I feel like the point is that we shouldn't be goaded into activity for the sake of capitalism, that we should have the right to be lazy even if we never use it.
It would be nice if I could just walk out of my job for 2 weeks and get rested and refreshed and then come back like it was nothing without first having to make an appointment for said vacation and possibly take calls and deal with issues remotely the whole time, you know?
I think that's totally absurd. You're a human wherever you go, you should not be required to put aside what's important to you for most of every day, keeping your head down and paying tribute to capitalism. Work is, and should be, real life.
This (beautifully written idea) may be the point, to me.
I Don’t like to work. I Like free time. But i know more than enough people who are just unable to stay still with themselves.
Could it be that society (by emergent behaviour) has actually turned up like this (with basically mandatory work and no free time) to cope with this necessity of most people to not be still?
Russel dismisses the possibility of this being the case, but it doesn’t feel completely far fetched to me.
In that case, it’s bad news for the ones who’d work less, because the ones willing to work more will always have more power- and they’re usually not afraid to use it…
This (beautifully written idea) may be the point, to me.
I Don’t like to work. I Like free time. But i know more than enough people who are just unable to stay still with themselves.
Could it be that society (by emergent behaviour) has actually turned up like this (with basically mandatory work and no free time) to cope with this necessity of most people to not be still?
In that case, proponents of UBI etc should really review thir plan againts the fact that basically people don’t want it…
I dont know where this idea of relieving people from work came from. Humans are workers, it's a part of our being and their wouldn't be a civilisation without it.
The idea that everyone really just wants to put their feet up in a hammock and relax but these damn social constructs are keeping us tied to work is crazy. If the need to work and strive for something is taken away, I can tell you bad things will happen.
Totally agree. Many people seem to believe that having to give away the majority of our most valuable non-renewable resource in life, time, in order to actually enjoy the remainder of our time, is a fantastic system that can't be improved upon.
Sure, having to work was (and still largely is) a necessity, but we should make it unneccessary as soon as technologically possible.
We act like being forced to do something is a right/privilige instead of a burden.
Toil for toil's sake is some Sisyphean bullshit. Our goal should absolutely be to eliminate the necessity of work. If you can't find reason to live in such a scenario, you've whole-heartedly bought into Capital's propaganda, and frankly, lack imagination.
You're always free to set your own goals, and pursue them as you see fit. Hell, look at the leisure rich: They're liberated from work already. Their lives don't seem particularly miserable.
I love the idea that people’s leisure time should be judged on its productivity. Netflix? Okay but only educational stuff, otherwise it’s back to the mine with you. I mean almost literally with your last paragraph. “We’re making you work more for your own good” is a capitalist/fascist dream.
I want people to have an option not to work, because I want an option not to work. Maybe I'd like to use that time to drink myself into a stupor and write a terrible novella and pretend I'm Ernest Hemingway in a house full of alley cats. Maybe I'd like to use that time to consider a startup idea that wouldn't be big enough to pay for everything I need like healthcare and retirement, but would be otherwise an interesting project if it didn't have to meet those financial goals out of the gate in its business plan. Maybe I would like to use that time to teach young kids how to program, not as a trade, but as a means to entertainment.
You want to ascribe morality to those options, but I find the freedom to choose more interesting. It's not my job to judge which is more "productive". Maybe that novella in the end turns out to comment deeply on the human spirit, maybe those kids never use those skills "productively", maybe that startup goes bust and I return to the next plan. The moral imperative is that I should have the freedom to choose outside of the strictures of what the current job market finds productive or what government can legislate to be considered productive.
If that means there are a lot more people following the first idea and drinking themselves to a stupor, then that is a market failure. Surely the labor market can stretch to entice people to such "productive" labor if it actually has to compete for their time and energy? We use a "productive morality" to prop up a market that has never had to truly compete in the entirety of its existence. (Which is to say that labor has never been a free market.)
I find it funny, too, that you bring up religion as providing the most convincing moral imperative arguments for UBI, when in my mind it also religion, the Puritanical Zeal, that so colors the debate against UBI. The Puritans believed that men must work to appease God, that Productivity was an end to itself, a way to measure yourself before God. Why does everyone need to work so? You claim it is "society" that demands productivity and wishes to keep score, but many societies have never kept score, and have no need to keep score. It seems to me that the scars of Puritanical Zeal have simply replaced "God" with an uncaring "society" in a lot of the arguments.
(From a purely utilitarian point of view, the more people with an option not to labor under someone else's mandate, and truly choose their own path in life, presumably the greater the well being of those individuals and the overall more well being across the spectrum of that society. Individual financial self-interest is never utilitarian, you can't maximize others' happiness thinking only of your own.)
