ISO examples of someone *really* selling out/abandoning morals

[Anonymous]

I'm confused about why this is even an issue - almost any job you can do for an evil corporation you can also do for a nonprofit that fights evil corporations. The interesting thing about nonprofit work is that the most valuable people in any nonprofit are the ones with the typical "corporate sellout" type of degrees and skills - the lawyers, accountants, people with business degrees, fundraisers, and so on. Even nonprofits can't use people without hard skills and useful degrees. Likewise making changes at the government level also requires a useful degree and good skills. There's a reason why a lot of lawmakers are lawyers.

The choice of career path isn't corporate sellout or no corporate sellout - it's usefulness or uselessness and employment or non-employment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lots of condescending suggestions here which have excellent track records of going over well with 14 year olds.

Your daughter is into gardening, sewing, baking, art, and linguistics, all of which can be pursued as careers. But some of these are easier to do, or come with more opportunities, with some advanced education, which requires better grades. Help her understand this instead of trying to convince her that she needs a corporate job and see how she responds.

Also agree with others on mental and emotional health. She’s reading Marx at 14, she’s clearly not dumb.

Is she really reading Marx or is she parroting soundbites about him from Twitter/Instagram/TikTok. If the former I am impressed. If the latter she is like every other faux-intellectual keyboard warrior.

For real? Marxism is trending on TikTok?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here and thank you for the comments! Here is my response that is WAY too long.

1. I will not continue on the route of selling out; you are all right that I should instead say that trying to get good grades and a job doesn't mean you'll be a corporate cog. Or maybe I should just shut up about it.

2. I have definitely tried to explain the idea that this is about closing doors, but I really suck at persuading her.

3. I am amused that my stress about this is coming through. Yes, I am completely stressed out about the bad grades, to the point where my husband has taken over discipline for getting bad grades and homework supervision, which is sort of funny because usually I'm the chill one. So DH is the one having the conversations about grades, taking away the phone, saying no to friend hangouts, etc. I try keep my conversations with DD in the theoretical realm. Although now that I think about it, that's not true because I have my hidden agenda, and she must see through me.

4. DCUM is so good at sniffing out ADHD and anxiety in kids! Yes she has both of those issues, and she is taking meds for both and seeing a therapist, plus she got an IEP about a year ago which has been great. But she has never seemed to be anxious about a career, oddly. When people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up she has always said things like, "The world is going to be so different when I grow up so there is no use in thinking about that now. *shrug*" That or artist. On the other hand, she got really anxious about the possibility of her brother dying and now about things like the Russia-Ukraine war. So I don't think her attitude toward grades and her future comes from a place of anxiety. I think it comes from a misunderstanding of the world.

5. I will never let her have instagram, tiktok, etc. She can do that when she's 18, when I can't stop her. Of course, who knows what she does with her friends' phones and what she watches on youtube on her school laptop, but she is definitely reading about automation, capitalism, the arts and crafts movement, etc in hardcover books and on wikipedia. Perhaps I can give her a book that can round out her understanding.

6. I think she is so cool and I am incredibly proud of her. I love how she is always busy doing interesting things, and we do have a good relationship. I'm just struggling with this issue.

My son has ADHD/ASD. I think your daughter is similar. A lot of her opinions are the autism speaking. These kids can develop a somewhat oddly skewed view of the world because they apply logic and reason where they should be a little more socially and emotionally flexible. The rigid black and white thinking hurts them, and will continue to hurt them in adulthood if they don't train themselves (with your help) to be more self-aware. It's very hard.

There is no magic pill for autism, but please bear this in mind when you formulate responses to her remarks. The goal is to get her to be more mentally flexible and see the world in shades of grey.

[Anonymous]

You can save more physical lives in the world by having a finance job and spending 90% of your income on mosquito nets and premethrin and stave off malaria that infects 2M and kills 600k people a year (mostly children)

[Anonymous]

I agree with your DD and I am an academic. My husband is a public defender. We have no family money but have a lovely upper middle class life.

[Anonymous]

When my kids try this (and they have) I smile and laugh. If they keep pushing it, I remind them “you’re not rich enough to live that lifestyle so you will have to get an education that good enough to afford you choices on how you can live, sell out or not. So do your homework.”

[Anonymous]

Give her a lesson in real life finance.
How much does your house cost? What about rent?
How much does food cost?
How much has your family spent on doctors, therapists, and drugs?
What does it take to navigate a school system if you need an IEP? How much harder is this to do if you have no money and only a high school degree?
How much money do you spend on transportation?
If you, OP, are a SAHM, what would you do if you had no $$ or if your spouse didn't have a job? Or if you didn't receive money from family?
How much does college cost?
How about daycare?
You need to make concrete a lot of the realities of the cost of living. She is a normal 14 year old who has been sheltered from the financial realities of life in DC. Once she realizes that she would probably not have enough money to treat her ADHD or to live in the house that she does or to eat the food that she eats or the clothes that she wears, she might start thinking differently about her education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DD is so lackadaisical in coming up with some sort of life plan because they don't want to be a corporate sellout. I'm trying to explain the difference between doing that in a truly bad way and just having a regular old job for a company that might not be the best thing for humanity. Like the difference between being an attorney for Amazon (not the best for humanity but wouldn't violate my ethics) compared to becoming a doctor who approves claims for United Healthcare and gets a kickback for every claim they deny (not okay with me and I would assume with most people).

Any other examples?

It's all in the eye of the beholder. I could argue the opposite as you, that a lawyer at Amazon might be defending anticompetitive practices that drive up costs and the doctor is keeping people from getting unnecessary surgery that has medical risks and raises insurance premiums for all of us. Nothing is black and white.

