Are you happy?

Pardon the admittedly indulgent post, and please feel free to ignore if this topic isn't interesting to you. TL;DR at the bottom. Light TW for self harm.

I work a job that requires me to be online from 9am to midnight Monday through Thursday, 9am to ~nightfall on Fridays, and generally available if anything comes in on the weekend. This is the baseline - there are many nights which go until 3 or 4am, and I have had to pull a few true all-nighters. Most weekends are chill but I have worked 10+ hours in a single weekend day as well.

I am a junior associate meaning I have virtually no control over my workload, and even as more senior colleagues say that they get a bit more control as they progress, they still work as many (if not more) raw hours.

My company is one of the more chill/relaxed in my industry too. There are some substantially similar companies which expect even more all-nighters and constant weekend work. My bosses regularly tell me "don't do this tonight" or "this can wait until Monday" which is not true of every firm around me. They also generally treat me with dignity and respect, and from what I hear I do good work (which I don't believe I do, but that's another story I suppose).

I absolutely loathe this job more than anything in the world. It has brought me more pain than anything I have done before. But ultimately, I am among the most privileged members of society - I earn a good (not great) wage, live in the greatest city in the US (a country with fascistic tendencies but a more or less decent human rights record), work in an industry with lock-step pay raises each year and generous discretionary bonuses, and was born an upper-middle class white male to loving parents in a liberal city. From a global perspective, there is no privilege life has not afforded me.

But I am utterly miserable. I spend most of my waking life doing work I hate in order to make rich people even richer. I get paid OK but in a VHCOL city, so while I save as aggressively as I can, I definitely would need a few decades until I could retire.

No human being should have to go through what I am currently going through, and most humans go through much worse. Most would dream of getting to send emails in an air conditioned skyscraper and order sushi on the company's dollar if they stay past 8pm. I do not mean to be ungrateful for my privileges, but I hope it is understandable that it is psychologically deleterious that every single time my phone lights up I have a mini panic attack that it might be a work email and to have to take my laptop with me to dinners, theaters, dates, and family outings in case I get work.

This cannot be what life is about. This is not a life worth living in my opinion. The only reason I do not commit suicide is because I hold onto hope that I can someday live a better life than this. But I contemplate killing myself every single day, and my life is a constant flow of pain through my intense job, and relief from pain during leisure (i.e., I cannot enjoy leisure for what it is, I only enjoy it as it is a break from pain. There is underlying dread that the pain will return Monday morning).

To me, the singularity is not an answer to all my problems. I am human, I am fallible, and even in times of complete leisure I will still find some level of unhappiness. But it is a potential liberation from the shackles of my desk, which constrict my autonomy and delete years of my life that I could spend living. I do not feel alive while I work. I feel compelled and controlled. If money was no issue I would not send another email for the rest of my life - I have sent 10+ this morning alone.

People get upset that AI might take their job. Why? I do not want my life's purpose to be selling my labor by trading most of my waking hours to engage in actions I don't enjoy to make other people money, and I get my cut of the loot to afford rent and food. I do not understand why so many do view this as their life's purpose. I was told I would get more conservative as I aged and entered the workforce - the complete opposite has occurred. I don't want anyone to ever have to sell their labor in order to live.

My question is: Are you happy? Do you enjoy your current job or whatever it is you do to occupy your time? To what degree do you think a singularity might increase (or decrease) your happiness? Your freedom?

TL;DR: I work a well paying, high stress job which usually requires 80-100 hours of work every week. I hate my life and contemplate suicide daily. The primary source of hope in my life is that a coming singularity might free me (and everyone) from the prison of wage labor. I wonder if you feel similarly?

100% of this post came from my brain. I did not use AI to generate, edit, or read a single word here.