It’s been four months since our Court Jester wrote his highly controversial article about how to begin your career in the emerging field of digital performances. I remember being skeptical and a little taken aback at first. Lie to your boss? My parents and mentors taught me to “say what you mean and mean what you say” and that “a man is his word”. This clashed with his ideas of extracting the most amount of value from your employer. But, after looking past the Russian sarcasm, and swallowing this red pill, I realized there is actually some concrete, useful advice. Over the past 4 months I’ve been doing the work in my life to implement it, and I can say firsthand that he’s telling the truth.

The truth is that while your employer and some higher ups pretend to care about you, they really don’t. If you died it would slightly inconvenience them for about two weeks before they find a new hire to take your place. What they do care about is maximizing your work output, squeezing every last drop of productivity out of you until you go home at the end of the day exhausted with your creative juices depleted. Why shouldn’t you approach the workplace with the same ruthlessness?

The bright side is that you as a worker have a big advantage. Because your employer extracts so much surplus value off of your work, you can get away with a LOT of doing nothing before it makes sense from your employer’s perspective to fire you. In other words, your edge is found in pretending to be less productive than you actually are. Staying just south of average (which is very low in 2023) will allow you to do almost no work while still collecting your paycheck. There’s simply no benefit to being above average in the workplace — hopping from company to company is far more effective at raising your salary than staying at one company and waiting for a raise. Assuming you are intelligent or have experience it should be very easy for you to crank out a day’s worth of work in a few hours.

That covers the economic side of things, but just like GLO mentioned in his article there’s another angle to be aware of: narrative. What you have to realize is that everyone at your job is playing a role that supports their own fantasy and that people can only desire you if you occupy a place in their fantasy. In the case of the person cast in the role of your manager, their fantasy is to see you being a happily productive worker who identifies with the company. For them to view you through their fantasy screen and desire you thus letting you do less actual work, you don’t have to BE productive, just APPEAR productive. You need to develop behaviors that make you seem like you are working hard around the clock. With GLO it’s tough to tell when he’s being satirical and when he’s telling the truth, but I think he’s serious about this part. I know because I’ve done it myself.

I’d also like to touch on something that has really helped me maximize the appearance of productivity without draining my energy: ChatGPT. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last 4 months you’ve definitely heard of it, but you probably haven’t been using it to help you make money, and you have no idea how powerful it can be. With GPT-4 I don’t have to think at all at work. I use the chatbot to save time on everything from writing emails to finding bugs that are assigned to me. This tech has a lot of potential so I recommend that you get used to it now.

The final point I’d like to make is, why has nobody else implemented his advice and written a field report about it? It’s not even that hard. After treating my resume as a creative writing exercise, my LinkedIn inbox was filled with recruiter DMs. I accepted a nice job offer and now work less than 4 hours every day while getting paid around 6 figures. It seems to me like a lot of other people could have gotten a “job” just as I did. My view is that this can be explained with psychoanalysis. Being presented with applicable, contemporary advice and doing nothing reeks of obsessional neurosis — most men are obsessionals, and TRP users are predominantly men, so most TRP users are obsessionals. As such they read his article and they became obsessed with future possibilities — i.e. they didn’t actually implement anything and their symbolic network remained exactly the same. If you aren’t familiar with psychoanalysis, you can learn more here or here, but for now I’ll tell you that obsessionals are the classic beta male postponers.

The same way the beta male avoids asking out his crush at the dance, the obsessional neurotic postpones making radical changes to his life. And if you read his article, considered taking action, but didn’t, you probably need someone to be a little more of a hysteric and less of an obsessive.