[Anonymous]

The option to not be a "corporate sellout" reveals the safety net of a middle class or upper middle class upbringing. People who live paycheck to paycheck, who budget food within pennies, who worry about paying for extra-curriculars, who can't afford ADHD medications or paying therapists out-of-pocket--these people would LOVE to have the financial security of being a corporate "sellout."
Give your daughter a dose of reality. Maybe if she develops some *empathy* for people who are financially struggling in this world she won't see the world in such stark terms.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think you are going about this wrong. How old is DD?

When a young adult says "ugh, I don't want to be a corporate sellout," often what they really mean is that they don't want to do something boring for money. It's not really about principles or ethics. It's about looking at middle aged people who have boring jobs they don't even seem to like that much, but do them because they pay reasonably well and they have kids and a mortgage. That lifestyle (which, by they way, basically describes my life) looks really, really unappealing to a young person who still holds onto a dream of doing something more meaningful than being a working stiff. And I get why (again, my life).

Instead of trying to draw these distinctions between an Amazon lawyer and a corrupt doctor, I would instead have conversations with her about how to navigate the practical need to support yourself and your family financially (and ideally in a stable career) and also the individual drive for meaning and purpose in life. The happiest people I know are those who found a way to marry those two things together.

Even if we just take the two professions you've mentioned so far, lawyer and doctor, you can talk through with her how someone plans a career in these professions to hold onto some of that idealistic drive for meaning.

Do you know how someone winds up as a lawyer at Amazon, sort of not being very proud of themselves but also appreciating the paycheck? They do it by making few choices in law school and afterwards to drive their legal career towards something more meaningful. They took a job with some big law firm and wound up in the employment group for no reason than because they wanted to avoid M&A, and then they hated the law firm life so they looked for in house positions and Amazon's needs matched up with their experience (at a job they didn't even like that much).

If, on the other hand, they'd thoughtfully considered which areas of law they found most interesting and rewarding, focus on finding internships and fellowships in those areas, and then taken a job with a firm (bit or small or midsize) that specialized in that kind of law, they'd be positioned to take a lot of different jobs (in policy, in-house, or at a firm) that actually plays to their interests and feels meaningful to them.

Same with a doctor. You can become a doctor without becoming a claims adjuster for an insurance company. You just need to not sleepwalk through your career.

I don't think coming up with hypotheticals of very morally corrupt professionals is going to make your DD settle on a major or pick a career.

No, for DD it is 100% about principles and ethics. I admire that, but she is young and her understanding of it is immature. She has read a lot of Marx and books about how we are in this late capitalism society and hates the idea of contributing to the system by being part of it. She reads things about abandoning morals for money and seems to assume most jobs are like that and therefore undesirable. She loves gardening, sewing, baking, art, etc., along with more intellectual pursuits of philosophy, linguistics, etc. and is spending all her time on that instead of schoolwork, thus getting crappy grades. I am totally okay with her working the land while she reads books but I hate the idea that she is going to cut off opportunities to work some tolerable but unrewarding corporate job so she can actually have hobbies.

She’s right; you’re wrong. The end!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This probably won’t work, but you can make the argument that by not doing well or applying herself in school she is actually playing right into the hands of capitalists and robber barons. They would love to keep people in their place by using the established system to keep them down, what they don’t want is people rising through their ranks, playing the system to their advantage and then getting into positions of power and authority where they can actually make a difference

+1

Can’t change the system if you’re on the outside.

Your historical education was LACKING. Sorry about that.

[Anonymous]

Drop her off at a non-profit animal rescue or community supported agriculture farm to volunteer

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Give her a lesson in real life finance.
How much does your house cost? What about rent?
How much does food cost?
How much has your family spent on doctors, therapists, and drugs?
What does it take to navigate a school system if you need an IEP? How much harder is this to do if you have no money and only a high school degree?
How much money do you spend on transportation?
If you, OP, are a SAHM, what would you do if you had no $$ or if your spouse didn't have a job? Or if you didn't receive money from family?
How much does college cost?
How about daycare?
You need to make concrete a lot of the realities of the cost of living. She is a normal 14 year old who has been sheltered from the financial realities of life in DC. Once she realizes that she would probably not have enough money to treat her ADHD or to live in the house that she does or to eat the food that she eats or the clothes that she wears, she might start thinking differently about her education.

No no no no no, just have her do manual labor in the hot sun! If she likes it, she's just a legit hippie. If she's not, she's gonna come around to AC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:She can go on vacation to a country where Marx’s ideas are alive and well. Oh wait….
Get her off tiktock for now.

capitalist countries have caused a lot of problems around the world.

I hope they are accurately teaching about the suffering of South Americans at the hands of the American government. The CIA overthrowing socialist democratically elected governments and installing brutal dictators because they feared communism.

The overthrowing of Allende in Chile, a socialist leader elected in a fair election. The US intervened, had Allende overthrown and brutal psychopath Pinochet was put in power by the CIA. Military Dictator Pinochet was responsible for torturing and killing tens of thousands of civilians.

The CIA and our capitalist government took advantage of poor countries for the benefit of the US. So did England, France, Belgium, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain and more.
Britain has museums full of art and jewels plundered from African countries worth hundreds of millions that they still refuse to give back. Shameless.

Right now in America the 50 wealthiest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom half of the country. It’s not sustainable. Communism didn’t work in the Soviet Union because of wide spread corruption with 1% holding all the money. Greed, theft, corruption all lead to unstable government

The collapse of capitalism is not a TikTok thing, it’s in all the reputable news publishers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree with your DD and I am an academic. My husband is a public defender. We have no family money but have a lovely upper middle class life.

Many people do. It’s the crazies who think if your kid doesn’t get all As and doesn’t get a STEM major they’ll be destitute.