this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Sigh ... can you people tell me what is your "idea of life"? Like what do you think a persons' life should look like?
I mean for a moment lets imagine that you're the only one on earth, everyone just disapeared. Your life will be pretty hard do you realize that? It'll be a constant survival, gathering food, clean water, being warm, preparing for weather catastrophes, animal attacks, insects, diseases, etc. You'll be constantly on edge whether you survive to the next day, week, year. The reason you don't have to deal with shit like that is that we have sort of functioning society where everyone takes a part, everyone specializes at something and together we achieve more and make your life super easy.
So with this in mind, back to the original question - how do you imagine your existence? Sitting down on your ass? Travel? How? Having a family? How do you feed them? Do you want them to be in constant survival mode?
Or if you like this then go. Really. Go to the woods and enjoy your life.
Or is this somehow supposed to be criticism of 9-5 office job for some billionaire? If yes then this is laughably shallow view of jobs and a society as a whole. Whith shit like this you literally shit on eneryone who does our society a better place.
4 days of work, 3 days off would be a great start.
I did 3 on 4 off. The 3rd 12hr shift was rough, but otherwise it was pretty great.
Such a rigid view of life man
Here's a crazy idea: decouple work from personal survival. People will work just as much, and live easier.
But it isn't decoupled.
There are people whose work directly enables your survival, and that of everyone else's around you, as well as their own.
Food production, mining, logging, maintenance of infrastructure, just to stay basic.
These people need to be compensated too, and they can't just opt out. Cause if enough of them do, or if the ones who don't are just not performing well enough, everyone is fucked.
This fixation that we don't need to work to live is moronic, just because your job is not essential doesn't mean no job is.
At its most basic level work is about portioning scarcity. You work to be assigned a smaller amount of the hardship pie on your society. Thankfully western society has a very small pie to dole out, comparatively.
Uhh.... I know? I literally just said we need to decouple it. This isn't an argument, dude. This is like me saying "we need to abolish slavery" and you saying "but.. we have slavery".
Okay? No one wants critical work to stop, especially those doing it.
Yep.
This is what I'm talking about. Everyone deservers a good standard of living regardless of the work they do. Stop thinking "work = living". Stop operating under the principle of "no work, no food".
??
This is a needless concern. There will always be people who want to do the "dirty" work. You truly underestimate peoples' ability to find satisfaction in necessary work.
Ha. I have a quote for exactly this sentiment:
― Buckminster Fuller
Excuse me? Truly, honestly, what? Who is saying any job is not essential? Did you really think I was saying "we need to stop working", or that "work is not necessary"? Surely, surely not?? What I'm saying is we need to remove the requirement of work for a good life. Work should enhance your life, not enable it.
No, no it's not. Work is doing stuff that needs to be done. Work is producing and reproducing what is necessary for society. Portioning scarcity? Some say money does that, but even that isn't true; at least, it doesn't do it well. And, depending on the goods, scarcity is barely a concern: housing and food exists far in excess of what we need.
Yikes. Big oof, my dude.
Depends what you're comparing it to. Maybe the poverty stricken third world, but that's a very low standard to have. Compared to what we are capable of, though, with our level of technology and infrastructure, we're doing pretty poorly.
And my point is that you can't make it decoupled any more that you can make breathing decoupled from survival.
What the fuck are you talking about? Where the fuck does food come from in your mind? The fucking aether? Food is a product of people working. Arguably, the most important product that all other products stem from.
Until we figure out full automation that will always be the case, and even with full automation there will be a need of human supervision to an extent.
Sure buddy, that's why the soviet union had work camps, because people were volounteering to move to Siberia to do dirty work.
But jokes aside, that's only demonstrably true if the alternative is not an option.
We have absolutely no idea what the world would look like if people didn't need to work, because some people have always needed to work, namely farmers, and thus everyone else had to work in turn to earn the cost of the farmers' labour.
The reality is that your thesis that "people would still perform backbreaking thankless labour on a scale sufficient for all of society for free" is not only ridiculous on its face, but conveniently unfalsifiable, because until non-people exist to do that, that will literally never happen.
