So....Kyle Kulinski, a youtuber who I watch fairly regularly, has finally waded into the anti work topic. And...as an actual anti work person, it's cringey.
I'm gonna be honest, for a while, I watched Kyle for sanity, and considered him to be one of the best left wing youtubers, but as I go more into UBI and anti work ideologies, the more I sometimes find myself not seeing eye to eye with him.
And...his views on r/antiwork was...kinda cringe.
Kyle really has this idea that if the system worked better a lot of people would be less anti work, and that the actual die hard "I dont want to do anything" anti work supporters are a minority of the movement. Maybe he's right, but I do want to approach this as one of those minorities of people.
I'm not gonna lie, Kyle is right that disaffection from the system contributed to me mentally checking out and becoming anti work. HOWEVER, he seems to have some idea that traditional left wing policies will bring most of us back to the fold. here's the thing. if you've actually read and agree with anti work ideology, it's too late for that.
Here's the thing about "deconversions" from mainstream ideologies, whether it be christianity to atheism, or becoming anti work. Eventually, you kind of reach a point of no return in my opinion. You eventually get to a point where before that point, yeah, maybe access to more moderate ideologies could convince me to maintain the overall ideology, but once you get past a certain point, nothing is gonna bring me back. You just become "too woke" so to speak. Once you're aware of plato's cave, there's no turning off that illusion again. I would need amnesia to do that.
You could argue when I was questioning christianity, if I gained access to "moderate" views that I found convincing and made sense, I might've remained a christian. But in doing so I would've also stunted my own growth and continued buying into that illusion. The same goes with anti work. And being a very "early adopter" of the movement, and remembering the sub when half of it was literally Doreen's blog posts (hence why I'm such a defender of hers), I've long since reached that point of no return.
Here's the thing. I NEVER liked work. Something inside me has ALWAYS had a revulsion to work. Part of it was seeing my dad being miserable with work. My whole life has been watching him getting crapped on by all of these different companies who used him and abused him and then threw him away when they were done. I never really had a positive role model in my life as far as work goes. My dad always had a strong work ETHIC mind you, and did, at some level, buy into the gospel of jobs, but...seeing what it did to him and how he clearly wasn't happy made me known to his true feelings. Much of my young adulthood has been about trying to avoid ending up like him. I went to college so I WOULDN'T end up like him. For many of us millennials, college was pushed by the boomer generation as the way to get away from the grind that our parents had to go through and to lead a much cushier life. The problem is we ended up finding out that all of us going to college just oversaturated the market, making each individual millennial far less likely to be able to attain that dream. The reason college was a pathway to success for boomers was because so few boomers went, and most boomers just got full time jobs out of high school that they still managed to feed a family on. They were hard jobs, jobs that made many of them deeply unhappy with their lives on some level, but they paid the bills. After we graduated, after being told to go to college or we'd end up working in mcdonalds, then we were told "what are you too good to work in mcdonalds now college boy?" and then shamed for our choices of going. Many of us didnt know what we were doing with our lives. We just didnt wanna end up like our parents so saw it as a path to an easier life and affluence, we could not be more wrong.
But, I digress. I'll come back to this later, but I do want to discuss other childhood factors. Here's the thing. Much like Doreen, I'm autistic. And autistic people seem to tend to hate the working world. We don't adapt to it well, and for me, while I initially remember looking forward to school when I was like 3-4...by the time i hit 2nd grade, i HATED it. It was all about the structure of it, the expectations, the routine, and...the work. Like...I didn't adjust well to school, being an undiagnosed autistic kid in the 1990s before people actually understood widely what aspergers and the like was. So...I initially didnt adapt well to it. I would always get punished for not following directions, I didn't understand what I did wrong, and I didn't take well to the conditioning that was imposed on me. I remember the first time we were assigned homework in kindergarten, I did it right there, and handed it to the teacher a few minutes later. They yelled at me and told me I was supposed to do it at home. Why should I do it at home I wondered? I just did it here? but no...these guys insisted on me doing it at home, to condition me to be more willing to accept doing work at home. That's the thing about school. It isn't just about teaching you academic subjects. It's a matter of behavioral modification to indoctrinate/brainwash you for a future of work. So, I was disciplined constantly, i didn't get it, and eventually my behavior straightened out, but let's face it, I was doing what autistic people call "masking" where the behavioral modifications I went through were all about reward/punishment. This is normal for NT kids, but let's face it, it's all that really motivated me. Eventually I went on to kohlberg's good boy/girl syndrome where I started doing things to be good, but let's face it, i still largely adopted a fear of punishment approach to it. By high school I became the goody two shoes who accepted the system and became like, the most obnoxious rule follower possible. Always getting on my more rebellious classmates, blah blah blah. But ultimately, all throughout the time, I hated work. I always saw it as something that needed to be done, but that's all that drove me. I was never a fetishist for work itself, I just accepted, okay, crap needs to get done, so I'm gonna do the crap. And honestly? I LIVED for summer.
