Posted on 06/06/2023 9:15:24 AM PDT by MeganC
(Note: This was republished by Zero Hedge and it is not your average blog post)
What Happens When the Competent Opt Out? By this terminal stage, the competent have been driven out, quit or burned out.
What happens with the competent retire, burn out or opt out? It's a question few bother to ask because the base assumption is that there is an essentially limitless pool of competent people who can be tapped or trained to replace those who retire, burn out or opt out, i.e. quit in favor of a lifestyle that doesn't require much in the way of income or stress.
These assumptions are no longer valid. A great many essential services that are tightly bound to other essential services are cracking as the competent decide (or realize) they're done with the rat-race.
The drivers of the Competent Opting Out are obvious yet difficult to quantify. Those retiring, burning out and opting out will deny they're leaving for these reasons because it's not politic to be so honest and direct. They will offer time-honored dodges such as "pursue other opportunities" or "family obligations."
1. The steady increase in workloads, paperwork, compliance and make-work (i.e. work that has nothing to do with the institution's actual purpose and mission) that lead to burnout. There is only so much we can accomplish, and if we're burdened with ever-increasing demands for paperwork, compliance, useless meetings, training sessions, etc., then we no longer have the time or energy to perform our productive work.
I wrote a short book on my experience of Burnout. I believe it is increasingly common in jobs that demand responsibility and accountability yet don't provide the tools and time to fulfill these demands. Once you've burned out, you cannot continue. That option no longer exists.
For others, the meager rewards simply aren't worth the sacrifices required. The theme song playing in the background is the Johnny Paycheck classic Take this job and shove it.
Healthcare workloads, paperwork and compliance are one example of many. Failure to complete all the make-work can have dire consequences, so it becomes necessary to do less "real work" in order to complete all the work that has little or nothing to do with actual patient care. Alternatively, the workload expands to the point that it breaks the competent and they leave.
2. Loss of autonomy, control, belonging, rewards, accomplishment and fairness. Professor Christina Malasch pioneered research on the causes of burnout, which can be summarized as any work environment that reduces autonomy, control, belonging, rewards, accomplishment and fairness. Despite a near-infinite avalanche of corporate happy-talk ("we're all family,"--oh, barf) this describes a great many work environments in the US: in a word, depersonalized. Everyone is a replaceable cog in a great impersonal machine optimized to maximize profits for shareholders.
3. The politicization of the work environment. Let's begin by distinguishing between policies enforcing equal opportunity, pay, standards and accountability, policies required to fulfill the legal promises embedded in the nation's social contract, and politicization, which demands allegiance and declarations of loyalty to political ideologies that have nothing to do with the work being done or the standards of accountability necessary to the operation of the complex institution or enterprise.
The problem with politicization is that it is 1) intrinsically inauthentic and 2) it substitutes the ideologically pure for the competent. Rigid, top-down hierarchies (including not just Communist regimes but corporations and institutions) demand expressions of fealty (the equivalent of loyalty oaths) and compliance to ideological demands (check the right boxes of party indoctrination, "self-criticism," "struggle sessions," etc.).
The correct verbiage and ideological enthusiasm become the basis of advancement rather than accountability to standards of competence. The competent are thus replaced with the politically savvy. Since competence is no longer being selected for, it's replaced by what is being selected for, political compliance.
It doesn't matter what flavor of ideological purity holds sway--conservative, progressive, communist or religious--all fatally erode competence by selecting for ideological compliance. Everyone knows the enthusiasm is inauthentic and only for show, but artifice and inauthenticity are perfectly adequate for the politicization taskmasters.
4. The competent must cover for the incompetent. As the competent tire of the artifice and make-work and quit, the remaining competent must work harder to keep everything glued together. Their commitment to high standards and accountability are their undoing, as the slack-masters and incompetent either don't care ("I'm just here to qualify for my pension") or they've mastered the processes of masking their incompetence, often by blaming the competent or the innocent for their own failings.
This additional workload crushes the remaining competent who then burn out and quit, go on disability or opt out, changing their lifestyle to get by on far less income, work, responsibility and far less exposure to the toxic work environments created by depersonalization, politicization and the elevation of the incompetent.
5. As the competent leadership leaves, the incompetent takes the reins, blind to their own incompetence. It all looked so easy when the competent were at the helm, but reality is a cruel taskmaster, and all the excuses that worked as an underling wear thin once the incompetent are in leadership roles.
By this terminal stage, the competent have been driven out, quit or burned out. There's only slack-masters and incompetent left, and the toxic work environment has been institutionalized, so no competent individual will even bother applying, much less take a job doomed to burnout and failure.