Though we did have times where slaves, people who were not considered people, were forced to perform this necessary labour, and you didn't see a lot of slave owners working the fields for free or otherwise so, again, no dice.
You truly underestimate the amount of labour necessary for the scale of production we need as a society to maintain this standard of living, and given your later comments about hardship I don't assume you want to go back to medieval standards of diet variety and such.
What should be is not a factor, what is is what matters.
Some people's work enables your life. Without their work, you don't eat. Not some amorphous "people don't eat", you. You don't. And neither does everyone else.
Oh, but you are saying that. The fact that you don't understand that is the fundamental issue with your argument.
Tell me, how much food does one person produce if they "go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”?
That's not your problem, though, is it? You get to go back to school, someone else will work so you can faff about studying underwater basket weaving or some other world shatteringly important topic.
And who's gonna fix the roads, so the trucks that move the food can deliver it? Someone else who is not going to school, and instead is inhaling toxic fumes so you, your majesty, can "think about whatever it was [you] were thinking about" which, I am sure, was tremendously important, which is why you are currently developing it into some revolutionary solution to one of mankind's greatest problems.
No, work is using personal energies and resources to do that.
There are people doing this and not using their time sitting with their thumb jammed up their asses, who very often would rather be doing anything else. I know because my father happens to have done sto for 40 fucking years before he got to retire, and he was doing a relatively cushy job in the essential production fields.
These are people whose lives are shortened and made harder by their work even after they retire, and who literally only do it because it's the best value for money they can achieve.
In some cases that is still woefully little, which is an extra level of travesty when it's confronted with some spoiled asshole like you acting like anyone would be or should be doing those jobs for free, no less.
Money is literally a proxy for work, at its most basic.
The fact that 500 years ago the Dutch invented finance to gamble on economies doesn't change this basic point that, for the vast majority of humanity, money is a "work done well enough token" you can exchange for food and comforts.
Heckin chonker pupperino, etc.
I'm sure when everyone works for free you'll see a great deal of work being done in the expensive drudgery of repairing and maintaining infrastructure for this hypothetical ceiling you still have only asserted exists with no evidence.
But, then again, by having a cursory look at your comment history you're an anarchist, so you're no stranger to believing hilariously stupid shit with no evidence.
It's ok, kid. We've all been there, I was an AnCom in highschool, too.
See you in 10-15 years once you work for a living and have figured out why people have to pay for you to do it.
Or not, and not, up to you.
I think you're vastly misunderstanding what I'm saying.
I'm not saying everyone should stop working! I've said that a dozen times now.
Stop. Take a breath. And try again, kid.
Once you realise I didn't say food can pop into existence without work, we can talk.
I'll try and explain it one more time for your feeble mind to understand:
People should not need to find employment to be deemed deserving of basic necessities. They should not be allowed to starve simply because they can't or won't stack shelves or flip burgers. They should be offered basic necessities regardless of their employment.
If you disagree, go ahead and tell me why. But I'm not entertaining your delusions that I'm saying everyone should stop working. Studied have already been done in this area proving it is entirely feasible. Stop fighting your own liberation.
It's not a matter of what you say, it's a matter of the inevitable consequences of the arrangement you propose.
In most western countries, the ones wealthy and well run enough to have such a system, that's already the case. You need to look for employment, strive to be useful to society, not actually succeed.
Yeah, that's not what you've been arguing for, and you know it. Nowhere in your prior post does it mention being unable to work.
You've done nothing but arguing that people should not need to work to live regardless of ability.
But not regardless of their willingness to be employed.
You can't find a job? Cool. If the state comes around and tells you there's roads to tar, you'll tar roads. That would be a fair arrangement.
If there's literally no work left to do for you there shouldn't be a gun to your head, I agree.
However that isn't, wasn't, and likely will never be the case.
No, what you're saying is everyone should have the option not to work (which they already do, if they can afford it) with no drawbacks whatsoever, making work completely optional for the individual, which it de facto isn't for the collective as a whole.
Since, as you already conceded, food does not manifest out of thin air decoupling individual survival from labour, when collective survival is very much not decoupled from labour, creates a tragedy of the commons of catastrophic proporions.
Which means that unless some people decide to work for no reason other than funzies, or worse an understanding that they must take responsibility for no reason other than altruism, a lot of essential work just won't get done.
