So, when I mentioned being anti work, a friend of mine asked me to define it. I had to give some pause before coming up with an acceptable definition, and even consulted the dictionary in order to get some ideas in terms of what I mean about "work".
Why was it so hard to define? It's not that I don't know what the term means, it's more the fact that I don't want to just consign the idea to wage labor under capitalism, which is the direction the "anti work" subreddit went where they basically just turned it into a circlejerk against capitalism while still being pro jobs and pro work under whatever weirdo "socialist" arrangement that they deem fit. No, I want to be against ALL work, under ALL systems, and I wanted a much broader definition than most "anti work" advocates advocate for, who often do weirdo philosophical dancing around the concept of being like "well im not against labor I'm just against work", no, paid employment is definitely a form of work I find detestable, but my ideas are much broader than that.
So what did I settle upon? From google's dictionary feature:
a task or tasks to be undertaken; something a person or thing has to do.
There were other definitions. The others seemed to be "effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result" or something similar to that. But let's face it, everything takes effort. LIVING takes effort, getting out of the bed takes effort. Playing video games takes effort. Watching TV takes effort if you want to be engrossed in the program. By that definition, leisurely activities are all "work". That's too broad. And I'm certainly not against ANY form of effort exerted toward any purpose. I mean, this sentence is work. Everything is work, to live is to work, and the only way to not work is to not be alive. Again, too broad.
So why did I settle on this one then? Because it captures the zeitgeist of what I despise about the concept. "Something a person or thing has to do." HAS TO is the key word. To be compelled to do something, is to work. And if you consider my ideology and my core solutions to work, clearly I'm not against all people doing all things that take effort, I'm against people being forced to do things. The key to the definition is the idea that someone HAS TO do something. As I see it, HAS TO means that your consent isn't necessary. Your will isn't necessary. You HAVE TO do it. You often don't WANT to do it, but because of some force somewhere in the universe, whether it be an economic system, or a person, or even your own biological needs, you HAVE TO do something. If you dont do something, there's likely some consequence to it. At best it's simply "well that thing isn't done". But if it's something more severe like deprivation of resources, or external intervention from other humans, that's a problem.
The fact is, just like humans avoid pain and dying, they should also be a bit "lazy", lazy meaning they inherently dont want to do the things that they have to do. A lot of progress happens when we invent ways to reduce our own burdens. We used to spend all day hunting for food and gathering fruits and vegetables. Then we developed agriculture, which should, in theory, make it easier. We grow food, the good isn't out there where we have to go far to get it, we are literally growing it, and then we consume it. It is supposed to make life easier for us than it would be otherwise. And making life easier is inherently good.
Now, to be fair, reading Widerquist, we all know that agriculture is where the problems started with a lot of more institutional work goes. When we started settling down and farming crops, thats when states stated forming and that's when other people would force other people to do work for them. People would be forced to grow crops. And this is bad, especially if you don't consent to such an arrangement. We humans have a nasty habit it seems of capturing other humans and forcing them to do undesirable work for each other, often at the threat of some force. And that's another reason I'm against "work". Often times, often times a lot of this work isn't really necessary. We have created systems to implicitly or explicitly enslave each other, and deprive them of their freedom. Instead of spending their time, which is, in my mind, one of our most precious commodities, doing things we want to do, we do things we have to do. All this talk of "work ethic" is just internalizing a slave mentality in which we subject ourselves to constantly doing things that we don't want to do, but have to do, while simultaneously shaming others for lacking said ethic.
Again, for me, the purpose of work is the product. We work toward an end, toward a result, that's what the other definition of work is. The point isn't the process, it's the outcome. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But what makes work ethic so despicable to me is to make the work itself the end. Work in itself becomes a valuable commodity, when in reality it should be seen as drudgery we wish to avoid.
