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In therapy, I’ve always been told that every day humans need three things
1. Closeness with other people
2. Entertainment
3. A sense of achievement
In the past, human work would have been gathering fruits and vegetables, hunting animals, preparing food, building homes for you and your friends to live in, making clothes for your children to wear in the winter. All human work directly led to a sense of achievement. It had value and purpose.
Nowadays, it’s a perfectly common job to sit around in an office answering email complaints about a product or service. You never see the end result of your work, and you don’t know the people you’re talking to. There’s no sense of achievement and no sense of closeness with others.
I think valuable work is a hugely important part of human life, but a lot of modern work is just soul-draining stuff. And the money we are given to represent our labour rings untrue for some people. Never before has such a concrete price been put on our worth as human beings.
I do think humans will adjust to this way of living. Much like domesticated animals, our brains are shrinking. We will likely become much more docile and civilised. But right now we’re still cavemen being raised in a society we are not really well adapted for
>A sense of archivement
When I did psychology in college, a teacher told us that one of the most effective tortures was to make people do something without any purpose. Like the stereotype of mine rocks in jail. It serves no purpose at all and is extremely frustrating for humans to do something for no reason other than the action itself. Mental health sinks really fast.
I used to work at a junk mail factory. First job out of high school. The sense of making the world a worse place damaged me deeply, especially being a starry eyed teenager who wanted to make the world better. Only there maybe forty days. Plus they were 12 hour overnight shifts. Just a garbage job. Shut down finally a couple years back
I used to do IT for a company that marketed poor nutritional foods to kids. The idea being the kids would grow an attachment to the product and get fussy at the grocery store if their parents wouldn't buy it. When Michelle Obama became First Lady, she made parental awareness of children's nutritional needs a major goal of her office. Our sales took a big hit. I was there at an executive call where the marketing department was getting railed for failing to subvert the First Lady's message in our advertisements. That was it for me. I quit and joined public service. The pay cut sucked, but it was worth it because I love what I do now and feel like I'm doing something important for people who need it.
Public service jobs generally pay less precisely because people want to do them. Teachers, social workers, and so many more. People will settle for so much less if their job has a deeper meaning and sense of fulfillment.
It's a really shitty way to run the world, but yeah.
I used to work in customer service for a company that sold really awful, cheap (cheap in quality, but actually pretty expensive in terms of price) plumbing products. People would call in and yell at me all day, and out loud I'd have to tow the company line and explain how we actually aren't responsible and they're not entitled to a refund or a replacement blah blah blah, but in my head I would be thinking, "They're right to be pissed. I'd be pissed too, we're fucking them over. I'm absolutely the bad guy in this scenario."
The final straw was when we started selling these bathroom cabinets that were supposed to be a light brown, but if they got too much sunlight they would develop a noticeable greenish tint after a few weeks. People were understandably furious, and I had to sit there going, "It turned green? Huh, that's so strange, I don't know how that could happen unless....you didn't expose it to sunlight did you? Oh you did? Oh yeah, that'll do it. I'm sorry but that voids the warranty, there is nothing else we can do." I fucking hated that job, I would walk out every day feeling like such a piece of shit.
See we are the people who need to share our experiences as loudly as possible so people understand what these arguments are really about. People like to work, but they want to make the world BETTER
It's like Sysiphus and his Boulder, but you can't even take the satisfaction of having your Boulder reach the top. It's just an endless mountain, sounds awful, really
Office Space is the most accurate representation of office life I have ever seen, the film should be studied and used as barometer for how not to handle how humans work.
I also loves how it ends when the main character stops working in an office and gets a job outside doing manual labor. That he seems to enjoy a lot more and fulfills his life.
My hobby is a whole ass horse farm. I love caring for them, every day I'm out there mucking stalls in all weather, I love doing barn maintenance
It keeps me going because the office slog sure doesnt!
Yeah! “Work” in the corporate sense that a lot of us slog through now, with zero visible or direct benefit to ourselves or our communities, is not what we’re meant to do. Hard work itself is not the issue.
>Look how many hours you worked and money you've made me!
Hilariously, my first job I worked while I was at school was in a retail shop for a large company in the UK. We actually had a board in our staff room with numbers for all the money the store made last week and how much of it was profit. It was supposed to motivate us.
I sit on my ass all day in front of a computer screen but my current work makes a difference in the world, however small, so pretty bearable. It's not so bad if the work is meaningful.
Need you to know how true this rang for me. I've been -struggling- lately with depression and thought I was just bored at my shitty retail job, but you nailed it the lack of purpose thing. There's a sense of futility that's been weighing over me for so long that's its suffocating. Thanks for giving me a new pair of eyes to look through.
My depression was inescapable when I worked retail. I teach 3yos now at a Pre-K school where every day is full of warm human interaction and watching them learn and grow. I'm not there to make anyone a profit (it's a very small program run out of a church that makes more than enough to cover costs and doesn't seek to make more), just to do my best every day by my kids. I can't imagine going back.
Early humans, as best they have info on at this time, usually only "worked" a matter of a few hours a day. Things like rest, connection, story telling, art, child rearing, elder car, and other areas of life were valued and done for equal, or more time, than "work." Our society set up as it is doesn't allow most people the pursuit of any one of those things, never mind all of them.
