Job title: lifetime luxury prisoner / resident of Switzerland
Location: anywhere inside Switzerland (any canton. Choose your preferred trap)Contract type: lifetime, no escape clause (except emigration)
Salary: extremely high in gross, but eaten alive by costs
Do you enjoy being buried under absurd bills, watching scenic vistas while your wallet cries, and navigating a societal clockwork so rigid it makes your spine stiff? If so, Switzerland is your dream job destination.
Job Description
Apply now to become a resident of Switzerland, one of the most picturesque, over-regulated countries on earth. Among your many duties you will have to:
- Pay through the nose for housing, groceries, services (Switzerland is consistently ranked among the most expensive places in the world).
- Fight for a roof: housing availability is scarce, and decent apartments often come with waiting lists and impossible prices.
- Surrender to bureaucratic labyrinths: permit renewals, residency applications, canton-level weirdness, and health insurance complexities (which change annually).
- Accept that health insurance is mandatory (not free), gets more expensive each year, and forces you to shop every year.
- Live in architectural monotony: new developments in cities look bland, glass-box, repetitive. The charm of old Swiss towns is getting swamped by uniform concrete expansions.
- Experience social isolation: locals are private and reserved, making friendships hard.
- Deal with discrimination or xenophobia (especially if you’re not European or foreign-born). Full integration is out of reach.
- Witness inequality: though Switzerland is wealthy, a non negligible share of people fall into relative poverty or “working poor” status.
- Pay high taxes. Forget the myth. Yes, a handful of billionaires get sweetheart deals, but regular people cough up serious income tax, plus eye watering VAT, wealth taxes, and compulsory insurances that function like extra hidden taxes.
- Fines, fines, fines. Everything is fined. Forget speeding, you’ll get fined for parking 2 minutes over, throwing glass in the wrong bin, or putting your recycling out on the wrong day. Welcome to the land where your wallet is always guilty until proven innocent.
- Parking Gestapo. Police (or zealous “wardens”) literally mark your tires with chalk and sneak back to see if you dared exceed the sacred parking time. Congratulations, you’re a grown adult treated like a 6 year old who can’t manage recess.
- Water police lifestyle. Enjoy the bliss of being fined for showering after 21:30 or flushing your toilet at night in some apartments. Noise ordinances and “quiet hours” are enforced like commandments.
- Public “order” obsession. Hanging laundry on your balcony the “wrong way,” or mowing the lawn at the wrong hour? Neighbors will report you. Privacy is sacred, but tattling is a national sport.
- The surveillance vibe. Cameras, rules, and an invisible lattice of control: people may smile at you, but don’t be fooled, they’ll drop a complaint slip faster than you can say Grüezi.
- Sterile social life. You might be surrounded by people, yet feel like you’re in a museum: quiet, stiff, nobody touches anything. Try cracking a joke in public; you’ll get looks like you just yelled fire in a cathedral.
- Cultural monotony. Beyond fondue and yodeling caricatures, don’t expect much spontaneity. It’s a country where even spontaneity is scheduled in advance.
- Nature as prison wallpaper. Yes, the Alps are majestic, but when daily life feels like a bureaucratic stranglehold, the mountain view becomes more like a guilt trip, reminding you how much freedom you don’t have.
- Obsess over punctuality (being 5 minutes late can get you socially ostracized)
- Learn multiple languages (so you can argue with neighbors in German, French, or Italian)
- Smile politely while your bank account bleeds
- A robust bank account.
- Patience comparable to a saint’s.
- Willingness to treat your neighbors as rival compliance officers.
- An ability to fake serenity while living in a pressure cooker of rules.
- Punctual trains and reliable infrastructure.
- Clean cities, safe streets.
- Stunning landscapes (mountains, lakes) you’ll stare at while plotting your escape.
- Political stability and low violent crime.
If selected, you’ll wake every day in a country that looks like a Swiss watch: precise, immaculate, controlled.
Switzerland: where everything is forbidden, except that which is mandatory.
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