Don't forget that it comes out of the excess of those who do decide to work. I'm not confident that if this was rolled out globally, there would be enough people who really decide to "make something of their lives" to support the system. Sure, a lot of them will hate themselves if they don't, but, honestly now, how often does that stop laziness? Don't look at yourself to answer, look at the culture.
I'm on the other side from you, but not in the way the OP is...
Personally I'm against this thing where "work" is a whole separate thing outside of "life". We're not doing anything directly to benefit ourselves, we're doing random often-useless tasks to make someone else rich, just so we can be allowed to access the basic necessities of life.
I long for world where "work" means "tasks that need to be done", not "the place I go to be a slave so I can earn the magic capitalism points". I long for a world where work is directly beneficial to us. I long for a world where there's no concept of "going to work" and "coming home from work".
I really long for a world where people don't think it sounds like a good thing to have to leave home and stop acting like a human for a massive portion of the day, every day, just to earn some arbitrary pieces of paper that only benefit us because life has been turned into a commodity by the parasites who benefit from this arrangement: the shareholding class.
I often wonder what the psychological impact of this is. What does it do to us to be forced to walk on a hamster wheel for 8+ hours a day in exchange for food?
Firstly, exercising creativity is not an indulgement, it is a necessity. Just like you are not indulging yourself by drinking water or going to the toilet.
Secondly, lower class already sacrifices their hard work to indulge big corporations without societal concerns.
Just like those workers in Fritto Lays that work for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
I am not talking about taking an even larger cut from their labor and give it to someone else to sit idly. I am talking about creating the means so that people can improve themselves if they want to without worrying about not eating or feeding their families the next day.
Or you think it is ok to lock people into those inhumane conditions? If people had the possibility to leave work and seek better conditions, big corps would think twice before overworking and underpaying their employees.
My thought exactly. Fuck work, we can have a lifestyle driven by curiosity and cooperation, full of open research and celebration; Imagine constantly living like you do at hacker cons and camps.
When talking about this I often encounter people going "BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE FAT LAZY SLOBS WHO WON'T DO ANYTHING?!1!?" to which I can only reply:
What about them? So a few people will sit around and do nothing. What's so bad about that if their labor isn't needed? It's not like a few lazy people will bring about the end of our civilization…
Why do you think that people should have to do 'economically useful' things?
Surely it is one of the goals of technology and progress that we free people from the need to work. As such, any step towards this 'leisure economy' should be celebrated, rather than thinking up pointless labour for people to do.
This disincentivizes working and incentivizes not working.
Some might see that as a good thing. Being forced to do something you hate for fear of not being able to feed your family is probably not healthy for anyone involved. Imagine if that person could quit their job and spend time with their kids instead.
Imagine the passionate painter or musician being able to paint or make music full time without worrying about having to pay rent next month.
Imagine the corporate programmer being able to quit his job and work 6 month on that open source project he always wanted to do.
As someone who actively enjoys his job and looks forwards to going to work most mornings, I think it would be kind of neat if more people could feel that.
Sure some people will just use their new freedom to drink beer and watch TV all day, but perhaps those people weren't contributing too much to begin with, making the net loss minor.
The main 'down' side would be that getting people to do 'shit' jobs will get harder and more expensive, but I think that might work out to be a reasonable price to pay.
Personally I'm not really convinced the numbers add up economically to make it actually viable, but I see it as an interesting utopia.
Sure. Signing away your free time to make it work is fine. Signing away your free time into some limbo where it's still legally your free time, but your employer claims it's not yours, is not.
When free time becomes work, that should also entail a lot of responsibilities on the part of the one paying for the work (such as, for example, paying).
Re the market solving it: maybe it does solve it for you and me. The skillset we're likely to have just based on the fact that we're hanging out on HN means we have a lot of relative power. I for one want a society where also the less fortunate (=a looooot of people), and the far less fortunate, can live worthy lives.
This. I also very much get the feeling that if people weren't being kept so busy trying to pay their bills, they might actually have time to pause and reflect on the current state of the world, and the powers that be don't want that. Either keep 'em busy working, or keep 'em distracted with shiny baubles and insipid passive entertainment.
Let me be clear that this isn't an attack on those who find so much passion in their work that they spend the great majority of their waking hours at it. I applaud them, and wish that more people could find that passion. But every time someone comes along and proposes something like basic income (or heaven forbid, affordable health care) that would make the path towards true passion in work and leisure, they get shouted down.
It would be nice if I could just walk out of my job for 2 weeks and get rested and refreshed and then come back like it was nothing without first having to make an appointment for said vacation and possibly take calls and deal with issues remotely the whole time, you know?
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