Three Worlds

I’ve worked in three different worlds and each one taught me a life lesson.

I first worked at a car wash in a black ghetto. The customers were low lifes who spent every penny of their welfare check upgrading their Cadillac. In black culture a car is a piece of jewelry like a watch or necklace. The mating ritual for wooing a black female is showing off an ugly ostentatious car. The blacks treated me like shit because I was a skinny white guy. Since I wanted to live, I put up with their jive talk bullshit. Sometimes these animals got into fights with each other, which balanced things out. We also had hispanic customers whom didn’t speak English that I much preferred to deal with.

All of the customers were broke losers so the car wash needed to make money in volume. I had to clean 120 cars an hour to keep my job. If I slowed down my boss threatened to fire me. I was always too slow because I had flat feet. At the end of each day my feet were sore to the point that I was bleeding into my socks. But I never got fired because I showed up on time and wasn’t a junkie stoner.

My co-workers were a mix of single moms, dope heads and college drop outs. I was among the latter. Everyone’s goal at the car wash was to be lazier than the next person. The harder you worked the more lazy your coworkers got. The manager was too stupid to understand this correlation so he would reward the most productive people with the worst jobs. This increased productivity for a short time, but then the best workers would quit.

Since the customers, coworkers and managers were all trying to scam each other from their own angle, I saw no reason to improve the place. I learned that you can find freedom in such a place because no one expected anything of you. It was accepted that this was a shit hole that shouldn’t improve. You don’t come here to progress, you come here to give up. The nice thing about a completely illiterate culture is that it can’t fully absorb liberal values. This place was just a thunder dome with the biggest brute reigning supreme.

The second place I worked at was an online marketing firm in silicon valley. I went from working with brutes to working with slick ivy league graduates. The place was fashionably unfashionable. Since silicon valley is supposed to be based on brains, it’s considered hip to dress like a slob. Don’t mistake this for open mindedness though, as guys who wore suits to interviews didn’t get hired. This sounds like a innocuous detail but it actually epitomizes a work environment, which I realized I hated much more than manual labor.

The more open minded a company claims to be, the more dogmatic they usually are. When you interview at a hip tech company the first thing they try doing is making the place look fun. In our case we showed off a ping pong room. This is good for attracting shallow people who can be manipulated by children’s perks. The ideal hire is a soft goofball who can’t shutup or think but is good at entertaining people. Most tech companies don’t have brains, they just have sleek sales people who can convince idiots to like them. It’s more important to be funny than smart.

Silicon valley ran out of ideas a long time. It’s now based on the myth of progress. Everyone looks busy but nothing new is created. It’s important to be aware of this myth because the culture is based around it. Most people in silicon valley associate innovation with making something slightly more complex, slightly stupider, slightly harder to use. As long as something is new and nobody understands it you can pass as intelligent. If you demand simplicity and a reason for change you’re a traitor to their cause. This is perfectly compatible with modern culture, which is based on ego rather than retrospection. In office politics idealism is taken over intelligence. It’s better to be new than good. And it’s sacrilege to go backwards. To be successful in silicon valley you need to buy into this mythological improvement cult. In the office this means letting women run the show, pandering to equality and believing in the fairy tale that the world is only improving.

I now work with a Chinese startup. Chinese are up front about the fact that they worship money. As long as you deliver, they don’t care what you think. They’re unashamedly hyper capitalist. There’s none of this progressive company philosophy that you’re forced to gobble up in silicon valley. Brute force is valued over originality. Speed is pursued over quality. Money means more than ideas.

The formula is brazenly simple. We make stuff cheaper. Since Americans have no loyalty they buy our stuff. In the long run Americans will slit their own wrists by buying our products but they’re too short sighted to see this. Americans have bullied me my whole life so if they need my assistance to commit suicide I’ll gladly help.

If you have nationalist values then working with an international startup won’t be a good fit. I’m not a nationalist so this doesn’t bother me. I see the west as a decadent palace that needs to be plundered. It’s a badge of honor rob it dry. The west is not my community. There may be people in the west whom I value, but the civilization as a whole deserves to be eaten alive. I want to speed this evolution along. There’s many decadent industries in America that are just waiting for vultures like me to pick them apart. Anyone who hates the west should join in this feeding frenzy.

These three jobs reflect three different ways of dealing with the world. You can drop out and be poor. Swallow the blue pill and survive. Or slaughter passive sheep and become rich.

What enabled you to transition from a car wash to a tech start-up? How did you go about getting the job?

I got lucky and met the cofounder through a friend. This requires being in the right place at the right time. Not everyone will be as lucky as me. However there were two things that I had control over that I did right. First I took the risk of quitting my full time job for a non-paid internship that had no guaranteed future. Second I was willing to put up with adversity. I wasn't a college graduate so all of my ivy league coworkers looked down on me. My two female bosses also hated me.