It is unfortunate that this anti-work rhetoric often comes off as outrageous, when in reality it isn't. I don't know if the people doing it are intentionally trying to be controversial, or if they just are not good at communicating.
When we complain about work, this doesn't mean that we are asking for a world where we lounge all day at home, and expect that food, shelter and entertainment are magically delivered to us without any regard to how it happens. No, anti-work is not about a blind sense of entitlement. But that is how a lot of these posts come off as, even if their authors don't intend it.
Anti-work is a recognition that the working class works way too damn much; so much more than we need to to have a functioning society with everyone living happily and having their needs met. There's so much inefficiency in capitalism, with aims to drive more capital to the wealthy, and working around other stupidities of capitalism (check out the book "Bullshit jobs" for examples). The ruling class holds hostage the world's resources, and requires you to give them a large portion of your life to get even the minimum needed to sustain your living. Now that is outrageous.
When I say I'm tired of working for a living I don't mean that I don't want to work, I meant that I don't want to work for other people doing something I don't care about so someone I don't care about can better achieve something I don't care about just so they pay me money for it. I'm happy to work when that goes directly goes toward my own well-being and that of my family and local community. I just get so tired of doing work that I have no personal investment in beyond "it makes me money so I can then give that money to other people."
So I play Rimworld and dream of what it would be like to have a role in a small community where everyone does their part for the direct benefit of the community and it isn't all just about money.
Pretty sure in the old days, when there were fewer people, you could just fuck off into the forest and build yourself a cottage. If your feudal lord found out you’d be in trouble, but they didn’t have satellites or whatnot to track you down.
We have this weird unwritten assumption that the cost of technological advancement (esp medical) was our own domestication. That we sacrificed freedom and privacy for health and safety. I wonder if that’s really the case, or if it’s some bullshit post hoc justification
I don't think I'm entitled to someone else's labor, no. I would like fair compensation for mine is all.
It made sense when working meant providing for families, and even in the industrial revolution where it meant making mass goods for large amounts of people to enjoy.
But what happens when we get the ability to produce more than we need with only a relatively small amount of humans to do it? If we have the resources where we can easily give everyone on the planet a cell phone, why not do it?
We are already there with some goods: for example, we currently produce enough food to feed 1.5x the world’s population. We may very well reach a point in the next 20-30 years where we can produce everything market wants with 50% or perhaps even 25% of adult humans actually working. Our solution so far is creating artificial scarcity, but that’s only going to patch the system for so long.
Already we’re eschewing traditional factory jobs for service industry jobs like meal delivery. But we’re not far off from autonomous delivery vehicles automating that away, too. With the rise of AI, we can expect a lot more jobs to be augmented or superseded by automation over time.
Capitalism rests on the premises that we can always produce more and that people’s value is tied to their labor. But in a post-scarcity, heavily automated world, these premises break down, and suddenly this system doesn’t really work anymore.
Short of a communist revolution, I think we are going to need to start trialing measures that divorce benefits from labor. Most of the world already has healthcare coverage separated from labor (USA is the glaring exception,) and the next step would likely be universal basic income.
Actually, that one's on me guys, sorry. I just said we were all okay with it and honestly thought you'd all be fine with it...? Anyway, my bad.
For the literal sense, yes, I do remember consenting work for livelihood. Now, that work actually is being made into servitude, I don't remember. Livable work is really scarce, servitude and selling-out isn't.
It's the way of the world. To eat, to live, work must be done. The most fair is way to divide up the work which must be done is by capacity. The fruits of those labors should be distributed first according to need, second according to whomever produced them.
This is not how things are done now, of course. Now, the neediest work hardest, and the fruits of that labor flow to those who have the least need.
The premise here is kinda blurred, but I think it does exist and goes something like that:
If you want to live and benefit from a society you must contribute to it
Is it wrong? Is it right? I think the anwser lies somewhere in between.
However one that is not established and I think it should be written down is one that my pops used to say:
Do not live to work, and if you love your job and enjoy it there more than anywhere in the world than you are already living, but even so do it with moderation else it will destroy you or turn something you love back to work.
Why the FUCK do you think you're entitled to get the free labor of bakeries working hard to make bread, farmers farming to create food, and people building technology to make your life easier?
No, you don't have to work. Go live in the forest and farm your own food. Maybe then when a lion attacks you you'll realize the value of modern civilization.
0Nobody wants to toil. The profits funnel directly to owner pockets who do next to nothing to operate the company.
I think the alternative is living out in the wild, fending for yourself. As much as I hate the inequality and mediocrity of modern life, it’s something of a step up from living like that. I love watching Primitive Technology, but I probably couldn’t handle that life. Imagine spending hours collecting fire wood, spending hours/days turning it into charcoal and building a clay oven just to fire up some shit you picked up from the river in hopes of getting a few globules of iron, to make like a small shank or a spear tip or something (after maybe weeks of effort). Oh, and you’re having to get your own food and maybe bathe yourself every so often. Super interesting to watch, but holy shit is that alot of work for so little (compared to what we’re used to seeing). Life is work.
Things cost money.
No. I was born. I went through elementary school, middle school (junior high for my Midwestern peeps) and high school and then being like 'well, shit. I guess i have t work now."
Human nature, regardless of political systems, dictates that one and their family must provide trade-worthy value to receive trade-worthy value. There are plenty of exceptions to that thanks to charity (at any scale) and social policies that allow for some to provide little trade-worthy value and still receive essential benefits (for example, those with disabilities). But if there were an option to provide no trade-worthy value and receive completely satisfying goods, accommodations, and freedoms in return, then productive people would naturally feel foolish for spending time working any more than they like to. There is some point where there wouldn't be enough people to maintain the benefits for the non-workers. Although people would offer to work as good will, labor and supply shortages would be far more frequent or constant. So should we allow the option, but only a limited amount so that the threshold of value-produced to value-consumed is never met? It's unlikely that there would be good relations between the class of people in society that would be gifted with that option and those that aren't.
When did antiwork get filled with bootlickers?
