In this viral Reddit AITA (Am I The Asshole?) thread a man asks if he’s the asshole for being frustrated that his girlfriend gets paid twice as much as he does and he doesn’t think she deserves her salary. He has also decided that she doesn’t work as hard as he does. Lots of couples make more or less than each other and are perfectly fine with that, myself included. Being jealous and bitter about your significant other’s salary is not a good look. This is the opposite of being a supportive partner. Below is the AITA thread and the many responses telling him he is indeed the asshole. But do you feel different? Who is the asshole here? In my opinion this dude is toxic af:
Source: r/AmItheAsshole
(via: Cheezburger)
Who do you think is the asshole? Let us know in the comments below!
NTA but if it bothers you you’re going to have to break up. She’s on a good thing and it wouldn’t help either of you for her to quit.
You must understand this is the face of the real Wage Gap. She has T&A and lots of social capital and can suck up to any boss and fit in most minority quotas. You are just a male that can be replaced even though you have system critical skills, and unless you can get into the management track will never get her privileged payrank.
Seen a couple of women pull this off, and it was them that pointed out how they worked the system, gaming it for favour, support, and advantage. Me, I’m too honest, which they found cute, if misguided. PS you’ll get plenty of hate from the Sisterhood for bringing it up (c.f. Wage Gap) but that’s reality.
You’re not “too honest”, YTA. And you’re as big an asshole as OP. So, to sum up, STFUYTA2
Just like an incel, to blame his own shortcomings on women. Gross.
i dont have a job (not old enough to work yet lol) so im not necessarily qualified to reply, just here to say it sounds like she has a great job! how do i find one like this? speaking as someone with ADHD and autism, who already burns themselves out almost daily trying to keep up in the school system 🙁
@drae When you first get started, you’ll probably have to work a number of difficult/rotten jobs. That’s just the nature of starting out. Better work opportunities come from time and experience… AND the willingness to switch jobs every few years to continue working your way up. This is important — people who stay in one job for too long are missing out heavily on promotions and improvements in quality of life. Eventually you’ll find a job you love and want to stick with, but for most of your career you need to be focused on improving your skillset and finding new opportunities. This is not our parents’ or grandparents’ generation — you should not spend decades working for the same company, relying on them to promote you.
The next thing to keep in mind is to think of clever ways to do things well. And yes, not all cleverness leads to good results — you’ll need to learn balance so you don’t galaxybrain yourself haha. However, in general when you think through the problems you face at work, there’s often ways to reduce your workload through better problem solving, automation, a rigorous approach, more safe/reliable steps, etc. As you gain experience, you’ll get a better feel for this.
One example: Early in my career, I came into work each morning and ran a bunch of scripts that were written by the guy who worked there before me. The scripts were supposed to process audio recordings of customer service calls, encoding them into a specific format and storing them in the database so they could be summoned up at will by management or others. These scripts were a major improvement over doing this by hand, one file at a time, but they broke super often (requiring extensive manual intervention), and if someone wasn’t in the office that day due to illness then the work didn’t get done (and this caused big problems).
So something I chose to do, even though I was busy, was steal a bit of time here and there to improve the scripts and fix the bugs in them. Eventually I solved the whitespace and pathing issues so the script worked quite reliably in 99.99% of cases. I went further and scheduled the script to run every morning at a specific time, and email me a status report plus any error output, so I could manually investigate those rare errors (and further improve the script).
By the time I’d finished with these improvements, I’d freed up about 4 hours of each day that I used to spend battling problems and investigating missing audio recordings. Now I could use that time to do other things the boss needed, which made him very happy. And I had more time to think about and work on other improvements at the office.
This is what “work smarter not harder” means. Tech jobs, when leveraged right, are experience- & intellect-driven jobs that reward wise decisions and deep experience much more than simply working harder. If someone in such a job is wearing themselves to the bone every day, either they’re doing the job wrong, or it’s just a bad job and they should move on. This is how you have situations like the post above, where one person is working very hard every day and getting paid a lot less than his girlfriend, who has a much more relaxed schedule and better pay. This guy’s girlfriend sounds awesome and I’m envious. Someday I want to find a lady like this.
Despite what some religions will tell you (lol 7 deadly sins), envy and laziness can be powerful virtues when leveraged responsibly. Indeed, I was literally taught the concept of “true laziness” by my college professor. Instead of doing hard work every day, find a way to make it easier so you can be lazy later. Instead of lazily not doing the work (which creates harder work and big problems later), put in the extra work now to make things easier for you later. Leveraging your desire to be lazy is a great way to become a better employee, and lighten your overall load. That, plus changing jobs semi-often to continue working your way up the ladder, is how you work toward a happy career.
I think the big problem the guy in the post above has is his attitude. Both he and his girlfriend have the job they themselves think they deserve. She has a job that values her experience and approach, and she feels she deserves that job. He has a job that works him very hard, and he feels he deserves that job. He looks over at her job and think she’s lazy and unworthy of the pay, and this is WHY he has a worse job. His mindset tells him that people are not allowed to have a better job that asks for less hard work and rewards them more, and thus he hasn’t sought one out.
One of the most insidious phrases out there is “good honest work”. Granted, you DO want good people in your company, and they need to be honest, and they need to be getting the work done. However, “good honest work” is an immensely toxic phrase that tells people to only value hard work, even unnecessarily hard work, and to view smart work as cheating. So if someone comes up with a way to do their job more easily, more safely, more reliably, etc… the “good honest workers” treat them like a villain, because they’ve been culturally taught to do this all their lives. In part this is in response to narcissists, who wield vices as vices. Successful white workers, however, know how to wield vices as virtues. Envy and Ambition can drive you to become better and seek out a better life. Laziness can drive you to solve problems and find a better way. And so on.
This jealous guarding of bad work environments is a big problem, and it’s a mindset you have to abandon if you want to work in good quality (often white collar) jobs that value totally different character traits. The person who is morally opposed to a safer work environment and more sane hours is going to be a problem for everyone else on the team, because they’ll pathologically resist improvements, feedback, better pay for other people, etc. They don’t last long — either they grow out of the mindset, or they drive themselves out of the industry and spend their lives railing against it.
So yea, them’s the breaks. Capitalist jobs come in a lot of flavors, and people aren’t always in a great position to pick and choose. Sometimes they’re stuck working an awful job in an Amazon warehouse that works them to the bone, treats them terribly, and fires them on the first perceived offense. However, when you have the opportunity to work your way up and out of that environment, do take it. Keep changing jobs and keep improving and expanding your skillset. Ditch the mindset that tells you it’s wrong to get paid more to work less, and instead lean into your experience and skills to find a job that treats you well. Don’t worry if you have to scrape by at first — it’s hard starting out.
But do have that goal on the horizon in mind, and keep looking for the next step.