In high school we started having this thing called study hall where we COULD do our homework in school? And I avoided all extracurriculars in order to maximize those periods. And I just did all my work at school, so I could go home and be free. And come summer, I would look forward to that glorious 3 months of the year I could do whatever I wanted. I HATED the idea of going back to school. Starting around july 4th, I'd look to september with dread, counting down the weeks, often crying and having breakdowns the weekend before going back.
And the idea of getting a job on top of school seemed hellish. Why? I go to school every day from 8 until 3, why should I wanna work my evenings away on top of it? When i turned 16 I never desired a car. I didn't wanna go anywhere. If I got a car, I'd have to get a job. ANd then I'd use the car exclusively to go to work, which I would use to pay for the car. And it never made sense to me.
That brings me to college. In college, I just wanted to do my classes and go home. I didn't have any real world experience. I just focused on getting As, and i knew if i worked, I'd probably suffer a mental breakdown on top of school, which occupied literally all of my time. Here's the thing about college. You only have like 12 hours of classes, but we were expected to study for like 4 hours per hour of class outside of our classes. So in reality school was like a 60 hour week with all the studying I did. I barely had time to myself. I hated it. The only thing that kept me sane was the long breaks between vacations.
And then the recession happened. And I would say that's where my political attitudes started to change. I was originally very conservative. I was drawn to politics in my high school years, as a conservative christian who listened to rush limbaugh a lot. My parents were fans, so I became a fan, and I ate up everything the dude said. And of course he was a work worshipper too. But honestly, I never really adopted that. Here was my attitude, as a teenage conservative whose views came from my parents. I didn't like the idea of work. I hated the idea of work. But...I understood that we needed everyone to work for society to function. If we didn't have everyone working, people would starve to death. And of course welfare was wrong, because it was redistributing work from people who actually worked for it, to people who didn't. And of course, there was real resentment there, but here's the thing, as someone who is anti work now. That resentment, for me, came down to "okay, why do I have to be miserable only for my taxes to pay for freeloaders? they should get jobs too." That's kind of the thing about the whole hating free money going to people idea among the right. A lot of it is based on the fact that a lot of them are miserable working, they dont LIKE it, but they have to do it, and they dont wanna pay for people who skirt their burden. I think that resentment is why anti work ideas are so unpopular. I think most people actually hate this crap, but they have to do it, so they do and they want everyone else to suffer like them. Another idea I had at the time was that we actually did need everyone to work and that there literally wasn't enough to go around and that society was dog eat dog. It wasn't nice, it wasn't fair, it just was. And the problem with liberals, socialists, and utopians is they often have these great ideas, but if they actually implemented them, it would end up like the USSR, and would be far worse. So, for the longest time, the big thing that stopped me from moving left was the fact that I just saw left wing ideas as not able to be done without hurting society. It was all functionalism for me. I didnt LIKE work. I just understood we all ahted it but we still had to do it.
But again, then the recession happened. And while I initially remained very right wing, my dad got treated like crap some more, and got fired from his boss who claimed record profits, but in order to keep them he had to lay him off. And then my dad couldnt find a new job for over a year, and we were only held together by Obama's extended unemployment. I kind of realized at this time, hey, government safety nets are necessary and actually work. So I softened on them. I also saw republicans trying to cut them, which led to me turning on them. Their argument was they needed tax cuts to create jobs. But they already had record amounts of money, and were cutting staff...see the problem?
The recession revealed the farce for me. Between this, and taking econ in college, I started piecing together things. Like....employers dont hire people to give people jobs, they hire people to make money. They dont give a crap about you. As evidenced by my dad over the course of my life. They will use you, and then get rid of you when they don't need you. And the recession taught me the realities of unemployment. Unemployment is...a thing in societies. For most of my life, getting a job had been easy. my dad was never out of work, even though he had to jump ship from individual companies over bad working conditions. And I kinda just assumed that was how it was. Jobs were plentiful, you could always find one, after all we needed people to work, but i kinda realized, no we actually have people unemployed who couldn't find jobs. I started realizing, doing math and the like, that we actually have A TON to go around. We have like $50k for each individual member of society, enough to give people a middle class life style, yet...income inequality is insane, with many people in poverty, many can't even find jobs, and honestly, to quote George Carlin, no one seems to notice, no one seems to care.
