fuck this job.com

A book by Alain de Botton. I have not finished the book yet so take this as you may. He covers things like self-esteem. If our potential is greater than our successes, our self esteem will suffer. Simple, I know but it made sense to me, if we are doing a job that is not satisfying, our self-esteem suffers. Advertising too, they have a way to always make us want more. A rich man can never be satisfied (happy)with what ever he gets but a poor man can as long as he is satisfied with what he has. They used an example for CocaCola. Ad's show rich people drinking it and being high class, a poor person will say "hey, I can buy a coke (affordable to them) and I will have a moment of being high class too." Always dangling that carrot.
He goes on about how society changed when people started leaving farms to working for someone else. This created all sorts of stress, who will be manger, who left behind, how long will I have a job, very oppressive. The stress of the fact that promotion and success have little to do with the employess actual performance. There is even a section of quotes On the need to lie and exaggerate. These quotes are all at least 300 years old! This one made me laugh:
"If you are involved in important affairs...., you must always hide your failures and exaggerate your successes. It is a form of swindling, but since your fate more often depends upon the opinion of others rather than on facts, it is a good idea to create the impression that things are going well." Guicciardini (1483-1540)

Anyway, so far the book has been pretty interesting, thought I would pass it on.