I know for a fact i'm not getting up at 4-5 AM to tend to a farm and, for that matter, neither will you, mr "think about whatever it was", but if society is not to collapse after this systemic change, someone will, and you are not entitled to their labour any more than your boss in real life is entitled to yours.
Salaries and tying able-bodied people's quality of life to labour are ways to ensure not only that the work that needs doing gets done, they're there to ensure it gets done consistently and to the required scale.
What the baseline quality of life should be is a matter of debate but if live in the west with the possible exceptions of US and maybe the UK, you're absolutely fucking fine at the baseline. I should fucking know, I was there for years.
Work must happen so someone must do the work. Saying no individual person must, doesn't mean someone won't have to at some point, and the reality is that this work needs to be consistent and reliable enough to be essentially taken for granted for society to function (something we've clearly achieved given your worldview), which means it fundamentally can't be done on a volunteer basis.
It's a responsibility that must be dealt with at all times.
So if some people must work, who gets not to, in your world? Who gets to opt out of the must clause?
How do you divide those who must work and those who can just exist?
We used to have that distinction once upon a time, it was called slavery, or indenture, or serfdom.
If you are to be delivered your beets and vodka ration every month, someone has to make them.
If someone makes them they are expending their labour, paying for at least part of your existence.
And you know what?
Not only would it not work.
Not only is that fundamentally parasitic (which makes me realise you're probably not a communist, as those guys are very not in favour of leeches usually).
But, frankly? You don't deserve that.
I'd rather the person making your food get to take an extra day off than you living for free for no reason other than leaving your mother's cunt because, ultimately, it doesn't take all that much not to be a useless sack of shit, and you're not even doing that, in this scenario.
UBI pilot studies are fundamentally flawed because they inject wealth into a specific subset of the population (the people in the test group) instead of absolutely everyone up to and including the primary and secondary sector.
If a handful of farmers happens to slow production down because they are in that one pilot progam, that won't impact worldwide or even nation-wide production, if every farmer, trucker, etc. in the world were to do that at the same time without improving per-hour productivity, there's absolutely no guarantee you wouldn't see food scarcity rise.
As it is now, testing UBI is the same as a few people winning the lottery. Not a valuable test of a systemic change.
Meanwhile every country that has tried giving universal basic necessities without means testing or other counterbalances has failed horrendously unless they were autocracies with command economies, in which cases they were just dystopic hellholes, instead of starving dystopic hellholes.
It's my turn to post a quote this time:
~C. S. Lewis.
You're literally just spouting neoliberal, bourgeois ideology. Try looking through human history sometime. You'll see this way of thinking only emerged a few hundred years ago. People work because they want to, they don't have to be forced.
Good luck in life, though, my naive child. Maybe someone will reward your desire to serve masters :)
I love writing software. I write a fair amount of it, and upload it for free. And my experience is that the best way I've found of turning something you love into something you hate is to tie it to being something you have to do, and do by other people's rules. I only started liking writing code again when I moved into management and didn't have to write code for other people anymore. I was able to go back to doing it for pleasure.
So, yeah. In an ideal world, I'd be free to write and publish software, on my time. When I burned myself out, I'd switch to something else; home projects, setting up selfhost servers, maybe build a table. You can't do that when you're doing it for a living. Fuck if I know how we make that happen; I'm not an economist. And I think it's probably another couple of generations away before we could possibly get to a post-scarcity society - even assuming that we don't extinct ourselves, and that the people who could make it happen actually let it rather than greedily using it to enrich themselves.
Automation, clean energy; I think we're close to having the tech for post scarcity. I do believe this: if we freed people from defacto indentured servitude, they might turn into unproductive fat slobs like on Wall•E. Or they might become artists and artisans ushering in a new Renaissance. But I'm optimistic: we won't know until we try, and not trying because we have a low opinion of our fellow man is just callow.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm at a point in my career where I could move up to management, or I could stay on a pure tech path and start to have limited opportunities for advancement. I've also been feeling less satisfaction for my technical work lately. I've thought about looking around at other jobs, but I've been coming to the conclusion that it would be the same anywhere, because it is ultimately for someone else and most of the time either the goal of the project or the method required to get there don't align with my own goals or interests. From the bottom looking up, there's a lot about management that doesn't excite me either, but I've been wondering if it would free me up a bit to keep hobby work fun.
