On work

 Another of these style of posts I want to make is one on work. Nothing I said here is really that new to this blog, I've written extensively on the subject, but I did want to give my philosophical views on work.

Work is essentially a necessary evil. It's the action of taking things that exist in the natural world and transforming them into goods and services that meet our wants and needs. It is generally unpleasant. As noted in the Bible, the punishment for original sin was work, and I think work has, throughout much of history, been looked down as unpleasant, but necessary. A lot of the stratification of society developed with the wealthy at the top doing very little work, and the masses at the bottom doing all of it. 

But in our modern society, work is seen as a good thing. Weirdos go on about work having dignity and giving people purpose, and people not being able to live without it. What happened? Well, many of these ideas stemmed from the changes that happened as we left the feudal society and its justifications for things, and had to come up with a new system. And we came up with one where the justification for property was labor and work, so now work is good, work is great, it's dignified, and how dare you think otherwise.

These ideas are nonsense to me. Cultural nonsense used to gaslight the modern slave class into being wage slaves and to cheer on their own servitude. Behind it are a bunch of dysfunctional ideas like the protestant work ethic, which is rooted in christianity and thinks that work is needed to display virtue and to save us from "sin", and resentment politics which is based on the idea that if I have to work, everyone must work to make it fair. it isnt fair for some to have to work and others not to, the old hierarchy of old is deegitimized, but in its place is a new tyranny in which we must all work in order to justify our own existence. These ideas arent any better than the ideas of old in some respects, and if anything are just based on a resentment politics that all keep us trapped slaving away forever like sisyphus rolling the rock up a hill.

I think we need to acknowledge that work is necessary for society to function, but let's get rid of the pretenses, work sucks. It's not a positive thing, and in a capitalist context dehumanizes people by making them economic inputs into some economic output machine. The point of work is the product or service offered, the process of making it, ie, working, sucks, and we should strive for a society that minimizes the amount of effort we have to expend to make things.

It used to be that the future to look forward to was one where we automate away all labor. After all, the point of labor saving devices was to save people from labor. but rather than working less for every invention we make that saves workers time, we just create more work instead, insisting on a slavish work ethic where no matter how efficient we get, we always end up working the same amount, for ever higher standards of living that many of us never enjoy, whether from the economic pressures like poverty and precarity that force us to continue working, or from the act of work exhausting us to such an extent that we can't enjoy the rest of our lives. 

We do things backwards, work should be a means to an end, a means to create the products and services that sustain us and make life worth living. They should not be the end itself. When we talk about creating jobs, we're talking about creating work for people to do to justify giving them a paycheck. Rather than rethinking this link between work and money, at least a little bit, we're a society obsessed with employing people so that we can justify giving them the resources for them to live. It's like we're subject to and tyrannized by outdated social norms that no longer work, and we keep trying to make them work but they dont work, they never worked, and have always been a great scourge and evil that we should strive to eliminate, but for some reason we stopped doing so and just keep insisting on creating more work.

Modern society is a sisyphusian hell to me. One where we are forced to roll metaphorical rocks up hills for all eternity, not as punishment from gods, but because we're trapped by our social norms that stop us from rethinking society. Not to mention the ultra wealthy benefits from a desperate and compliant work force and don't want to let their influence go. 

But yeah. That said, I think work is an evil, that much like other forms of pain, suffering, and hardship, should be eradicated from this earth. I'm not saying that there is no work that is worth doing or that can be enjoyable, but most work is very dull, very unpleasant, and if forced on people, is very unwelcome and makes us miserable. We would be better off doing away with work for the masses, and focused on liberating people by making work voluntary and minimizing the amount of time we should spend doing it.