This is why systems are breaking down before our eyes and why the breakdowns will spread with alarming rapidity due the tightly bound structure of complex systems.
> I bailed out when the commies took over at work. <
I was a successful urban public high school teacher. It was tough and challenging work (oh, the stories I could tell you). But it was bearable because the principals and vice-principals were usually tough old guys. They had your back.
Then came the woke administrators. These were folks in their 20s, with very little classroom experience. Yet they felt free to lecture me on how to teach urban youth. And they most definitely didn’t have your back. “What did you do that caused James to throw a chair at you?”
That’s when I bailed.
Beat me to it.
Your pension and 401(k) (TIP) is everything.
My employer matched the 100% of the 1st 3 percent. I saved 8 percent to my 401(k) for 28 years.
I’m actually bringing home more net income now than when I was working. Then there’s another $1600 in SSI.
Good luck to you. It sounds like you too have it all figured out.
Atlas Shrugged
Today's articles included one in which San Francisco's black, female mayor was asking the Biden administration for help with the city's drug problem. San Francisco is a perfect example of the "ongoing" competent opting out phenomenon, and observable in real time.
"San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Monday that President Joe Biden is not doing enough to fight the scourge of fentanyl and needs to do more."
Source: https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4158744/posts
San Francisco's drug problem is growing. Tent-occupying homeless are increasing. More and more businesses are leaving the city, especially in the downtown center. Commercial real estate is in deep trouble, with poor occupancy rates and high debt. And....
London Breed is a Democrat, as are all of the city's supervisors in this consolidated city-county arrangement, and the state government of California has a legislature which is a super-majority of Democrats, under a Democrat governor. So obviously, Biden, a Democrat, is "not doing enough."
See how the game is played? A Democrat supported by Democrats supported further by a super-majority of Democrats asserts that another Democrat is "not doing enough."
So it must be Trump's fault....
Or -- the better explanation -- is that the competent in San Francisco and California, and in city-located businesses have opted out, and more are opting out each day. Tick tock.
So the proper definition of "Democrat" at this point is INCOMPETENT.
The Democrat party?
I retired at age 55 because the liberal idiots I worked for me were so insulting and I had to shut it in so much that it affected my health.
Many of those liberals have been scattered to the winds and I’m doing fine on my hobby farm in Hawaii.
Your story is like my wife's. Except she taught elementary. And the woke administrators she had were minority gals with three names and no experience.
For SSA Make sure that you’ve reached your full retirement age:
The full retirement age is 66 if you were born from 1943 to 1954. The full retirement age increases gradually if you were born from 1955 to 1960 until it reaches 67. For anyone born 1960 or later, full retirement benefits are payable at age 67.
You’ll make a little bit more.
I looked at my health and my hereditary genetic background and determined that taking my SS retirement as early as possible was probably a good idea.
There’s a couple of different schools of thought — one is wait until you’re 72 while the other is you’re stupid if you wait until you’re 72...
Down at the SSA office they pushed the wait until you’re 72 option, which seemed like a red flag to me.
Shirley, all those millions of illiterate third world illegal aliens are going to fill the void and pay taxes to fund the welfare state...
I believe you can request that for your next life.
> “San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Monday that President Joe Biden is not doing enough to fight the scourge of fentanyl and needs to do more.” <
Mayor Breed sure screwed that up. She should have blamed the only Republican in Sacramento or in DC with any power: House Speaker McCarthy. He controls the purse strings, dontcha know?
Yes, I had the same idea.
I worked for the Federal government. We had very good people, average people, and below average people. They were from all races and both sexes. People in higher ranks generally deserved to be there, regardless of race or sex. The only brain drain to industry that I can recall was that of an exceptionally able contract negotiator, who was rewarded for switching teams.
Affirmative action had little impact initially, but it grew over time. White men were passed over. Some Blacks were advanced prematurely.
People will respond eventually. More brain drain to industry. More brain drain to other organizations. More retirements. Reduced ambition. Checking out.
Responses lead to responses. Organizations face cutbacks. Contracting out increases.
Meh, the difference in pay by retiring at 67 vs 62 doesn't pay off until you reach almost 79 years old. Yeah, you get more monthly benefit, but that 5 year wait costs you 16.8 years of your life before you break even vs taking it at 62.
Another favorite is the Concerto of Deliverance.
Those last two months will feel like twenty years
What if the entirety of the replacement generation is incompetent and sucks?
10 more years...if I can make it that long...
and the title wasn’t Who Is John Galt??? damn...
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