Washedupcynic

I'll go first. My ex cheated on me with a dude, (I'm les, she's bi,) brought home chlamydia and bed bugs, then after 13 years of no contact, texts me randomly to try and pull me into an MLM pyramid scheme.

We truly live in the worst timeline.

Did you have immigration lawyer watch list on your 2025 authoritarianism BINGO card? If so, congrats! But for everyone else, it’s yet another sad slide into federal control to learn that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted what appears to be a covert roster of immigration attorneys buried on its own website.

The list was discovered by attorney Arlene Amarante, who stumbled upon the list while interacting with ICE’s website and found her own name on it. The list has since been pulled from the website, which is usually what agencies do when a documents is totally normal. Now Al Otro Lado, an immigration advocacy group, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to know who created the list, why it existed, and what ICE thought it was doing cataloging attorneys in the first place.

My health insurance premium went up 27% this year. I used to pay $123 a month, starting January I will be paying $169 a month. That $46 a month is coming out of my grocery budget I guess. I've been going to a church every weekend and getting free bread. Most of the food pantries have hours during when I'm working, so that's out. I'm already doing shit like swiping TP and garbage bags from work to so I can purchase less of those things. I'm wearing my clothes indefinitely without washing if they aren't visibly soiled or stinky, and handwashing everything else and hanging it up to dry to save on laundry costs. I Cook everything from scratch at home. I don't own a car, cycle to work daily or take the bus during really bad weather. Outside of a 150 train ride to visit family, I get to take an actual vacation once per decade. I'm sleeping on the floor because my mattress is almost 20 years old and so uncomfortable. Once ever 7 - 10 years I upgrade my PC. I don't have cable or streaming services.

I'm lucky and I know it. I'm so scared for families with children, and people that don't have regular hours at their jobs or decent coverage through their work, and can't afford to self pay premiums via commercial plans. Families that were paying $700-800 a month for insurance are going to see those premiums go up even more. I can't imagine trying to feed an entire family on the pay we get. I'm paying $1300 for a one bedroom, I can't imagine having to rent a 2 or 3 bedroom. I feel like I'm barely hanging on, and I don't have the resources to help anyone else. Where I work there are tons of panhandlers are walking around hitting people up for food or money. 10 years ago, there were 0 panhandlers. The panhandlers are getting aggressive too. I had one put his hands on me when I told him up front I was having a bad day, I didn't want to talk to another human being at all, and I didn't have any $ to give, so save the story.

Stop the world, I want to get off this ride.

There is a kind of harm that leaves no bruises and no headlines.

It happens slowly, politely and with paperwork.

It happens when institutions treat human beings as interchangeable parts, when loyalty is praised but never returned, and when vulnerability is quietly punished.

I grew up learning that love could disappear without explanation. As an adult I discovered that many modern systems operate the same way. Employers speak the language of care, values, and community, but behave according to disposability. When someone becomes inconvenient, injured, burned out, or simply no longer profitable, they are removed. No closure. No accountability. Just silence.

What makes this especially damaging is not job loss alone. It is the erosion of dignity.

Dignity is what allows a person to believe they matter even when they struggle. When systems strip that away repeatedly the damage compounds. People begin to internalize abandonment as identity. They start to believe they are the common denominator. They are not.

We rarely talk about the long-term psychological cost of being discarded by institutions that claim to care. We talk about resilience, grit and personal responsibility. We do not talk about how many people are quietly hollowed out by systems that reward emotional detachment and punish humanity.

This is not a story about only one company or only one bad actor per se. It is instead about a culture that normalizes disposability and then acts surprised when people feel broken by it.

I am writing this because silence protects the system not the people inside it.

If you have ever felt erased rather than fired, managed rather than valued, or replaced rather than understood, you are not alone. And you are not defective.

The problem is not that you needed dignity.

The problem is that the system did not have any to give.

Rant mode engaged. I'm a state pencil pusher. I administer benefits for elected officials, their staff, with regular administrative employees. I'm 100% convinced that as a whole, Americans are functionally illiterate. I will spend 30 minutes to an hour crafting an organized email with TL;DR bullet points at the end to have people call me to ask me a question that said email already answered. Bro/sis, did you even attempt to read the words on the page? It's not an age thing, or an education thing either. It's old people and young people. It's elected officials, people with PhDs, masters, and JDs, along with highschool and college graduates. It's gotten to the point that I will make people pull up the email I sent out to read along while I point out where in the text their questions were already answered. I'm one person doing the work of 3, and god damn I hate doing the same task over and over because people can't be bothered to fucking read.

I work for a government agency. I'm required to give my state agency 35 hours per week, 7 hours a day. I'm salary, so if I work overtime I don't get extra money. I do get 1 hour of vacation for every hour extra I work. The catch to get that OT is you have to have worked 35 hours that week. If you take PTO or call in sick during the week you did ot, you won't accrue that bonus pto

past period I had 14 hours of PTO scheduled. Earlier in the week I did 4 hours of OT over 2 different days to make sure all duties were taken care of because I'm doing the job of 3 people right now. I checked with the payroll people, and they said it was ok to remove/save 4 hours of PTO since I worked 4 OT on different days. Basically, I save 4 PTO hours in exchange for not getting credit time for the OT I did.

Cue my boss. He refused to sign off on my time sheet. According to him, every work day must have 7 hours accounted for, doesn't matter that you have OT time on other days. This was a direct contradiction to what payroll said was ok. FUCK YOU PAUL. I will never work a single minute of OT for you ever again. Shit doesn't get done? I'm all out of fucks. Fire me when I am the only one running shit. End rant.