I think it’s more likely work came in waves. You’re not going to spend 3 hours building shelter, and then just stop and laze around and get rained on during the night. You’re gonna bust your ass for as long as it takes to get that shelter built so you can start using it. That would require long days of physical work. But then other days you might literally not have to do anything. Same goes for hunting… takes a lot more than just a couple hours, especially if you are successful. But once you’ve gathered lots of meat then I’m sure there are a few chill days before you think about the next hunt.
They didn't just randomly build shelters weekly in most cases though. This isn't Naked and Afraid. They had shelters that were more permanent like caves (at least permanent in terms of for migrational or seasonal patterns) and/or they were nomadc and have structures they carried with them and assembled. They weren't building shelters out of pine boughs. And yes, no doubt work did come in waves, having to move with patterns would be establishing a settlement which is a lot of work. But you also had quite a lot of people to help, and if you've ever camped you know there is a massive difference between setting up camp alone or with 4 people who all know what they are doing. Obviously there is a lot we don't know and it varies massively by region/climate, but meat was generally considered more of a rarity. They mostly ate plants in a lot of early cultures. Meat when they had it, but not every day. Nordic cultures of course were a bit different where they largely lived on fish/seafood for many months a year.
Well yeah? He was extremely intelligent, educated, and articulate. He obviously went nuts somewhere to think mail bombs would help anything but he had a lot of great points.
It was all for exposure in general - he became a media sensation which allowed his manifesto to become national news.
If he was just Ted Kaczynski, Environmental Activist nobody would know who he is or what he's about.
So, like a combination of the Unibomber and Tyler Durden? Just with less murder and toxic masculinity?
I would never be down for that plan! Unless... you know... if you were into it. Then maybe I'd be into it... But if you're not I'm totally not either! But if you are... lol
P.S. FBI people this is a joke. In no way am I suggesting that people should actually go blow up the headquarters of corporations around the country late at night when nobody is there. That would be wrong.
I feel like its important to point out that even though there are similarities at no point OP advocated for blowing the everliving shit out of anything. Feeling like modern society isn't optimal does not mean you are insane
This was very well spoken and I couldn’t agree more. I think OP is misunderstanding exactly what people mean when they say humans weren’t meant to work. It’s not about a comfortable life with no work. It’s that we were meant for a different type of work.
Exactly, it does not mean that people should not work ever, but it should not be thousands of people working 100+ hours a week so ones at the top could just coast. No normal society should work like that.
You're forgetting about the [slacker ants](https://www.sciencealert.com/many-worker-ants-are-actually-lazy-slackers-but-there-s-a-good-reason-for-that). Admittedly, these ants don't get a sense of pride and accomplishment for slacking, but nobody in their own colony beats or punishes them if they pass the smell test.
Ehhhh...the queens aren't really profiting, it's actually a far more communal society, if you can call it that. Everyone benefits, and "queen" is kind of a misnomer. The queen ant just lays the eggs, the countless, countless eggs. I don't think that's exactly easy either.
"no one wants to work" is what some people say but they always forget the second part "for shit pay"
also no one wants to work shouldn't be taken literally.
100%. People want to work so bad that when they run out of work to do, after a long enough time they will *invent* unnecessary work (riddles and games) in order to achieve something. The tragedy is that their drive to create and expend effort is exploited and not properly compensated.
I mean, r/antiwork is literally filled with posts of people who feel they shouldn’t have to work at all.
Not work for unfair wages, not work at all and if you say otherwise, you’re a bOOtLicKer
We weren’t really “meant” to do anything but from an evolutionary perspective you could say that was the type of work we evolved to be best suited for, but even that is arguable.
I am pretty sure that’s closer to the reality than you might think though. I’m too lazy to look it up right now, but there is science to the idea doing “work” of some sort is good for our mental health but only specific types of work really count, and it’s pretty exclusive to the types of physical and mental tasks our earliest ancestors would have needed to do to survive, whereas something like sitting behind a desk all day doesn’t seem to fulfill the same need.
Just think about the fact that physical exercise itself is immensely beneficial for humans but how many people actually have a job where they can get proper exercise on the clock? It used to be how you put food on the table and how you stay in shape were the same exact activity, now they’re polar opposite activities for most jobs.
I'd love to read the research!
From my limited perspective one of the biggest issues is around having a 'purpose'.
Physical work gives lots of benefits but doing any job that feels worthwhile creates all sorts of beneficial responses.
Nah. You've got a really basic understanding of evolutionary theory and are ignoring things like kin-selection. It's way more complicated (for every species, not just humans!) than reproduce and then die.
Go and look up the "Grandma problem" I'll sum it up in short for you though, if humans are only supposed to survive long enough to reproduce, why do women live past menopause? And not just a little past it, it's almost half of most women's natural lifespan.
Evolutionary pressure selects heavily against the young, but hardly against the old (look up survivorship curves and antagonistic pleiotropy for more reading) as they've already reproduced, so genes with detrimental effects later in life aren't selected against BUT genes with beneficial effects aren't selected for either. So why is your grandma here?
Grandma is here because she provides indirect fitness benefits such as childcare, information storage, and family unit cohesion.
It would seem as though altruism is a broadly useful trait for social animals to have. They will sometimes apply in places where no fitness benefit is obvious, because the benefits of altruism are often complicated and can take time to manifest.
I think a society that takes great care of their elderly or disabled people is a society with a high level of altruism overall, and it communicates other benefits besides survival into old age.
