Are you in this meme?

Because people need to eat and, maybe, somewhere to stay when they're not working. Just maybe.

But is it worth it?
- Being homeless, especially now, is worse than a bad job.
- If you're alone, maybe not. If you have a family which depends on you, you likely don't have much choice.

Because:

I didn't really have the energy to job hunt while working 40 hours.
I thought things would get better. I thought I was getting better at dealing with things.
I just kind of fell into doing IT support and didn't have the education, training, connections, or experience to do much else.
I wanted to have more money in savings so I could move out of my parents house.
When I quit the job prior to that, I was unemployed for 6 months and it was one of the lowest points of my life, so I refused to quit again.

I ended up getting fired, spent the better part of 6 years unemployed after that (see point 3), now I work part time in food service so I only occasionally hate my job, I still live with my parents, I try not to hold illusions about #2 anymore, and #1 is still true but with less hours worked.

That's tough man. At least as a food service worker you're contributing a lot to the economy. When I worked in restaurants, I worked a lot harder than I ever have in a corporate job, for far less money

After awhile it's cozy y'know?

The roar of heavy machinery whirring away for 9+ hours a day, pulsing at thousands of RPM, the calm of solving puzzles in the chaos... it's peaceful.

The news folks always ask me how I keep my sanity in all the noise and chaos, and it always makes me laugh. It takes a special kind of crazy to do my job for as long as I have and it shows.

Every day loading and unloading trucks with 60 other forklifts all blasting around on a dock with only 130 doors while going 8mph. It rains, you get wet. It snows, you plow through it. It's 100F outside, it's 110F on the dock and 120F in the trailers. The sun rises, you get to watch it rise over the snowy mountains. The sun sets, you get to watch it over the water.

It's not for everyone, but damn can it be right for the right kinda of people.

What you describe is flow, a desirable state of the balance of energies and requirements.
Unfortunately a lot of people are not able to get into flow because they're overworked.

Because I'm a masochist and I refuse to be forced out by incompetence.

Well I keep quitting and it hasn't been great for me lately.

Time to quit quitting!

because other places aren't hiring at a similar salary and benefits

because other places aren't hiring ~~at a similar salary and benefits~~ just putting out ghost listings to scare their employees into accepting the crap they're dealt
- or even worse than that, I've seen so many listings that are just training AI to eventually do your job. like they have a human there to ask why and try to understand how to perform the job function, but they're teaching both the human and the AI at the same time.
  job market is in a really shitty place in the U.S. right now.

Weirdly yes. I'm considering going back to my previous place of work because somehow, even though it was just differently bad, I miss it.

It was the same when I left the military.

this is no way to live though!

This is printed out and tapped to the wall in my workplace lol