To go back to a point I was in the middle of making earlier before I so rudely interrupted myself, we should try to minimize work for ourselves. The purpose of all progress should be to reduce the amount of work we do. The point of agriculture was to allow the food to come to us, rather than us going to the food, making the process of gathering food to eat easier for ourselves, so that we can seek other pursuits. If anything, growing our own food, rather than going out and getting it by hunting and gathering is lazy. But it's intelligently lazy, which is the best kind of lazy. Intelligently lazy people are the ones who bring society forward.
Quite frankly, this intelligently lazy mentality is the mindset I wish to bring to the problem. Work ethic just makes us take pride in being inefficient. Rather than measuring things by the result, we measure things by the hours we put in. And an efficient worker is punished, because to one with a "good" work ethic, there is always more work to do. The reward for work is more work. And then you wonder why there are so many BS jobs and why reducing the work week barely loses productivity. Many office workers are so efficient they could do their whole 40 hour work week in 15 hours, but they spread it out and spend more time pretending to be busy to pad out their hours. A system that was more honest about the nature of work and did not glorify the work ethic would get as much done in as little time possible, and then spend the rest of their time doing things that aren't work.
But all throughout modern history, the rewards for increasing productivity is to be thrown out of their existing work, and then being given more work. Women used to spend the entire day cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. They used to have to go down to the river with their basket of dirty clothing and spend half the day washing it to clean it. Now, we made machines that wash the stuff for us in an hour. Just gotta take the clothing to the machines, push the right buttons, and then let it go. And then after that, we have another machine, often right next to it, that dries them.
We used to have to cook with camp fires to cook our food, or stoves. Now we have microwaves that can make instant, prepackaged meals hot within 3-5 minutes. Admittedly the quality is inferior to a properly home cooked meal, but you get the idea. You can even go to one of the many fast food or take out places that can make many meals for many people very quickly, and often relatively affordably.The point is, over time things have been made easier, yet we still insist on working just as much or more than in the past.
Any time a labor saving device is introduced, rather than actually saving time, we just displace people and then insist they work somewhere else to keep up their productivity. Since 1750, we have grown over 20x over in the amount of stuff per person in the first world. We now have machines do harvesting for us, with only 2% doing agriculture these days. We are working on self driving trucks that will deliver the food to stores without a person needing to be there to get us through the process. We have self checkouts where we dont even need anywhere near as many cashiers any more to buy the food and check out. Heck, we can even have someone do your shopping for you so you just pick up the stuff curb side. But for every labor saving device we make along the way, we throw people out of work, and then insist on getting more work. And all throughout the history of the modern economy, people have suffered for it. We should celebrate people being let go for jobs. We should be like "hey youre not needed any more, go be free". But we dont do that. We let them go, cut off their means of subsistence, and then we make them get another job. We insist everyone work in an economy that doesnt guarantee enough work, and then we blame them for being poor when not all of the jobs provide good hours or benefits or pay or working conditions. Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Were more obsessed with numbers going up rather than what those numbers mean for people. And the protestant work ethic, which glorifies work as a process rather than as a means to an end, seems to insist that we must keep working in a "never ending race" as Mill put it in Anderson's book.
And that's the part about this that sickens me so much. There is no end point. There is no off ramp. If we keep going as we are, 100 years from now we might have $300k GDP per capita, but the problems of poverty and overwork and capitalism will remain the same, if we dont just collapse ecologically from overusing the earth's resources to the point that what we're doing lacks any form of sustainability.
The point of all of this STUFF should be to make people happy. TO make their lives easier. To make us spend less time doing "what we have to do" and more time doing what we want to do. The point of growing food was to make things easier for us. The point of automating jobs is to make things easy for us. Over time our actual NEEDS for physical labor from humans should DECLINE. All of this technology and advancement we're doing that makes us so able to do so much more with less, should have us eventually doing less, rather than the same or more. But because of the work ethic, nothing is ever good enough. It's literally the ideology of cancer. Growth for the sake of growth.
