Yeah, when I was fifteen, I came to realize parents and teachers alike were willing to pile busywork on me in order to retain the position that I needed to work harder. I just quit right there, which turned into a PTSA crisis.

Curiously, when I got into clerical work, I noticed the exact same methods were used to keep workers feeling inadequate, either to keep them from asking for wage increases and promotions, or as an internal political mechanism to prevent rising competition.

Oh yeah, our capitalist system works on forcing the working class to compete with each other to get a limited number of jobs (and the economy is managed in order to keep jobs scarce), which is a means of allowing companies to underpay their labor and clerical staff. It also allows upper management to abuse their labor pool while keeping them too afraid to lose their jobs to actually report the matters.

So the whole system is designed so that workers will forever be compensated for less than they’re worth. When the communist revolution comes, we really do have nothing to lose but our chains. (And curiously, Marx predicted all these dynamics in Das Kapital )