So much of this blog seems to focus on the how regarding the work question, or I instead criticize the moral arguments FOR work, but very rarely to I make arguments against it, and that's a huge gap in the knowledge base on this blog. So tonight, I'm briefly going to outline my core argument against work, and why I am so passionate about moving away from it.
The typical human life span is finite. It generally lasts, more or less, 80 years. It can vary significantly, although for people who live a "normal" life, you're talking somewhere between 70-100 years.
Much of that life will be spent working. For most people, from the time they turn 16-22, to the time they hit their mid 60s, they will spend most of their time working. And to me, work seems to be a waste of time. Let's go back to human centered capitalism and the main principles here. For me, the point of the economy is to serve human needs, and instead our lives seem to be used as inputs to generate ever growing amounts of wealth. The point of this work should be to serve human ends, but it seems like in our society that productivity is more important than human lives, and humans are conditioned to accept work as a moral good. I recently restarted a play through out outer worlds, and tobson, the boss guy in the first planet you start the game on, said that sickness was a sign of a poor work ethic or something like that, it was a sign of spiritual weakness, and work ethic fortifies the body or something.
This kind of seems parallel to a lot of our modern work ethic. The protestant work ethic still undergirds modern work ethic, and people seem to treat work not just as a means of making things, but something we need to complete our lives. Like, we need it in order to find purpose in life.
As I have stated before, with the name of this blog, I have left plato's cave, so to speak. My experience leaving christianity really opened my mind and caused me to contemplate purpose on a deeper level, and honestly? We dont really NEED purpose. Purpose is something imposed on us, like an imaginary cure to an imaginary disease. So many people in the cave look to different sources, like work, and religion, for external validation for their lives. But for me, as someone who left the cave, I've come to realize that there is no purpose but that which we make for ourselves, and being forced to submit to this structure of work, when I really dont believe in it, feels like a form of spiritual violence to someone of my intellectual stature.
I literally view work as a modern form of slavery. Our existing moral philosophies love to dance around this and seem to be created to legitimize and justify the practice, but I think, looking at things objectively, that if work is, at best, the process by which we make things to serve human needs, and work is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that there is no purpose but that which we make for ourselves, that a life spent working is a life that is wasted.
We should honestly strive to spend as little time as possible working. The goal of the economy shouldnt be to increase employment or create jobs, it should be to produce the most wealth possible with the least amount of inputs. But because we have belief in a system of inalienable property rights, where merely redistributing wealth to people is "theft" and somehow wrong and against objective morality, then we instead keep creating work so that people can justify giving people wealth. We have such backwards moralities surrounding work ethic, an while at best, they functionally exist in order to motivate people to work, in a modern era, it really does seem to me that whatever scarcity based justification behind them no longer exists, and that our big problem with the modern economy isnt a scarcity of stuff, but a poor distribution of it, and an obsession with linking it to work.
Linking income to work is literally the source of all misery in our modern economy. Because we insist people must work in order to meet their needs, even though this isnt really necessary. And because the employment system does not fairly distribute rewards in and of itself, or guarantee a decent standard of living, or a job for many even, then we end up having a system in which people who through no fault of their own still suffer from unemployment and poverty.
Even if the system worked under its own principles of justice, if we could instead concieve of a world in which we did not have to work, over one in which everyone does, is that not morally superior?
Should we spend so much of our lives working? The 40 hour work week was designed with the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, and 8 hours of whatever, but when one thinks about it, that 8 hours turns into 9 once breaks are considered, which arent true free time. Possibly up to 10-12 once commutes are considered. And then once other responsibilities outside of work are considered, people only have a block of maybe an hour or two a day to themselves. People spend most of their time working in order to live for only a few hours here and there. Many try to take back their lives by staying up late, cutting into sleep time, which causes them to suffer health wise.
To me, it's insane we live this way.
And for most of this time working, we dont really have control of our lives. The boss tells us when we get up, when we work, when we sleep, and we often revolve our whole lives around work.
As I stated lately, even worse, a majority of workers are disengaged from and hate their jobs.
Why do we spend so much of our time doing things that we dislike doing? Why do we subject ourselves to these mini dictatorships we call corporations that dominate so much of our lives? Should we not live for ourselves?
Rather than talking about making work better, I think we should recognize work for what it is: evil. Perhaps it is, to some extent, a necessary evil. We do need the stuff that comes from it at times. Im not saying that we can FULLY do away with work at this time. BUT, I see no reason why we can't start cutting back the hours we live our lives to something that we dont want to do, that we don't even have control of. We could establish a UBI to give people more real choice within the economy. We could reduce work hours over time as productivity rises, recognizing that as we can create more stuff with fewer inputs, that we can spend more of our time living as we want. It's crazy that we create so many labor saving devices for ourselves, only to insist on retraining people and forcing them to take new jobs, rather than being able to use those devices to live more fulfilling lives. The goal of labor saving devices should be to save people from working. Instead we insist on firing people from some jobs, threatening their economic security, and throwing people back into the meat grinder of the economy expecting them to take up some new job somewhere else. It seems insane to me.
INstead, maybe we should give up on work altogether and instead redistribute the rewards of the economy in a more fair way to make work less central to our lives and more voluntary, and we instead opt to trade future economic growth for more leisure instead of more stuff. It seems like the best way to live to me.
And let's face it, given climate change, we cant keep going with the maximum growth paradigm anyway. Eventually we'll bring oursleves to environmental ruin, as David Graeber once said, to save the world, we must stop working.
Anyway, that's a shortish elevator pitch for doing away with work. In retrospect, this might sound downright repetitive considering other articles ive done in the past. But I feel like it brings a lot of themes together. To me, work seems like a waste of time and a waste of a life, and an alienation from what life should be, not some grand purpose. Youre not here on earth to flip burgers or build widgets, youre here to live, with those burgers and widgets serving whatever purpose you need them for. You dont exist to create wealth, wealth exists to serve you. And it would be best to start to live this way, instead of how we've been living.
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