Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2019

Matthew Gates https://notetoservices.com 17m 4,271 #highlights

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

Confessions of the Professions Is Turning 7 Years Old This Year As 2019 Ends And 2020 Begins

Skip my long dialogue and go straight to the Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2019.

This is an entire new decade we are headed into. Will things be the same? Will we change? Must we change? It has been my pleasure running Confessions of the Professions for 7 years and my dream is to keep it going. With every effort, I’ve been able to fund Confessions of the Professions by offering various methods of making this website everything it was meant to be.

If you have not read the latest news, we’ve recently opened up Contributor Accounts, allowing you to now register for your very own account on Confessions of the Professions in which you will be able to keep track of all of the confessions you have submitted and you will also be able to pay a priority fee which gets your article published immediately with ZERO wait time. WYSIWG — what you see is what you get — your own article formatted as you submitted it — we do reserve the right to make it look better if we feel it is not up to standards, but we certainly want you to be able to get your article out as fast as possible without even having to email us or wait for it to be published.

Confessions of the Professions is about people who wish to share their lives in the workplace and outside the workplace. What do you do in your daily day? What do you do everyday when you go to work and you come home? Does your life have meaning? Are you a father? A mother? A husband? A wife? A girlfriend? A boyfriend? A son? A daughter? Are you living your life to the fullest? Are you spending every moment alive being happy or trying? Life is full of mystery and surprises, but we all must acknowledge that in the past 7 years, the world has changed. We are now going through our second President during the Confessions of the Professions existence, the first one being Barack Obama and the second one being Donald Trump. Two names that definitely made it into the history books, whether you like them or not, they are now legacies written in history.

And here we are, Confessions of the Professions survived a second election and will see a third elected President in its existence. I am a real person, just like you, and we make this website what it is. To all of you who email me personally to submit an article, to give me the honor and privelage of hosting and publishing your article on the Internet, in what I hope lasts forever, but… as many websites exist.. and are created each day, many are going expired because the owner may be no more, to pay the bill.

Fortunately, Archive.org is making its way towards archiving somewhat the history of us, human beings, as we moved to a virtual world. Hopefully, we’ve figured out how to share that data with the future so they learn from our mistakes, and evolve beyond the nothingness of our world. The Earth only remembers what we leave behind. How it might be possible to leave a digital copy behind to another, hopefully sentient species who discovers us, to warn them that greed of a species will always end in extinction. How homo sapiens became the ones that survived… well… we’re not surviving anymore if we don’t have an Earth to survive on, as our weather changes, and it has changed rapidly in the past.

I’m not here to give you any spiel on recycling or turning lights off. I’m not here to tell you that you should have less babies, yet something in your genetics tell you that you should bring children into a dying world. I’m also not here to depress you and tell you about the realities of the workplace and the human condition. Confessions of the Professions has been more than just publishing your articles. I’ve been reading them, looking at them, and while many are more focused on detailing the workplace rather than getting more personal, we do publish personal stories of what life is like at your job.

Confessions of the Professions started with just a visitor or two, my mother and girlfriend. It was a hobby, an experiment to understand what makes people go to work and do what they do, while some others, aren’t sure what they want to do and never figure it out, and that’s life. By the publication of this very article, we have published nearly 2,400 confessions.

Who are you? What do you do? Why are you doing that? How much money do you make? Does doing that job and making that money make you happy? Where are you going? Where do you want to be? What do you want to be? What do you hope to accomplish? Who do you want to be with when you get there? Who helped you get there? And many more questions.

As we head into a new decade, an exciting and scary time for humanity, we all still have to go to work. We all still want to do human things, like read our favorite blogs, and try to be as safe as we can as we attempt to work and survive in our world. Some of you are rich, some of you are poor. Some of you work. Some of you don’t. We all have to survive and find our way in the world.

Every year, as I come to write my end-of-the-year article denoted in the Confession Highlights, as I’ve done since our beginning, I am very happy to see so many articles coming our way, and we appreciate everyone sending them. We choose 10 each year, just to highlight some confessions we thought were worth mentioning at the end of the year. Take a look through our previous years:

Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2018

Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2017

Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2016

Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2015

Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2014

Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2013

I wrote a few of my own this year, but have been so busy to get any of mine published, as my policy is: publish everyone before yourself, and while I normally write evergreen material, I realized these contained link-sensitive information. It was an unintended experiment, but an experiment nonetheless. I purposely published the articles without going through them and removing all the dead links. I wanted to publish as is, to show you how busy Confessions of the Professions is and how I certainly do my best to follow my own “guests before myself policy“. However, I took a week to get those articles out, and some links were still working, while others were not.

