So, I realize I'm a bit late to this, but given I was focusing on the Matt Cholbi book and all of those essays, I just totally overlooked Yang's interview with Derek Thompson. I mean I stopped thinking about it until Yang posted a clip of it and it ended up in my YT feed. He was promoting his on book on the future of work, and essays on the subject.
This interview was interesting for a bunch of reasons, and ties heavily into themes I've been discussing on my blog for a while now. And I wanted to talk about a few of them.
The big thing he talked about was "workism." Workism is a lot like what I call jobism, but I would argue it seems to have a different focus. When I think jobism, I think of this sociological phenomenon in our society in which we just see jobs as the solution to all economic ills. As if we can just slap "job creation" on everything and everything would be great. I've...kind of disproven this idea on here before. There is a hard limit to how many jobs we can reasonably create because we develop a so called "worker shortage" and get spiraling inflation from that. Sadly, things are as good as we get, and this never ending push for more jobs seems to be keeping us on a treadmill that if only we do a little more things will get better, but they never do.
That's what I call "Jobism." It's a term I drew from the anti work community, and ironically, Doreen Ford when she used to have that website "abolish work" back around 2014 (this is what it is now, a lot of her earlier works have disappeared). UBI advocates still sometimes use the term though.
As far as workism, as used by Derek Thompson, he seems to be focusing more on a personal level, and the idea that people tend to try to derive meaning from work, as if they are trying to replace the meaning that religion once gave to people. People seek meaning and community from others, and many seek it from their work. Of course, this is unhealthy, because as Thompson points out, a lot of jobs are really just jobs, and nothing more. These jobs are quite dehumanizing, and putting your eggs in the basket of a job with a flesh and blood boss who can yell at you and castigate your performance or lack thereof can be destructive to one's well being.
I'm sympathetic to this argument. All throughout the essays we've been reading, and Yang's works himself (and Yang admitted being a "workist" himself in this interview), we've seen a huge emphasis on jobs being an important source of meaning and psychological well being. It's one of the reasons people are so leery to do away with the concept of work. And Yang mentioned it himself somewhat in this interview, going on about how men who drop out of the work force just sit around watching TV and playing video games all day, as if that's a bad thing. Honestly, yang's perspective is a little too protestant work ethicky for my tastes, and that's where I have to step in and talk about this.
I don't think it's fair to say that work has replaced religion as a source of meaning. I mean, the idea of work being a calling often works in tandem with religion, and has roots in what Max Weber calls the protestant work ethic. Because in this version of the Christian worldview, humans are sinful beings, and "idle hands to the devil's work", people need to be distracted with work in order to impose discipline and structure in their lives. Industriousness goes hand in hand with godliness, while sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. In many iterations of the Christian worldview, people are often on earth for some sort of "calling". And for some, this is true. I mean, I consider...ironically, trying to dismantle the concept of obsessing over work and implementing a UBI as my own personal "calling."But...I'm going to be honest, I don't think that everyone has such a calling, nor should such callings be particularly glorified. Quite frankly, I think that "God works in mysterious ways" and we can't know what peoples' purposes is or isn't. It's kind of a personal thing they have to choose for themselves. And given one could make a very good case for God not existing at all, I think it's obnoxious to enslave humanity to such a ridiculous and unproveable concept.
I mean, I want to reiterate that despite regaining some level of spirituality and melding it with everything else here, the core of my actual political worldview was forged from atheism and secular humanism. From that perspective, we have one life, and we live in an amoral and purposeless universe. Why oh why, should we spend our lives WORKING?! I mean, if it's a matter of survival, sure. But for the concept of meaning? What a ridiculous concept! Whose meaning? Where did this idea come from? Freaking Christianity? Why oh why, should we entertain Christianity and its high strung and repressed moral system for one second longer than we need to do disprove such a worldview?