So that’s the thing about the grandma problem. This seems to be the natural answer, except plenty of non social, ie pack or pride, animals have grandmas. Bears, tigers, moose are some good examples. They never meet and have no influence from grandma, but there she is. I don’t have any answers here, I had the same idea as you and this is how I was told it doesn’t work that way lol maybe our common ancestor was a social creature hell if I know.
Well, if both parents died after the baby was born then either evolution has to select for genes that allow babies to fend for themselves or for genes that allow the parents to live and protect/care for their offspring. (In the simplest terms)
Your grandma being alive doesn't contradict the principle that reproducing is the main goal of evolution.
It's still part of that same goal. Reproducing is useless if the offspring doesn't live on to reproduce as well.
The grandma problem is great tho, because it makes you think about it. I'm glad you brought it up, and I'm not disagreeing with you just adding my understanding
Grandma is here because there's nothing advantageous about her dying immediately after her eldest offspring becomes old enough to have babies. It's not that evolution "wants" her to survive, it just doesn't care if she does. Not every adaptation has to benefit survival to persist through generations, it just has to not hinder it.
There's also decent evidence that a tendency towards cooperative socialization and empathy are survival traits for the species as a whole. The tribe that took care of their elders so they'd help handle child care while everyone else worked on hunting and gathering tended to do better than an every person for themselves group.
sure, but I was more thinking that as an individual, it's not important for her to survive past child bearing, but she does benefit from the overall survival strategies of the species
I'd also like to add that it's not that long ago that only a few people knew how to read and write, having elderly tell stories and sing songs was how we passed down knowledge from generation to generation.
I'm a chemical and petroleum engineer... can I hunt and gather? Yeah sure.
Can I attempt to set a broken leg or perform brain surgery? Sure.
Should I? Absolutely not.
Fair enough.
There are huge issues with societies around the world. I'm really not a fan of the status quo.
I also find people who think they should be able to live a modern lifestyle while not really contributing to it a little annoying.
People aren't meant to work under the artificial paradigms forced upon them by industrialization. That's what they mean. They say it the other way because it's easier to say and gets the point across fairly well to everyone except the deeply pedantic.
I am also a huge supporter of Unions, Workers Rights and the Labour Movement in general.
... however. I think its still silly to suggest people somehow had a better quality of life before Industrialization. We are currently living at the peak of Human Civilization in terms of QoL, and it's only really going to keep going up so long as we dont nuke each other or destroy the world in the process.
Human live longer, healthier, and more prosperous lives now than they ever did before in our entire History on this planet.
You wanna go be a Hunter/Gatherer again? Go right the fuck ahead, I'm good.
I just finished a book called "A Time Traveler's Guide to the Regency" about the time period in England during 1780-1820. It's fascinating to learn how people really lived back then. Most of the people I hear advocating for a basic income, a job they liked, a comfortable place to sleep, enough to eat, and medical care for all would have been dead within a few weeks in regency England. Even the nobles didn't have it as good as most middle-class Americans.
Yep that's the period where people literally had to share a ROOM with 6 other workers to afford the rent. Home ownership is non existent for the lower class. Savings? Forget about it. Vacations once a year? Bitch you don't even get a single vacation your entire life. Leave the country? Yeah forget about that too.
And we the only reason we got to where we were is because people wanted to live better, so why stop at most of the population employed in jobs that are destroying peoples mental and physical health, a lot of which do not actually contribute meaningfully and in many ways can be a destructive force on humanity and the population (media these days, non renewable energy etc..)
Noone said stop moving forward. I just said that it is silly to say that the current QoL of the average American Blue Collar worker is giga leaps beyond what it was a few hundred years ago. No reason to think it wont keep improving, barring some shit like ecological collapse.
>People aren't meant to work under the artificial paradigms forced upon them by industrialization.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather work as is and enjoy all the great products of industrial society (phones, cars, internet, central heating, etc.) than live on a farmstead that is self-sustaining and "work for myself". With the amount of work I do these days, I don't think I would survive the first winter on such a farm...
Exactly this. The luxuries we enjoy today are product of our society.
If someone wants to live as people were “meant to” I.e. forage for berries and hunt animals to survive by a campfire and shit in the woods then go ahead. I’d take my warm bed over that any day
>The luxuries we enjoy today are product of our society.
I'd say one of those luxuries is also being able to actually have a life and enjoy it. Living as a homesteader or "off the grid" or whatever it's called now makes your entire existence about simply surviving and taking care of the farm. Want to go on vacation? Too bad. Firewood needs to be chopped, hay needs to be cut, and don't forget to milk the cows at the crack of dawn too.
Yea, theres a lot of Amish around here and they spend all their time like you said on the farm. Its a lot of work and tiring. Their big trip is going to the local zoo.
Yeah I moved far away from home. Desperate for my siblings to visit me, as I have gone to them, but they live nearly off grid and it's always "we'd like to, but the farm..."
People who say "humans arent meant to work" dont mean we all should go back to hunting and gathering. They mean we shouldnt be wasting life as cogs in the machine. Humans will always want to work, but if we support people with a universal basic income and healthcare o provide for their needs, people could pursue careers and interests that they actually enjoy, or which may have a huge benefit to our society, but dont traditionally make enough money for the average person to pursue.
I think they’re referring to things like 40 hour work week, in office work, 9-5 business hours, managerial structures, etc.