The message is clear: the Internet only exists until the last one who uses it. Every year, we lose interest in our projects, which are often unfunded, and we let the websites die. We let them go and the idea of that website we created… fades away, perhaps to someone else, who wants to share it or has a similar idea. As far as the articles themselves… it was a nudge to privacy: using web services… without requiring people to sign up. We don’t have much of that anymore, now do we, NSA? CIA? FBI? Facebook? Google? Apple? Amazon? Twitter? LinkedIn? We willingly give these companies our data that they use to analyze us and sell products to us, products they created that they need us to use or consume, so they can stay in business. And that is why you have a job so that you may buy those products or pay for the services that are not free. For those that are free, your information is the price.

Without further ado, these are the Top 10 Confession Highlights of 2019.

1. Is Your Career Your Soulmate?

Joy Smith wrote about your career being your soul mate. Interesting article that can refer to a soul mate that you give a chance, whether it is a woman or a man, or anything in between, or you take your career life so seriously, that you forget about love along the way, and you marry and live with your career, focusing only on your job, that it takes away from your real life. Maybe one led to the other. Falling in love with your lady or falling in love with what you do or your career, are you happy in your life?

Joy writes:

It’s a wonderful notion to believe that if you get this one dream job, everything will work out in your favor; the reality is that everything takes work. It’s important to be honest with yourself and check-in with yourself to see where you’re at in any career. If you want to be married to your career, that’s fantastic, but remember that you can always change your mind.

The same advice can be applied to anyone in your life or anything you are doing. It might seem like it is a dream job, it might seem like it is the one, and without it, you have no reason for living or going on, but you always do. You keep going. You’ll find your path in life. We all do eventually, at least find something to live for or some meaning in life, even if we don’t realize it.

2. Starting A New Career

When you are younger, it is not that hard to switch jobs at all. It is as simple as putting in your two weeks, usually, if you’re being generous and going by the book. Within the month, you can have another job doing whatever you want to do. Of course, when you’re in your twenties, chances are, you are just starting out. Maybe you are working in retail or fast food, and with nearly a dozen options to choose from, you can have multiple jobs without issue.

The case for switching your career, however, can prove slightly more difficult, especially if you’re wanting to switch to a career that has nothing to do with what you have been doing for the past decade. Now you are in your thirties. You went to college, studied what you need to know, and got a great job, and it happens to be one of the longest jobs you have ever held. You have held it for so long that you think of it as your career because you don’t mind doing it and it makes money. It might not be your dream job or what you would have ever dreamed of as being your career, but you have made it work for so long.

Now you’re ready to move on. Ready for a change. Ready to go back into the world of the unknown, possibly not even liking it, and you need to know what to do. With Lizzie’s help, you might just discover that leaving your career and starting a new career is going to be okay. After all, millions of people do it everyday. They leave and start fresh. Some are voluntarily doing it while others are forced to do it. Whatever the case, this article will prepare you for starting a new career.

3. Jobs That Rarely Fire You For Doing A Bad Job

I received a package in the mail from my father, who lives across the United States. This is how the package arrived. It made me think about presentation: where in the workplace is this acceptable? Would you give your boss a package like this? There are plenty of jobs that take what you do very seriously, base their metrics on job performance, or may even give you a quarterly review or yearly review on how well you are doing your job which can lead to you keeping your job, getting a raise, or getting fired.

So I got to thinking: just how many jobs out there rarely fire you for doing a bad job at your job? Believe it or not, there are plenty and they even include the United States government positions as well as fast food restaurant positions. There are things you can do and really mess up, and no one cares. Once you hit a certain point in your career, it is like you’re in for life, and you can be bad at your job without worrying about getting fired.

4. Jobs That Take The Most Out Of You

There are some jobs out there that are amazingly great for you and pay very well. There are also plenty of low-stress jobs that also may pay well, or may not pay well at all, but it’s a job and it pays money. And then, there are those jobs that many people take that go beyond the workplace and take their emotional toll on human health. There are some jobs where you can leave work and that should be the end of your day, while there are many other jobs in which the job is truly a part of your life, causing nightmares and stress that can tear a family apart.

Regardless, these jobs need people to fill the positions and there are plenty of willing people who may or may not understand the emotional effects on the mind and the body. Some of these jobs include dealing with traumatizing things that no one should ever see, including injuries and death. While some of these jobs certainly compensate people for it, there are many others that do not, and pay them very little, and fail to even regards doing anything for their emotional well-being.

