psychiatrist who wrote a very popular book about reserving psychiatric diagnoses for only the most severely ill individuals.

And like, I'm all for not pathologising the normal human experience. But we live in a world where our standing is just so incredibly precarious. As soon as a brain/mind problem starts impacting your productivity or "normal" you better be able to explain it and show that you are doing something about it or you could lose a job, or friends, or opportunities.

Which usually means a diagnosis at the very least.

So I'm very pro diagnosis if the diagnosis works for you.

Having now been diagnosed with psychiatric conditions (anxiety and schizophrenia) for many years and benefited from those diagnoses and the treatments that came with them, I don't think we're over diagnosing at all. And I don't think people choose diagnosis, counseling, and medication if it's not improving their life. They're pretty inconvenient things.

#mental health

this-is-trans-joy

You can’t call yourself a leftist if you hate children tbh, like you can choose not to have them or be around them, but outright hating the most marginalised group of people in the world who have absolutely no power or control over the most basic parts of their lives and bodies is a dangerous mentality to have and you need to grow the fuck up and get out of your edgy phase and start treating everyone around you like human beings, even the ones that piss you off.

this-is-trans-joy

Like the older I get, the more empathy I have for children. Imagine living on this planet for less than a decade and having to figure out every single thing from scratch, only for the people around you to treat you like a living doll and constantly invalidate your feelings because you haven’t learned how to express them beyond screaming at the top of your lungs, like you’d be having meltdowns in the grocery store as well. The least you can do is offer them some grace, everything is so fucking confusing and scary and overwhelming and they’re not able to communicate that properly and no one around them is explaining shit, and they are constantly at the mercy of whether or not the terrifyingly giant adults around them CHOOSE to be kind like genuinely put yourself in the situation of a child and tell me you wouldn’t also be freaking the fuck out.

The way society treats children is borderline inhumane, and you have the audacity to call them hellspawn crotch-goblins for screaming a little bit too loud or daring to be in the same vicinity as you.

this-is-trans-joy

I do also believe that hating children is a sign of underlying ableism, because most of the justifications of hating children comes down to “they’re annoying” or “they don’t know how to act” or “they’re gross” and if you are unable to treat people who lack social skills, who make loud or repetitive noises, who are incontinent etc. with basic respect and dignity, then what’s the difference between hating children and hating disabled adults that share the traits you find so irritating?

#^this #Kid rights

herpsandbirds

#this is so funny #i love your brain

kaijutegu

rip to my corporate blogging job

Welp. I knew it was coming, but my corporate blogging job is officially over. My agency is... not dead yet, but it's dying. Like, it's on life support. I don't think it's gonna be around at the end of the quarter. It's 1 AM and I should have been in bed an hour ago because I have a big day taking interns into the field tomorrow, but I want to eulogize the end of an era.

At our peak, we really did operate a marketing agency- we had editors with authors beneath them, we had well over 200 clients, and it felt like this was gonna be a sustainable side hustle forever. At our heyday, I was pulling in an average of 600 a week; my best week ever I made about 1300 from what was really just a part time job I did at night.

And it was fun! We had a really vibrant work slack, I had great relationships with my editors, and we posted all kinds of goofy stuff. I had some really great clients in industries I knew nothing about, but that was ok, because I could learn.

And learn I did! I'm not going to outright name my clients but if you've ever been on a major perfume review site or bought any luxuriously-formulated vintage-inspired victory red lipstick or prepped with the experts for your SAT, you may have seen my writing. If you're a gen z fashionista and you've ever wondered why every single article that includes shorts on a very popular fashion website includes a line about how they're comfy and easy to wear, that was me.

I haven't been a freelancer long; I started in early 2022, when I wanted to pick up extra money because I knew I wasn't going to get summer funding. My first client was a fly fishing website. I knew nothing about fly fishing, but there I was, doing gear reviews based on videos he sent me of setting up tents in his backyard and writing about fish ethology. I remember when ChatGPT came out in November of that year and we were all "oh, this thing sucks, it's a flash in the pan, it's not gonna hurt us." And then it just never left.

At first, my firm made it a selling point- human-crafted words for your boutique needs. But then ChatGPT got better and SEO got harder. We tried to pivot. We started an AI branch. (My clients never took the option, they wanted me. My words.)

The problem, of course, became price. I went from around 10 regular clients to 4, to 2. And as of this weekend, it is zero, because my company has simply run out of money to pay the authors because they've had to discount so much to keep our clients.