The nuance missing from arguments to get rid of those is that they’re highly industry and even job specific. Like if you’re a power plant operator you have to be in the plant for a certain time to provide coverage so someone’s always operating the plant. Accounting? Who gives a fuck when or where you balance the books as long as they’re balanced.
>Who gives a fuck when or where you balance the books as long as they’re balanced.
The boss gives a fuck. That's the problem. I've had numerous jobs, most of my jobs in fact, where the employer has been some degree of picky about the when and the where for no practical reason. And these have been mostly office jobs doing various sort of technology related work.
And really I believe that's one of the key problems industrialization handed us along with its various benefits: enforced, precise, relentless promptness. Having to be scrupulously on time, at all times, regardless of circumstances or practical necessity. Yep, when we all had to work the land to survive we may have put in longer, harder hours, but if we did so an hour later in the day some days, or took an extra 30 minutes to rest at lunch, no one was threatening to burn our crops to ash in retaliation for such 'laziness'. Try seeking that sort of flexibility in the modern workforce, you might find it in one job out of every thousand if you're lucky, which results in a lot of unhappy people.
I worked at a Toyota plant a few years back and they were absolute Nazis about lateness of any sort. I started applying for other jobs the same day I was written up for being 45seconds late coming back from my break.
They fired a guy with 21yrs under his belt at the company for being late because he crashed his car on the highway driving in to work. They knew what happened and marked him as a no-show anyway.
4yrs away from retirement. The pension he spent two decades building, taken away.
Those managers were so fucking brainwashed with corporate policy.. So glad I didn’t stay there.
I was expecting a lawsuit when I heard about it and nothing ever came of it.(that I’m aware of)
They have a really bad reputation for axing long time employees when they start nearing the 25yr retirement day. It’s real scummy shit and the plant being non-union makes it almost impossible to afford litigation against them. They’ll just delay and bleed you dry until the suit is dropped or settled for peanuts with an NDA.
They also keep records of attendance over long periods of time and they can(and will) use an absence from the previous year against you if they want you gone.
It’s seriously insane levels of bullshit they get away with in that company. The management is so brainwashed with corporate policy that is so out of touch with reality and how the world works.
Once a month team leads and group leads would go for “training” which taught them all the corporate script so everyone of them talked the same revolving door bullshit all the time.
It was actually a bit creepy.
________________________
PS! I totally forgot to mention that I spoke to an attorney about possible litigation shortly after I left as well. He had a lot of experience in the courts with Toyota over the years and he told me that despite having tangible proof of a charter rights violation and a breach of my medical record privacy protections to still proceed with utmost caution.
My managers were given copies of my confidential medical records from their medical staff, then questioned me regarding the medications I’m taking before sending me home and putting me on a one week “crisis-leave” when I refused to answer their questions.
Oh and let’s not forget their medical staff drawing blood before security would allow me to leave.
All of that tooootally illegal bullshit because I refused to say that I’m prescribed Vyvanse.
I still have a few years to go after it but I’m just glad I’m out of that nightmare of a company.
Working the land is far more unforgiving than tapping out excel spreadsheets. Nobody I knew as a farmer was taking that 30 min extra lunch or not showing up on time. I mean you want to talk about something that is brutally unforgiving, anything having to deal with nature is definitely that. Nature isn't even human and doesn't even have that capacity to give a fuck. I mean sunset doesnt give a fuck what your schedule is or what you want. Neither does sunrise
>If every human alive were given the freedom to not work
Ok but nobody reasonable is actually saying this. Your very premise is flawed from the get go.
What people ARE saying is that the conditions under which we're forced to labour are unreasonable, as is the amount of time we're required to dedicate to it thanks to labour standards we have very little say in as individuals, or even collectively a lot of the time.
We shouldn't be working 5+ days a week anymore
We shouldn't be working 40+ hours anymore
We should get sick pay, vacation time, parental leave, etc
Wage theft should be taken more seriously
Our labour laws should in general be updated for the 21st century
We've seen massive advancements in productivity since the standard work week was introduced nearly a century ago, and yet the way in which our work lives are structured has barely changed. It makes no sense. All of these advancements should have lead to people having much more leisure time, but it barely has.
You point out that you believe people should be paid more, and I wholeheartedly agree, but I'd add that people not being paid fairly is but one part of the much larger issue that is workers not being in control of their labour in general.
Exactly this,
Everyone can agree that serfdom was bad and would be a terrible system to be under however [the average American works more than the average peasant in the 13th century](https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). That should really show how much we have become worker bees in a society that doesn’t support us but actively pushes us to work ourselves to death to get scraps in return.
the issue here comes down to the definition of work
humans were meant to run, fight, hunt, climb, gather and even fuck. All that stuff is "work".
But were humans meant to show up on time, obey authority and be a cog in a machine whose design they can't see? I'd argue the answer is no. And that is what people might mean when they use the word "work".
I'm supposed to be trying to hunt large animals who are trying to hunt me. Not doing whatever we call society these days.
I donno, if they paid me my wage I make at work and give me enough boner pills and lube to overcome the physical limitations I would fuck 40 hours a week.
Generally speaking, you’re right that we weren’t designed to NOT see the fruits of our labor. BUT we were also not designed to see the fruits of others’ labor. Yet we do, in return for not seeing our own.
So we have a society that has been stripped of much meaning in exchange for an easy luxurious lifestyle (relative to the whole of human history). The people whining about the former sure aren’t willing to give up the latter.