Honestly? To have Christian sentiments imposed on me, an "atheist" (when I was an atheist, and to an extent now as a nondescript spiritual person), just seems needlessly authoritarian. I need to be forced to work for my own good because I would fall into sin, a concept I don't even believe in, without it? And sure, I might believe now I have a purpose...to spread anti work and pro UBI propaganda, but that came from the idea that that gives me more sense of purpose than any freaking "job" could provide. Honestly, I've always seen through the idea of a job. Even as a Christian I always kind of knew that yeah, working in McDonalds is NOT going to give me purpose or something like that. And as an ex Christian, the concept is just insulting.
If anything, it comes off as the myth of sisyphus made real. And I want to remind people, the fact that sisyphus was sentenced to roll a rock up a hill for all eternity was seen as punishment. Because the idea was so absurd and pointless. There was no real value to be had from this labor. It was just going through the motions and working for its own sake. Which comes off like much of what we do today when we talk about creating jobs for the purpose of employing people who lack employment. As David Graeber would say, its as if someone just goes around creating jobs in order to keep us all working. And in his point of view, this imposes a kind of spiritual violence on people when they wake up to this idea.
And that's how I see most work in the 21st century. I'm not even saying a lot of work isnt socially useful. But attaching your identity and your purpose to that seems....ridiculous. You're a cog in a machine, and you're subject to be replaced at any time. If you died, your employer would probably flip out over you missing your shift and then once they find out be like oh well and you'll be replaced within a week. In the grand scheme of things, this crap doesn't matter. And if machines can do this socially necessary labor for us and free us from having to do this BS, we should welcome that.
Really, isn't being a cog in a machine dehumanizing? We should be trying to reduce the amount of work like that, and allowing people to find their purpose outside of that. It seems like the opposite of human centered capitalism, which is why my iteration of the idea is more explicitly anti work. The economy should serve us, we shouldnt be slaves to it, and work is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
I honestly see workism, and jobism for that matter, as a dangerous and inherently authoritarian ideology that robs us of our freedom, liberty, and autonomy in life, and reduces our lives as mere economic inputs for the purpose of creating a profit. It's slavery with extra steps, except it's insidiousness not only to hide that fact, but to cause most people to clamor for more labor.
As far as what should replace work as people's source of purpose, I have to ask, why do we humans need purpose so much? This is why when I was an atheist I really was very evangelical with it. Because honestly? I want people to go through the same purging of unhelpful beliefs that I did and see the world in a totally different way. That's why I named this blog what I did. I literally want to get people out of their little matrix worldviews where they see the worldview a certain way so that they can see it for what it really is. Honestly? I think not having a purpose is liberating. I like the freedom that comes with it. I like the idea of doing what I wanna do when I wanna do it, and having fun, and not being forced to work for some BS purpose I don't believe in.
Really, I see Americans as brainwashed. I mean, if we have a psychological dependence on work, that speaks to a lifetime of brainwashing that made us incapable of coping without it. The good news is that this is curable just from a shift in worldview and mindset. The downside is that such a transition might be rough for some people. Getting people to go from A to B might be psychologically harmful. But I do believe that it is in the best interest of each and every one of us to undergo this process so that we can come out on the other side stronger and more able to see the world as what it is. As I liked to say as an atheist, it's a relationship with reality. And I would highly encourage people to discard unhelpful ideas that hold them back so we can live lives worthy of living.
And yeah. That's my thought on this subject. I would agree that workism is harmful. Heck, taking the idea of human centered capitalism to its logical ends, as I love to do, it seems quite contrary to how I see the world. Sometimes a job is just a job. Most jobs are, in my opinion, sisyphusian tasks that should not be lauded or rewarded. Over time, we should liberate humanity from having to do these tasks, and celebrate throwing off the yoke of jobs and full employment. For me, a huge mark of progress going forward is working less. That used to be the dream. That over time, we would reduce the amount of labor we do by working less and less. Instead the incentives are as such that we work the same work weeks our grandparents and maybe even great grandparents did in some cases and we have an existential crisis at the idea of doing away with work. We live in a sick society with a sick culture. Rather than change it to be healthy it seems to me we try to prolong the sickness. We really should get back on track here.
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