As of Monday, the one founder left and the guy who bought the company are going to be basically the only writers left- and I know they're not actually paying out by word. They're just changing the parameters of their job descriptions to give themselves more work for no additional pay. This is not sustainable. There are a couple more- three, I think. I'm fairly certain at least one is going to get the same conversation I did, where it was clear that they wanted me to step down without having to say it.

And I did, because this was freelance, always. Easy separation, just walk away. They offered to keep me on for our last high-volume client, but I bowed out because it really isn't worth it to me anymore- it would be 7,200 words a month, if that. At my peak, I was writing around 16,000 a week.

I burned out a few times, but they were always kind about it, always helped get me back on track. I can tell the conversations are breaking their hearts. I'm worried about them, because this was always a side hustle for me- but for some of them, it was real. It was everything.

And I'm fine, I have a real job now that I love and they love what I do, I'm not doing this to survive. And I never actually wanted to be in marketing as a career. It kept employment gaps off my resume and gave me something to chew on when I was struggling with my dissertation and it was never meant to be forever. I was planning on hanging on as long as my three favorite clients were still around.

As far as I know, two stayed with the company- one also dropped today because he couldn't afford to pay a writer anymore. AI isn't just killing us, it's killing his site, too.

Anyways, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. It was a thing I did, I made some nice money off of it that helped me through some otherwise completely unemployed summers, and now it's gone. It was dying anyways, and everybody I was really friends with who worked there was already let go.

The highs of my old job:

Free perfume and makeup

Helping people leave the Jehovah's Witnesses

Learning about fish

Seeing some of my legal clients on billboards, hell yeah I wrote for ambulance chasers.

The lows of my old job:

Writing for a law firm that turned out to be owned by the dad of two high school classmates- that was weird and we weren't sure if it was a conflict of interest or not

Christian entrepreneurs

Subsequently, learning about the woman in LA who recommends that you save money by buying a whole raw chicken on Monday, boiling it for two hours without any seasonings, and eating it and drinking the chicken water to save money- a direct quote from her: "I cannot justify spending 5.75 on a loaf of bread that will just go bad in a couple of days." She insisted that the chicken water was "broth." She gave explicit instruction to throw the bones away.

Later when I looked her up I found out that her husband is the CTO at the Fortune 500 her dad (or at least a guy who looks a hell of a lot like her with her maiden name as his last name) owns. She didn't need to larp as being poor, she just wanted to confess to an audience of... tens, these Christian entrepreneurs dropshippers were not popular, that she drank boiled chicken water every week.

kaijutegu

I got done with offboarding and it's more dire than I thought it was. I thought we were on life support but I think the proverbial plug's been pulled and we're on death watch. What else would you call it when a company goes from about 100 employees to 5 in less than the span of a year (red alert attrition started August-September 2025 and it's now June 2026)?

Because it's down to 5 people. It's 5 right now. The guy who bought the company, his wife, the one remaining founder, and two other writers.

What's far scarier... is that there are 7 clients left. There is always churn in marketing, so even though we said we had "hundreds" of clients what that really meant was had a group that had a lot of churn, a group that would contract with us for a project or two or a set amount of time, and then we had a core group of about 75 who'd signed on and stayed consistently. The last time we talked about that core group, it was before the attrition started, so this would have been back in early 2025.

Of those 75 original long term clients... there are 3.

We lost 96% of our clients and 95% of our staff in less than a year. We'd had attrition before that, we'd lost market space to AI, but it wasn't like this. Before 2025, our pivots were doing well. We leaned into the human-crafted boutique language, we abandoned our traditional SEO and worked on AI-optimization as soon as we realized what was happening to search. This isn't because of the AI models getting better; it's because the way people search the internet has been gutted.

Now it's bots writing material that's published by bots for other bots to read and then give you the bottiest material- or the material that's sponsored- when you search.

I know that industries die, I just never thought I'd get to experience that dying like this. It's horrible to watch because the casualties of this are people. I was one of the people on the freelance team who didn't want to be a writer or work in marketing/advertising. Most of them did want to work in this field, as did all of the editing and infrastructure staff.

It hurts a lot seeing this happen to them.

tragedy-at-its-peak

This reminds me of the audio, I’m not sure where it’s from, where they talk about machines taking over art and the people discussing asking, why aren’t robots and AI taking the jobs in the Amazon workhouse? Why aren’t humans given the opportunity to leave those jobs and CREATE and do things they enjoy and have the robots do the grueling tasks?

I think we should ask ourselves that more and be more angry about it.

#art #writing #fuck ai #ai