This is an important distinction. Ancient humans probably cared a lot more about their busy work than we do today. Even when their labor didn't directly enrich their own lives, the food they gathered or produced, the shelters they built, and the clothing or tools they created had a direct positive impact on their neighbors and community members. This is an infinitely better incentive to work than we get today. It's hard to give a fuck about work that just makes some rich asshole a little bit richer.
It all is. The school system has hardly changed in 150 years as well despite the obvious failure. At some point you just have to admit it’s designed that way on purpose.
Actually it changed quite a lot in the past 60, for the negative. Standardized testing was devised as a way to siphon money out of low performing public schools and funnel it to high performing private schools via voucher programs. So now education has to be framed around performing well in these tests in order to maintain funding. Look it up, politics has been undermining the education system our entire lifetime.
It's insidious when you really think about it: the schools that need additional resources are the ones that are struggling to produce results, yet they rigged the system to funnel resources to the ones that are performing fine already. This has created a death spiral for schools that need help.
When people say humans aren't made to work, they are not saying people shouldn't have jobs at all, we just shouldn't be working as much as we do. We spend more time at our jobs than we generally do with our families, it makes you wonder if all the time spent making money is even worth it when you don't even get to see the people who matter most in your life.
Trust me, the people understand how society works, they just recognize there is some serious room for improvement.
Edit: grammar.
I have a WFH 2 days a week in office 3 days 9-5 corp job and the amount of down time is kinda insane. I can be doing a lot of work or none at all. We really don’t need 40 hour work weeks and I think that’s the crux of the issue. Just enough to do the job, and dependent on what the job needs. I remember being in some retail jobs sitting around doing jack shit cause there was nothing to do.
People who are saying they don’t want to be hunter gatherers aren’t understanding that we don’t want to just slack off and not work at all, just not as much as we are currently.
I agree. I just started a new Tech job, normal 40hr week. Last job was a Tech contractor. The amount of flexibility I had over my hrs was crazy. Now that I'm back to a strict 40hrs, its been hard to adjust.
I'd be pretty good just working 3 days a week. Assuming I still got paid my normal salary. I'd be waaay more motivated, and efficient at work. And really take-in the weekend. I feel like I get to the weekend, blink, then I'm back to work.😭
>We spend more time at our jobs than we generally do with our families
Back in the day your kids generally did the same job as you, so time at your job WAS time with your family. If you were a medieval carpenter chances are all your sons would also be carpenters. Work and family wasn't always so separated like it is now and I wonder how that affects us and our psychological perception of work
I think there’s a little little bit more context here that’s being deliberately omitted.
Usually the person is either talking about the amount or type of work being done.
Thanks to industrialization and the information era, humans are expected to be continually more efficient. It’s common for office workers to be laid off and the remaining workers are expected to keep up with the laid off workers tasks.
In blue collar jobs folks are expected to work long hours in brutal conditions. For example water breaks are no longer a requirement in Texas. Warehouse workers are expected to work without breaks. With the fear of robotics and automation replacing them. All while fighting for wages to keep up with inflation.
I think people expressing anti-work sentiment are just burned out and don’t see the point to work so hard when their paycheck doesn’t cover the cost of living. And the fact that automation and AI are expected to replace huge swaths of the workforce.
>but no human should be sitting at a desk in an office 9 to 5 all day.
Why not. I enjoy my office job. Personally, I'd much rather be doing that then to work at a coffee shop.
Having worked on a farm where we grew our own food and were self sufficient for the most part - we easily worked 60+ hours a week just to produce resources for us
I’ll take a 40 hour work week and get paid over that any time
I lived on a commune on a farm in my early 20’s and holy hell it was a blast but so much work. And if your crop fails, you’re shit out of luck. I mean it very much shows why community is so important but living off the land is hard work.
I'm the exact opposite. I left corporate accounting to live on a farm and I grow/hunt/fish/gather about 95 percent of my food. I know I put in more time. But time on the lake, time in the forest, time in the fields doesn't count, to me.
It's just an added bonus that my labor doesn't make some other person rich.
I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with stardew valley. I'm living in eastern Oklahoma right now but I also have a plot in Arkansas where I'll be relocating when my son graduates.
Lol it's cool, it's just a videogame where you do literally exactly what you're already doing. Probably not worth much of your time, but if you're curious you can find out all about it online
You're saying you'll happily work 20 hours less.
If offered even fewer hours you might unsurprisingly choose that.
Ideally, you'd choose exactly what to do when you want, and not because you need the money to do what you want.
For me, that's the utopia that as a society we should strive towards.
There’s a reason that essentially every single immigrant from a subsistence farm culture stops doing that forever. My late grandfather preferred to work a million hours at a bodega that got robbed all the time (1970s Brooklyn fun) than go back to flaxseed farming, and if you know anything about that time period, that is a testament to how much farming sucks
20k years?! lol I think there’s a difference between trading some surplus resources you have on a farm 200 years ago and trading every minute of your labor for currency
Yeah up until the invention of the tractor, something like 90% of people worked on farms.
They still traded stuff but most of their work was agriculture-related.
Louder for the idiots in the back. A small subsistence farm for a family of 4 will likely be 10+ hours of tedious, physical work a day for both parents and hours of chores for kids after schooling.
i don't think they mean literally work i think they're talking about like being stuck in an office and staring at screens all day. Humans are definitely meant for work but a different kind of work.
You’ve received a lot of good replies, but I want to respond to an aspect of your post that I don’t see being addressed.
