Discussion
I wish I was either less stressed by legalese and tax paperwork, or didn't have to deal with as much of it.
It does feel like one of the general malaises of the modern world - at least the bit of it I see - is increasingly complex systems of work that institutions and companies offload as much of the liability and paperwork for onto individuals as possible. At the same time, the paperwork gets very complicated, so it becomes a whole second job scale taskset that drains everyone's functionality.
A lot of countries have systems that make this smoother for people in "normal" situations - someone who works one job in one country without side-work - but fewer and fewer jobs make that a viable way to work. I'd say at this point most people in my field have to move countries as early-career researchers if they want to hold a career together, and more jobs are becoming part-time and the responsibility for that is offloaded onto already struggling people not shouldered by employers.
I dunno. I talk about this stuff on a systemic level but maybe I'm just reflecting my own anxiety and this really isn't a common problem at all.
I mostly just want to be able to do the stuff I'm trained to do and have the time and mental space to do it well. Never mind even wanting less weight of work, I just want the work to be the stuff I'm good at and am being hired to do, not having to spend most of my life and stress levels chasing paper in order to maybe be allowed to do my job.
@JubalBarca It's a tangential point, but I feel the same about accountancy / taxes; Always felt that it would make a lot of sense for there to be a small business current account that just automatically applies company taxes to funds loaded into it, and automatically applies income / NI tax to any funds you transfer to your personal account, and that's it... It'd make life for people running micro businesses who don't want to do cup+ball tricks with accountancy a great deal less stressful.
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Some of this work becomes genuinely purposeless because what people input to it becomes a fiction: the incentives are to say what the paperwork needs you to say until it rapidly divorces from representing reality at all. Other times, the work does have important functions like ensuring people have social security, but the responsibility for that function gets given to the employees or worse, prospective employees who aren't even being paid for the enormous time load of working things out.