And then I exited college and had to join the work force. And MAN was THAT a rude awakening. I entered the common dilemma an early 2010s graduate faced in the recession. No one wants to hire you without experience, and you need a job to get experience. Given the openings in my area being barely existent on the educated level in the first place, and my degree being a poor match for most jobs, I kinda realized I was screwed. I became an atheist around this time due to a lot of the same patterns going on in other areas of my life, and I just couldn't believe any more, and that made me even more pliable politically as the existential fallout from that had me questioning EVERYTHING. I was leaving plato's cave...around 2012.
And just...not being able to find a job, it wore on me. I would surf reddit, and realize that we had hundreds of people applying for single openings. That half the people were being laid off and the other half told to pick up the slack and join them. And understanding economics and what was going on I kinda realized...we legitmately just didn't have enough jobs in society. We always like to act like we need everyone working, but at the end of the day, there's wide swaths of the population that arent even hireable. It was ridiculous, we all had to beg for jobs, tell employers what hard workers we are and blah blah blah. But...at the end of the day...that's what it was. Too many people applying to too few jobs. Often times without many people even having jobs that were suitable to them, and many people in the economy underemployed or disengaged with bad jobs that didn't even suit them.
And what were the powers that be doing? Obama would get up there and talk about "we need to create more jobs"....and something about that seemed wrong to me. Sure more jobs would help, but the jobs were so called "shovel ready jobs" that many people criticized, since most jobs created were low wage minimum wage jobs no one wanted to do. It was a recipe for misery. So yeah, kyle's right, the system failing us kinda made us check out, but let's think about WHY I checked out.
Around 2012, I realized my whole life up to that point had basically been a lie. I believed, as a christian, that I had a purpose in this world, and I majored in politics in order to get a job to change things for the better. Initially this "changing things for the better" meant more conservatism and more jesus in government. But...as I oftened on things and eventually became an atheist, I realized no one out there was really looking out for me. And looking at the economy I realized that there just wasnt an ideal job for everyone. We can try to create jobs for everyone, but are you really going to get a match for everyone? And honestly, do these jobs even need to be done? And in a lot of ways, I got nos as answers. I mean I kinda realized we were just making jobs for the sake of making jobs. The idea that we needed everyone working was a massive lie, we just pursue policies that aim for full employment, and we act like we need everyone employed when we have this massive consumption engine that artificially increases demand, that just further spurs employment. It was a farce.
And while I hadn't all put it together yet, the disillusionment ran deep for me. And a big thing I wanted to focus on, even when i was still in grad school, was some sort of policy to save the american dream as I called it. By this, I meant the good life. But, in grad school I ended up going in a different direction wth my final project so I focused on that. So I didn't really hit it big until 2013 with that, when I discovered basic income. I came across the subreddit totally by chance. It was small. But the user base was passionate. I asked them questions, about how to pay for it, whether people would work...and they would give me answers. Good answers. I asked for studies, and they would give me studies. I was getting hard evidence it could work. And this just led me further down the rabbit hole. I researched it thoroughly, and the more I did so, I just became more and more convinced that this is what America needed. I even took it upon myself to try to solve what I considered the biggest problem I saw with it, which was funding, hence why I focus on that so much. I used my political science skills to research the issue and create plans for it that I believe could work.
UBI would've been unfathomable to me as a conservative. I would've considered it communism. After all, that was what communism was right? Taking everyone's income and redistributing it to people equally. And that destroys all incentive to work right? Of course, that was propaganda. Turns out if you only give people a poverty line amount that most would work. And it turned out, most people actually wanted to work to some extent, which as I realized I was autistic, really made more sense to me. I dislike work in part because I am autistic and it never resonated with me and was imposed on me. But most "normal" people? yeah they like to work. So maybe kyle has a point there. But at the same time, I kept researching. Also from a conservative perspective, I hated the idea of welfare and giving money to those who don't deserve it, but at the root of that, it was because I would be forced to work, and then forced to pay taxes. if everyone was given a UBI and allowed to make different choices, was that bad? No, that was freedom. I only begrudged welfare because I couldn't get a check. But if everyone gets a UBI check? I could live with that. Rahter than exploiting the system, being able to say no was part of the system, and was a freedom afforded to every american.
Through my UBI studies, I came across r/antiwork in 2014ish. It was a new subreddit then, and Doreen was arguably the most active poster there. I can say this because I remember her plugging abolishwork.com all the time and that being a regular aspect of the sub. It almost seemed like it was Doreen's sub to spread her anti work views. And I actually read some of the stuff she posted, and like UBI, atheism, and all of these quite frankly heretical ideas that would make the old conservative christian me have an aneurysm, anti work...started making sense. I kinda realized, yeah, jobism IS an issue. The idea that jobs are the solution to all our ills in the economy. And that maybe we should pursue UBI. Karl Widerquist helped too, as I remember him posting his indepentarian theory in the basic income sub, and me reading his book through that. And I thought it was the most brilliant and prolific piece of modern philosophy that I read. And yeah, given the direction I was going with my disaffection of work, and the economy, it made sense. We have all of these people forced to apply for jobs, the jobs arent there, it's a numbers problem, and this numbers problem will never be solved through normal means, so we need a UBI to fix capitalism. It made sense. Some anti work ideology actually is a good thing, and over the next few decades automation is gonna do a number on the job market, meaning that peoples' faith in jobs will begin to fail, so, I kind of saw UBI as inevitable, even if a long way off.