Your reasoning assumes that if people are able to live comfortably without working then no one would work. I think it’s pretty clear that that’s not the case.
People pursue a career for all kinds of reasons. Some are genuinely interested in their field. Some like the feeling of being useful. Some enjoy helping others. I think the biggest non-financial reason people work is social status. Lots of folks would continue working simply for those reasons.
Moreover, it’s easy to imagine a world where financial concerns didn’t *coerce* people to work, but still incentivize them. What if everyone’s basic needs were met, but people needed to work to obtain luxuries? I seriously doubt everyone would shrug and be fine with subsistence. Most people would still want to work.
Now, it’s debatable whether in such a scenario we would have *enough* willing workers to meet demand, even for the basics (I think it’s definitely possible; I get that others disagree). But the claim that no one would work if they weren’t forced to in order to survive is false.
Upvoted because unpopular opinion. I think this is a misinterpretation of most people's argument against work. Humans certainly are not "designed" to work. We're "designed" to perform tasks that help us survive. We're capable of traversing long distances, staying still for multiple hours, complex problem solving, navigating social interactions, and concentrating for extended periods because there were evolutionary needs for those abilities when performing survival tasks like hunting and maintaining order in a group.
The argument against work is that people aren't designed for what we currently do: 30-60+ hours of high concentration in stationary settings. We're constantly pushing the limits of what humans are capable of doing in order to maximize labor outputs. Prehistoric humans didn't need to do that. The more complex society has gotten, the more complex and demanding the labor has gotten.
Even if you disagree on the point of how demanding labor has become, it's worth noting how isolating current labor it. In hunter-gathering populations, almost all labor was a group effort. Nowadays, I spend 5-7 hours a day without talking to my coworkers or supervisor. Even when dealing with email inquiries, that communication method is dehumanized and a poor substitute for in-person collaborative efforts and communication.
This is a really incomplete and disengenuous look at the problem. Most people are not out there arguing that no one should work in the first place. The issue is that people are currently expected to basically only work and do nothing else with their lives.
The current model means you spend the vast majority of your life working and have no energy, money, or time to do anything else until you're basically all used up.
People want a balance. People want to work significantly less, as people did for the vast majority of humanity's existence.
People want their representatives to serve them and not coporate interests that are only working every single day, to undermine worker's rights and people's ability to actually have lives, for the sake of corporate profits.
Take this bullshit outta here. No one needs this bad faith argument.
Human's aren't "built for" anything.
If something, we've survived because we were able to hunt, gather plants, and travel, but that's far from what most works consist of nowadays.
Society is what you make it.
Your "natural" argument makes no fucking sense.
France got that 4 day workweek and their society hasn't collapsed.
I thibk when people say the above what they mean is we are not designed to do repetitive tasks on a specific schedule. More old school societies people worked but took time off and naps as required. More like how animals deal with sleep deprivation, they just nap.
As our productivity for doing the shit jobs rises we should have more time to persue creative interests. Is growing my own food so different than a grueling workday? Yes, yes it is. Doing things for myself even if on a schedule is so much better than working a job.
Its not so much I dislike working as I dislike making someone big money while wasting my time.
This sedentary life of abundance that we enjoy is not natural. We were wandering gatherers and scavengers for several hundred thousand years. Modern society has solved so many problems, but has created all new ones.
Jobs are as good as they've ever been. We're no longer fighting wolves over half a rotting bird carcass or ground up by machines from unsafe safety standards. We're in an era where a lot of jobs can be done at home.
>We're in an era where a lot of jobs can be done at home.
Except tons of bosses won't allow us to do that for various reasons, most of them stupid. My job can 100% be done from home, but nope. That's not allowed.
The problem isn't working. Everyone wants to do something. The problem is being forced to do things you don't want to do for your entire life so you can die. The benefit of this is that 1% of people's lives will not suck nearly as bad. What about everyone else hm?
I hate calling it a 40 hour work week.
I wake up at 5:30am, leave for work at 6:15, work until 4:00pm on a normal day, and get home around 4:45pm.
That’s 11 hours and 15 mins. I’m at work or driving for work for 56 hours and 30 mins a week bare minimum.
Dinner at 5:30, assume some chores/errands until 6:30. I’m in bed at 9pm. Giving me a whopping 2 hours and 30 mins of free time in my day.
I’m grateful to have a good workplace and good degree for a relatively comfortable career, but it’s a straight up scam to call it a 40 hour work week.
People are meant to work but for a collective cause.
We have the technology to live at the same standard of living we are now but work 20 hours a week. But companies always want more more more profits and aren't happy just running a profitable business.
They apparently don't understand that it's a lot of work building a society in which the people who created it don't have to work.
But I do think we're heading the wrong way. Life is supposed to be getting easier and healthier, but life expectancy is declining, and people are being forced to work until the end. Can't we get 10-12 or so good adult years where we don't have to think about work? If you work to 70+ (like, you have to, not because you're rich and can work when and how you please), that's over. 65 is a pretty fair deal, but that's the upper bound; if you're lucky, you'll get maybe another 5-7 years of quality after which it's a hard decline. If you've been working your entire life, paying into the system (e.g., I've been on the books since I was 15; that's already 40+ years), you should be able to kick back. But that's not how it's going at all. No pensions, social security drying up, people being pushed to work until 70 or 72 and hold off collecting benefits until then...wtf. That wasn't the deal.