Now, I'm not ANTI growth, I want to make that clear. I'm for BALANCE. We have our physical needs and wants. We need some level of work to accomplish them. I just think that over time, we should move away from this system where we all need to be going ALL OF THE TIME doing things we HAVE to do, not want to do.
Over time, we should HAVE to do less. As we accomplish mastery over this planet and can meet our physical needs increasingly easier where not as much labor is NECESSARY, and then instead of doing the things we HAVE to do and having that occupy all of our time, we should have a leisure society where we do what we WANT to do.
What is the point of life, if we just spend all day every day doing what we have to do? We HAVE to get up at 6:30 AM. We HAVE to get ready for work. We HAVE to drive to work. We HAVE to start work at 8 AM, we HAVE to leave work at 5 PM, we HAVE to go to the store to get groceries on the way home, we HAVE to cook dinner, and maybe, just maybe, we will have a couple hours of time to ourselves before bed before we HAVE to get up and do it all again the next day. Why do we live life like this? THis is hell. We have made hell for ourselves, here on earth. Our lives are a busy blur of being filled with things we HAVE to do, with us only able to occasionally do things we WANT to do. It should be inverted. Everything we HAVE to do should occupy at most only a few hours of our time every day, and we should spend most of our time doing that which we WANT to do. Every hour spend doing the things we HAVE to do is an opportunity cost. it costs an hour of doing that which we WANT to do. Why do we waste our lives like this? I dont believe this nonsense from fundamentalist christianity that I am put on this planet to do trivial BS day in and day out. If I have any purpose at all, it's to tell you guys that WE SHOULDN'T BE FRICKING LIVING LIKE THIS!
And that's why I find this so disagreeable. We could either live in heaven on earth, a society in which we spend most of our time doing that which we want to do, being intelligently lazy and streamlining our lives to minimize the amount of time that we have to spend working, or we can be in hell, beating our chests about how much we work and how little sleep we get and blah blah blah and taking pride in basically being abused and sacrificing our lives doing things that dont really mean anything. I mean, I'm sorry, the protestant work ethic is nonsense. Youre wasting your lives. And due to the coercive processes thereof, you're wasting ours too, because obviously you cant just enjoy your life of christian asceticism by yourself, no you have to force it on everyone else and subject me to this nonsense too.
Why is this not our #1 issue in society? I feel like we're all brainwashed. Our time is our most important commodity and we are squandering it on pointless labor. I dont derive a sense of purpose from "work". I just see the myth of sisyphus in action, being forced to roll a rock up the hill for all eternity. And sisyphus, being aware of his fate, aint happy either. No, he's NOT happy. My internal sisyphus is SCREAMING for liberation from this nonsense.
Seriously people, if fundamentalist christianity is false, then we should not be living this way. Even if it were true, it just makes us slaves, as I would see making beings with free will then requiring them not to use it is a cruel thing for a being of infinite power to do. You kinda have a responsibility to what you intentionally create in my opinion. And if you create a sentient being that has its own feelings and free will, you should respect its freedom and independence enough to not want to beat "work ethic" into them. You think god cant make automatons to do what he wants? he's god, he can do what he wants.
Seriously, everything about this mindset is just so cruel and backwards. I cant believe we're still living like this in the 21st century. Especially when much of the 20th was based so much on reason and secularism. Seriously, somewhere along the way, we went from fantasizing about flying cars and exploring the universe to...this, and it's really fricking sad.
We are wasting our lives, and to go further, imposing this system on people is cruel and literally a form of spiritual violence. Screw work ethic, screw work, we should minimize work and maximize leisure, and any growth above the minimum to sustain our needs should be done among voluntary participants who wish to bring society forward (or for their own personal gain, as financial rewards for such a thing are still good). We shouldnt force everyone to work all the time with no end goal in mind, just endless accumulation of wealth. This is a sick system, and it needs to go. Im not gonna argue against all capitalism, I dont believe the problem is capitalism itself. I just want to see an end to the work ethic and a balance between our needs and other higher needs like the need for leisure, freedom, and time to be able to do whatever we want.
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