The entitled laptop class could never handle a real man’s job like mine (maker of haunted toys)
See what the rest of the country does for a living—if they can handle it!
Growing up, my father emphasized a few things: hard work, sticking to your word, and knowing the value of a dollar. I’ve busted my ass to make a career for myself, doing whatever it takes to get the job done and provide for my family. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired, if you’re sick, if you’re hungry. It doesn’t matter if it’s zero degrees or a hundred. When there’s a job to do, you do it. Period.
So when I hear coddled knowledge workers whining about how hard it is to show up to the office 3 days a week, I have to laugh. I bet I could do one of these “jobs” in my sleep, but the entitled laptop class could never handle a real man’s job like mine (maker of haunted toys).
Oh, are you feeling “anxiety” because your boss said you have to turn your camera on during a Zoom call? Buddy, I’m ankle deep in the mud in a moonlit graveyard, digging up human remains, looking for bones that I can secretly place at the core of a beautiful wooden baseball bat. When you’re taking a mid-day break to “get your steps in,” I’ll be toiling at the lathe, giving a professional finish, making sure no one suspects the bat’s awful secret.
These people are so detached from reality.
Does Mr. Businessman have to get his slides done by EOD? That must be so hard. It must be so much easier to trek through the sands of the Arabian desert, stalking and capturing an ancient and horrible djinn, and entombing it in a child’s dollhouse. It’s probably a walk in the park to get a steaming, rattling dollhouse that keeps hissing things like “One thousand generations of your bloodline will pay for this treachery” through customs. Give me a break.
Real men don’t complain about what kinds of snacks are at the office. Real men couldn’t care less whether something’s “gluten free” or “vegan” or “fair trade.” Real men are too busy scaling a forgotten pass of the Carpathian mountains, desperate to find a depraved crone willing to do a bulk curse on the ten thousand fidget spinners that the real men bought from a wholesaler. Don’t like it? Tough.
The fidget spinners make kids’ fingers fall off.
I guess this is where we’re at as a country though. Average, blue-collar guys like me work 60-70 hours a week in an unlicensed, unpermitted haunted toy workshop down by the wharf, but all the media wants to talk about is the people who have it easiest. There’s a million articles about software engineers who work a couple hours a day in their pajamas, but I’ve never read one about a dedicated father who puts in long days reading faint hieroglyphs off tattered papyrus scrolls, searching for the perfect arcane incantation for his vintage Etch-a-Sketch.
If these whiners think that they have it tough, then they should try a real man’s job. Seriously, let’s swap. I’ll work a couple days in performance marketing from my couch, and one of these “remote workers” can head up to the wilds of Canada to try and find this wendigo I’ve been after. See what the rest of the country does for a living—if they can handle it!
This piece is inspired by Marc Andreessen, who frequently writes about what he calls the “laptop class,” which is made up of people “who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality.” Andreessen is a founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and his net worth is estimated to be $1.8 billion. I’m not well versed in these things, but it’s safe to say his work day involves walking around the venture capital shop floor in overalls, fixing heavy machinery and commiserating with his fellow members of the working class.