Of course, for the most part, I dont really express my anti work views as plainly as I've been doing here. Why? Because I understood America isn't there yet. So when Bernie Sanders supported some of my goals, but still supported some aspects of the gospel of work, I just saw it as a necessary evil and saw that battle as a battle to be had in the future.
But...then the democrats went on neoliberal on us, and Trump won, and things got worse, and then Yang ran on UBI, painting a more acute picture of how screwed the American economy is, and then COVID happened, and with COVID, I realized the time was right for these ideas. r/antiwork exploded in popularity, we clearly had a society with a whole 1/3 of the work force not working, and I just realized, the future is now. And given the tensions among the more traditional left, I've just mentally clocked out. Screw the centrists, screw the bernie bros who are descending further and further into literal socialism, just screw it all. And Yang comes along pushes a 3rd party, and then r/antiwork becomes popular as the great resignation took off, and it just made me even more firm.
So...at this point, and I know I just rambled a lot...do I even want a leftist movement to "save work"? HELL NO. Screw work. Work sucks. Let it die. We should stop pursuing more jobs. We should give people a UBI, let people have the right to say no, and let the market decide from there. After all that's "freedom" right? Oh wait, the free market is suddenly not supported by the rich when the shoe is on the other foot? And then you have these traditional leftists promoting the same gospel of work...and honestly...I dont want work to be saved dog. Maybe back 10 years ago in 2012 you could've saved me in that sense by making the system work, but at this point, I've just gone too deep down the rabbit hole. I've grappled with the fundamentals of the economy, my dislike of work has never waned, and honestly, knowing what I know now...no. SCREW WORK! I dont just want to create more jobs and have everything to be fine. I dont wanna go back into plato's cave. So no, kyle, no. Maybe I am in a minority here. But you know what? Coming back to spirituality, and getting a temperature for how things are on that side of things, I'm starting to think my whole purpose for being here, and that included all that deconversion crap, was all to prepare me for this. maybe I'm SUPPOSED to be anti work. maybe my reason for being here is to spread anti work ideas. It makes sense. People who have my kind of spiritual awakening experiences are often here for a reason, there is a reason after all, and maybe I'm supposed to promote this stuff. I don't know. Heck, it's weird I actually read a spiritual book recently and in it "God" advocated for what seemed to be a form of UBI. It was weird (Conversations with God Part 2 if anyone is interested). So idk. I just don't have it in me to want to be pro work. it goes against my being. My whole childhood was just a ton of indoctrination to get me to accept work, and that has all been undone through my experiences. I hate work with my very being, and I seek to oppose it.
Am I in a minority? Maybe. Maybe some people aren't "awakened" enough to get it. It sure seems that way given how fast the sub turned on Doreen. I admit, the interview was bad, but honestly? It was just a bad tactical decision, and a lot of bad optics. I wouldnt say Doreen somehow strawmanned the anti work movement or misrepresented it. She IS the face of the actual anti work movement. The problem is, most of the people who joined didn't seem to know what they were signing up for.
But yeah. Either way, I disagree with kyle completely. Screw work. It's not a concept worth saving for me. What I want more than anything else, is my freedom to say no. I look at work with a sense of existential dread. I literally feel like I'm selling myself into slavery whenever I submit an application. It feels wrong for me. The whole system is wrong. I'm not against voluntary transactions, but how voluntary is this, really? And being an indepentarian, trying to make work right for me, feels...wrong. You can't just tell a person, "hey I made work just again, now you have no reason to say no". The very act of coercion is wrong. It doesn't matter to me if it's capitalism, socialism, whatever. The only justification that only made sense for the coercion of work is the necessity of it, and given how unnecessary it is and how we could have a system far less coercive...I would rather do that.
So no, Kyle, no. I don't want "work" to be made right for me. I dont want the big casino turned into the big collective. As Karl Widerquist would say, you can make the jobs, you can make them as good as you can, but it's ultimately up to us to decide whether they're acceptable. Labor reform is fine, but we DO need a right to say no.
Thankfully Kyle mentioned UBI so maybe he does understand a UBI is needed, but...yeah no. As someone who actually IS anti work...it's like...no. I just fundamentally hate this system with every fiber of my being. Screw work. We shouldnt seek to create MORE of it. We should strive to minimize it. It won't happen overnight, but it should be a long term goal.
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