I'm glad to hear you were able to feel an increase in your passion about coding after moving to management and I'm hoping it can do the same for me. I'm a little weary of becoming just another cog in the system though. I'm just hoping that I can keep my current perspective in focus so I can use that to bring compassion for my reports and keep them from being burned out as long as I can.
It'd be nice to just to screw off and make my own things, but I have bills to pay. None of my hobby project ideas are money producers and even if some of them could be, I don't know that I want to pervert them by making that a goal. I feel like that would suck out the fun of them for me and put me back in the same trap I'm already in.
I feel you, and it's exciting that you're at this point!
My one caution is that you make certain that you like management before stepping into that track. It may not be what you imagine. Things I learned the hard way:
My TL;DR is: before you take the management track, make certain you're either an extrovert, or that you're comfortable in that space. You'll have to act like an extrovert to be successful, and to be of value to your team and your company. Be sure you're willing to have your career consume more of your personal time; on-call and having your manager call you at random times of hours is nothing compared to what a mid-level managent position demands. You may trade having your passion debased for finding yourself doing things you hate all day, nearly every day, for the rest of your career.
Lest you feel as if I'm rowing the biggest bitter boat: I loved the Manager-1. It still felt like being involved in production, and I could easily identify and explain the value I provided. But in most companies, at some point, it's either up or out. If you're doing well, you may be offered a promotion, and it can be hard to resist an offer that's going to bump your salary by 20-50%. And if you're not, well, that raises other issues when the budget shrinks.
this reads like a capitalist propaganda leaflet that falls out of the sky for you to read in the 1940s. what if I told you that you can have a functioning society that isn't predicted on exploitation of labor and doesn't require you to live like a hermit in the forest. you should read some Adam Smith or some shit if you're going to talk about labour division and specialization as if it's a good thing. you can laud it all you want, but Smith is very clear this is a system of masters and labourers where society is built on your masters giving you just enough rent so you can afford to pay another (or even the same) master back while you and the other laborers compete against each other in a labor market while the masters watch. he even warns if you divide too much, you end up with a pile of shit. we're there now. we're a pile of shit. nobody wants to work their meaningless job that was sold to them on this capitalist American dream thought up by a bunch of anglos from 1790.
It does seem like a much better way could exist. So, why doesn't it? Is nearly the whole world just constantly being outsmarted by a few super clever assholes?
not outsmarted because the people on top are complete idiots, but essentially yes. the people on top will always have the power to revolutionize(not in a good way) the instruments of production to suit their needs and the common working people of the world will be the ones living in the consequences of their actions.
Humans are social creatures and people of all strokes in the anti work movement wish to return to a less structured, communal version of labor and survival. Starting on the premise of "you're the last person in earth" is a non-starter. It's coming from the perspective of this toxic individualism that denies people's innate desire for community and connection to others.
I'm generalizing and opinions vary widely but I think this would be a fair summary. Most want to decouple labor from survival. It is inherently coercive to be denied food and shelter on the basis of being unwilling/unable to work. Most want to divide essential labor (farming, housing, transportation, sanitation, etc.) as evenly as possible among a given population to ensure everyone is fed, sheltered and healthy. I'd type more but I'm at work and don't have the time to go into further detail.
Here's more of the "why". As for how, I don't have a handy resource right this second but I'd be happy to talk more when I can. For further reading I'd recommend that you look into degrowth, solar punk, anti-work, anarchism/ libertarian socialism, mutual aid, UBI, and social ecology. They're all pieces of the puzzle
enough said
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That's why ancient civilcations had slaves and we have bots. Yes, we are only half there. But we need to find a way, so the other half has to eat and a place to live until then.
Btw, if not for 2% possessing 90% of world wealth, average work week would be much shorter.
Holy shit did you set some people off with this.
Yeah, people generally don't like bullshit.
Yet primitivist delusions seem to get a full pass around here.
Really? I haven't seen any primitivism. Those guys are truly misguided.