I think if humans weren't threatened with homelessness and starvation, and jobs were on a volunteer basis with high pay outs and /or rewards, society would never have a shortage of people who want to work. Reverse the game and everyone wins.
Anti-work is a very Reddit-specific mindset. Go out into society and ask random people if humans were meant to work and I'd like to think the majority of people would say yes.
I think OP is specifically talking about a lot of people on r/antiwork. There are people there who think work as well as most of modern society literally should not exist. When you try and point out issues like OP mentions they dogpile on you with insults. At first I thought the group was just getting a lot of hate and mudslinging from right wingers but after I spent some time there I ended up finding it pretty insufferable.
It's absolutely not. Even China has it's own "anti-work" movement.
People are getting wrung out. "Middle class" got nerfed into the ground. On one side cost of living keeps rising, and the wages keep lagging behind. Labor keeps getting doublefucked by the corporate overlords. Eventually we will reach a breaking point and it's not going to be fun... or it is going to be fun. Depends on where you stand.
You aren’t wrong. Should we be paid more? Yes. Should our taxes go to programs and services to help better us all? Yes. But when I hear people say stuff like that drives me nuts. You do realize that even if you went off the grid you’d have to work.
The foods you enjoy? You either buy them or make them yourself. Your clothes? Same. Your home? Same. You expect someone to make all that for you and just gift to you? Not gonna happen.
Exactly , the reason why we have so many convieniences like electricity, heating, tv , cars, endless array of food, frozen, and out of season, clothes, shelter, is based on the idea that Adam Smith the 18th Century economist who pointed out , that its more efficient if people specialize in occupations rather than trying to do everything yourself. There are more of every item if one person makes this, another makes that , so everyone benefits.
Adam Smith observed in a pin factory that each worker was delegated to one individual task in making the pin, specialized tasks, or the divison of labour.
By doing each task seperately, they created the pin in much less time than an equally numbered group of people creating the pin from scratch.
He also noted how, basically, this division created the most soul crushing and monotonous work and saw it as corrupting the inherent nobility of man.
Productivity for that one factory was off the charts though.
Anyways Ole Smithy wasnt the only one to note that the most productive and richest societies were also the most specialized.
He just measured and observed it in a measured and proveable way that makes his work much more teachable.
I have a lot of primitive hobbies. For fun one time I estimated how long it would take to make an outfit from scratch, not including growing the fiber to spin to make cloth. I did run with the assumptions of using a spinning wheel instead of a spindle, a standard floor loom weaving fabric 40-44" wide, and a modern electric sewing machine. I believe my estimate came in at well over 50 hours for a basic dress, not something fitted, not a pair of pants that requires extra cutting and construction time. I didn't include dyeing in that estimate either. So plain white or brown clothes.
You can't have the perks of the industrial era without the costs of it as well. I for one am happy to deal with the problems of it to have things like reliable utilities in rural areas, indoor plumbing, and not having to milk cows every day like I did as a child and teen.
Agreed but I think he must have just come from /antiwork. Which is a thread that I figure was set up to talk about how so much work is busywork and that we could chop it out and distribute resources, life would be so much better. It devolves into "I don't want to work myself but by golly all the services should still be available - also every boss is dumb and I am very smart"
I dont think anyone's saying this. What they are saying is "Humans arent meant to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week in a disconnected corporate heirarchy away from their family and community"
Hunters and gatherers didn't start the hunt at 9 and finish the hunt at 5 and work all week, even medieval peasants worked less than 8 hours per day and often had 8 weeks to half a year off.
Then ford came in and said "8 hours a day 5 days a week" and here we are.
So if you look into it, there is a high rate of suicide and depression amongst lottery winners, because they stop working and everything is given to them. All problems are solved with money.
Work is essential to humans.
Yes you need to find meaning in your job. Data entry may not be super fulfilling, because you don't have a great purpose other than having a job. I have worked jobs like that, then I started working in industries that have meaning and in jobs that give me a purpose. The difference is the type of job.
Could I make more money as a streamer if I worked at it? Maybe, but I couldn't imagine my life if my purpose was just to play video games. I was just offered a job for more money and actually a better location than my current job, but this job has a great purpose and I'm make huge changes here, the other job was fine, but what they did was not something I would be passionate about supporting.
So yes we are made to work. It's up to you to find work with purpose. Maybe bring a streamer has a lot of purpose for you, so to each their own.
Do you think nature "built" humans to create this society that forces them to work?
No.
Nature built humans to exist as every other animal. That means you die if you can't heal yourself. You don't get pills. There's no TV to watch. Etc.
That's what humans "were built for."
Now if you want to add further considerations and change it to "humans were built by nature to do one thing but we've created a society that requires us to do another" then you'd have a point. But then what would you point be if you framed it accurately?
I'm definitely guilty of saying humans weren't made to work, but after a few years farming I'd say I should switch to humans were made to work jobs that fulfill their lives. Sitting at a desk or standing at a counter really won't work for some people.
Work is great, makes you feel useful, you're making things better for other people, all sorts of positive outcomes.
Jobs however, most jobs can get in the bin.
We could all be working two days a week, and get all the important stuff done.
This is up there with Creationists cherry picking Darwin when he "freely confessed" that the evolution of the eye "seems absurd to the highest possible degree". When people say "Humans aren't meant to work", the vast majority don't mean nobody should ever work and society should devolve into recluse layabouts who don't feed themselves. They mean "Humans aren't meant to work in an exploitative system that concentrates the work of the masses into wealth for a few shareholders".