5. The Price Of Free: You Are The Product

With mostly everything that is free, it comes at a great cost. Unfortunately, most people love when they receive things for free and are happy to voluntarily give information about themselves away to others in exchange for using that free product. Unfortunately, with the amount of data that is being collected about you, on Amazon, Facebook, and Google, it is enough to literally put together an AI profile that could possibly put into a robot to imitate you. While this information is often sold in bits and pieces to advertisement companies, the fact is: they sell your information to companies and make a profit on your personality and your likes.

When it comes to free: nothing is truly free. In exchange for free, you give up personal information and privacy. You give up everything about you to corporations that profit on your ignorance. Remember: when you pay a company to use their product, there is more of a reason to keep your information private, while free allows companies to profitize any and all data about you.

6. Why Not Asking Your Crush Out Will Ruin Your Life

As the years go by and I have come to realize that the last 10 years of my life has been spent in an office, it is sometimes a blessing and a curse to develop a crush anywhere, but especially in the office. After all, you work with her or him, and you see them almost everyday. Their personality seems interesting and they look good enough for you to feel sexually aroused by their presence, and you’d like to get to know them more.

Problem is, you work with them, and you don’t want things to get weird between you two because you still have to work together. The solution, however, is quite easy: just ask them out. If they say yes, great, but if not, it’s completely alright: just tell them you have no hard feelings and while you took the risk you want to keep your relationship professional and not treat it like a weird thing. After all, someone had to ask. Someone had to respond. And then both had to react.

Life is too short not to try and find love. Life is way too short not to be having sex with someone you like and love. So get to asking your crush out. Even if it hurts your heart: the alternative is to always wonder what could’ve been, what would’ve happened, what if… remove those questions from your life, and it will lead to a happy life no matter what, even if the pain is there. A response is way better than going through the rest of your life without knowing.

7. The Worst Times To Poop

If you are human, there has been more than one time in your life, where you had to poop at the wrong time. Whether you were in an airplane as it was landing, came into a meeting at work that just started, or literally sat down to take a test, for which the teacher wrote, “No bathroom use during test taking”, and you couldn’t help yourself. There are just times when your body decides that you have to poop, and nothing is going to stop it.

Most of the time, you know when to have your bowel movements and it often occurs at night or in the morning, before or after work. If you’re lucky, it’s during work so you can poop on company time and get paid for it. For many of us, we often make it to the bathroom with no issues, but for others, we often miss the mark and poop our pants. Unfortunately, whether you are in the workplace or at home, the asshole calls the shots.

8. Science Of Attraction: How To Source And Retain Top Talent In STEM

Chances are, if you have a degree from a university, it’s likely not in STEM. Most people opt for Liberal Arts, Social Work, or a business degree. While the article focuses on the UK falling short of having enough graduates in STEM education, the truth is that most of the world does not have as many people studying the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Sure, there are people who have those degrees, but when the scales are tipping where not as many people have a STEM degree, it is a problem for the human race. It is even worse for the female gender, who hold far less than males in the STEM fields. If you want to change the world, study something within STEM. If you are female, rise above and seek out the opportunities that start in your mind, are taught in the classroom, and ultimately become your life and career.

9. Coping With Exam Stress And Anxiety

It seems that once you hit the 4th grade, your life starts to fill up with things to do and while we handle tasks way better as kids, usually, it can be very overwhelming as an adult, especially in the workplace. Stress and burnout are common place with anxiety as a rising factor for most human adults. It may be the work itself, the customers, or management that bring about the cause for this overwhelming stress and anxiety.  The issue certainly starts with what is causing it, but more importantly, it is necessary to understand how to manage it, deal with it, and work to reduce it.

If you wish to reduce your stress and anxiety, before you even go to a doctor or a therapist, you may want to first understand what is causing the stress and anxiety, and what you can do to try and eliminate it at the source. If this is not possible, it may be ideal to look into meditation and more natural means. As a last resort, you may want to consult your doctor or therapist for further suggestions, which may include medication.

10. Realizing My Self-Worth While Working Retail

About 12 years ago, I left the world of retail to work in education, and then I moved on to software engineering, followed by web design and web development, where I sat in a cubicle in an office for over a decade. For a brief stint, I was had some extra credit card debt on my hands and needed to get a second part-time job around Christmas time. Target was hiring for seasonal, so I figured I’d apply. I did get the job, only to learn how much of a nightmare it really was, and hated it. After 12 years of not working in retail, Target reminded me why I left, why I choose jobs that require more skill and pay far more, as well as companies that treat their employees with more respect and offer a great deal of benefits.

Working at Target made me have some sympathy for all employees who were working there, but especially the manager who was hellbent on firing me and ensuring I was miserable everyday. While he seemed like he started working there as a teenager and never left, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that while he gave this company nearly 20 years of his life, I was probably making double his salary and only took the job to make enough money to buy some Christmas gifts for the family, and it was an experience, while my regular salary was paying my other bills. Before I left, I thanked him for his time working with me, and mentioned that he was the reason why I didn’t care to work in retail anymore.

Special thanks to Target for being a shitty company and reminding me of why retail sucks balls. While I never really shopped at your store anyway, I came to realize that while I was destroying my back and killing my legs and feet for you by unloading two trucks during Thanksgiving and Christmas time, your products are exactly the same as Walmart. Literally. Different sticker slapped on to it while you order from the same factory in China that Walmart orders from. Fortunately, Walmart has better prices than you do, and while I haven’t bothered to apply at Walmart, if I had to choose any store to shop at, Target will never be one of them. Maybe you should’ve treated me better when I worked as a seasonal worker for your company. Your management is shitty and you suck.

I’ll keep holding the grudge… you cared about me as much as I tried to give a shit about you. And for that brief two months, I tried to give your company my best, but you had a shitty manager who told me to quit my job while your shelves remained empty.  Good luck #2813! I don’t give a fuck about your corporation anymore. I hope Walmart and Amazon beat you. Thanks for making me hate retail again! That was all the inspiration I needed know why I want to work for myself instead of being your corporate bitch.

We had 262 confessions that went out in 2019. We published five days a week on Monday through Friday at 10 AM EST. These are just some of the Top Highlighted Confessions of 2019. We do wish we had time to write about more, as there were so many great ones. We do love to keep our articles interesting. As I wrote – some of these articles are a bit biased because I did choose some I wrote, but I do choose them at random, based on the headline and the details of the content. Longer more detailed articles tend to be picked, and for the most part, I write very detailed articles, as you can see from this one.

Total words currently published on Confessions of the Professions: 1,910,348 (796 average words)

This year, we also tracked total times the website has been accessed, either by means of a visitor landing on an article to read or a bot, such as Googlebot indexing the site. Any time the website registered a hit, it was logged, and here are the results:

Total hits to the Confessions of the Professions website in 2019 were 73,142,492.

2019 Facts for Confessions of the Professions:

• Over 2,400 confessions published
• Top visiting countries:
  • United States (2,000,000)
  • China (210,000)
  • Germany (60,000)
  • Russia (60,000)
  • Romania (40,000)
  • India (40,000)
  • United Kingdom (30,000)
  • Ukraine (30,000)
  • Canada (20,000)
• Top Keywords:
  • happy ending by licensed massage
  • customer demand
  • password wordpress generator
  • handbag making process
  • cnn money tech 30
• Top referrers:
  • Google 40%
  • Other 60%
• Backlinks:
  • 809 total
  • 270 unique
  • 371 linking to homepage
• Indexed Pages
  • 2,770 by Google
  • 14,000 by Bing
• Over 2,000,000 browser requests per month
  • 1,600,000 uncached
  • 400,000 cached
• Over 600,000 pageviews per month
• Over 35,000 unique visitors per month
• Over 70 GB bandwidth used per month for content only
  • 35 GB uncached
  • 35 GB cached
• About 300 GB of bandwidth for images per month
  
• About 100 GB per month downloaded in images
• About 400 GB per month for total bandwidth (content, images, css and javascript)
• Over 2,000 images uploaded
• 200 GB in images including infographics
• Over 50,000 search engine crawls per month
• 49% of visits use HTTP/1.1
• 50% of visits use HTTP/2
• 1% of visits use HTTP/3
• Alexa Rank: 942,252
• Alexa Reach: 894,499
• Alexa Most Popular Country: India
• Alexa Most Popular Country Rank: 139,893
• Average Page Load Time: 1.0 to 2.0 seconds
• Majority of traffic is now served over secured connection of TLS 1.3
  • 60% TLS 1.3
  • 35% TLS 1.2
  • 2% TLS 1.1
  • 3% non-secure connection
• Average of 11 emails received per day
• Averate time spent on site: 3 minutes
• 50 contributor accounts created in December 2019

We hope you enjoyed the Top 10 Confessions Highlights of 2019 and we look forward to publishing many more of your confessions in 2020! Have a great New Year! Many blessings to you! May it be filled with luck and happiness and all that you deserve!

Happy New Year! 2020!

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