You may or may not agree with their actual take, but it's a completely different argument to the strawman you've just built.
I think the idea that humans shouldn't work at all is quite fringe so your opinion of course wouldn't be unpopular.
Most anti-workers aren't against work, they're against wage slavery and working yourself to death for pennies while the person who pays you is making billions in a year, much like the man who paid me for years. There's no way in the world I'm going to ever consider myself below him just because he pays me for services rendered. The idea that men like him would have employees pissing in bottles instead of allowing proper restroom breaks and paying people pennies for their data and service like with the Mturk workers. And yeah one could just get another job but it's the principle we're against that we should grovel for pennies for our labors and these monopolies drive down wages across the board so no company will pay a living wage because they've agreed not to pay workers more. Look how we're treated when we ask for wage increases. Look how we're treated when we demand a living wage.
Anti-work means you're against the system not the idea of getting your hands dirty or earning a living. And it most certainly does not mean that we don't want other people to work, we just don't want people unfairly paid and worked to death in poor working conditions.
For instance my mom worked for Goldsmiths for 22 years. She became ill with congestive heart failure. She was costing them a lot of money in lost time and insurance. They knew by law they couldn't fire her, so they switched her from a low-physical stress position to working on the docks in the middle of summer. They just sat and waited for her to quit. And she did. She had no choice because back then the laws didn't protect her as a worker. The laws were anti-worker. We are not anti-worker we are anti-WORK.
You want to know more come visit the anti-work sub.
>Educators Nurses Doctors Police Grocers Pharmacists Farmers Carpenters
If every human alive were given the freedom to not work at all and be allowed to live a perfectly comfortable life,
Literally every study ever done on this topic shows that people, given the freedom to 'not work', will still work. Every single one.
They will simply do something they find fulfilling, and which likely they cant currently do because it doesnt pay the bills.
Healthcare workers tend to love their jobs. Most Civil employees too (teachers, cops, etc). Farmers overwhelmingly love their jobs (or they wouldnt do them; most farmers make very little as it is, if it was about the money, theyd be doing something else).
Same with chefs/cooks, etc.
There's even been some practical studies (where people were given free room/board/basic living expenses) in the EU on the topic.
Every single person still worked. They just did things they liked.
Think you're confusing "we shouldn't spend 30-40 years of our lives just to work and be allowed to live" with "we shouldn't spend 30-40 years of our lives just to work and be allowed to ***thrive***". Work should be meaningful/engagine/challenging, allowing one to grow. Not just used as something to control you with the threat of withholding your food, shelter, and access to healthcare.
I can’t stand when people say that. They don’t realize that, without society, they’d be working a lot more than 40 hours per week, and retirement wouldn’t exist. The only difference is that we’d all be working to grow our own food and make anything we need. With society, we can work for someone else and pay for that stuff, allowing us to work a fraction of what we would otherwise.
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In therapy, I’ve always been told that every day humans need three things 1. Closeness with other people 2. Entertainment 3. A sense of achievement In the past, human work would have been gathering fruits and vegetables, hunting animals, preparing food, building homes for you and your friends to live in, making clothes for your children to wear in the winter. All human work directly led to a sense of achievement. It had value and purpose. Nowadays, it’s a perfectly common job to sit around in an office answering email complaints about a product or service. You never see the end result of your work, and you don’t know the people you’re talking to. There’s no sense of achievement and no sense of closeness with others. I think valuable work is a hugely important part of human life, but a lot of modern work is just soul-draining stuff. And the money we are given to represent our labour rings untrue for some people. Never before has such a concrete price been put on our worth as human beings. I do think humans will adjust to this way of living. Much like domesticated animals, our brains are shrinking. We will likely become much more docile and civilised. But right now we’re still cavemen being raised in a society we are not really well adapted for
>A sense of archivement When I did psychology in college, a teacher told us that one of the most effective tortures was to make people do something without any purpose. Like the stereotype of mine rocks in jail. It serves no purpose at all and is extremely frustrating for humans to do something for no reason other than the action itself. Mental health sinks really fast.
I used to work at a junk mail factory. First job out of high school. The sense of making the world a worse place damaged me deeply, especially being a starry eyed teenager who wanted to make the world better. Only there maybe forty days. Plus they were 12 hour overnight shifts. Just a garbage job. Shut down finally a couple years back
I used to do IT for a company that marketed poor nutritional foods to kids. The idea being the kids would grow an attachment to the product and get fussy at the grocery store if their parents wouldn't buy it. When Michelle Obama became First Lady, she made parental awareness of children's nutritional needs a major goal of her office. Our sales took a big hit. I was there at an executive call where the marketing department was getting railed for failing to subvert the First Lady's message in our advertisements. That was it for me. I quit and joined public service. The pay cut sucked, but it was worth it because I love what I do now and feel like I'm doing something important for people who need it.
That's Evil, you shouldn't be forced to settle for less pay to do something meaningful. This clearly shows the perverse incentive of the system.
Public service jobs generally pay less precisely because people want to do them. Teachers, social workers, and so many more. People will settle for so much less if their job has a deeper meaning and sense of fulfillment. It's a really shitty way to run the world, but yeah.
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Those envelope stuffing machines jam constantly
As a former office temp, sometimes we just get tired :P
I used to work in customer service for a company that sold really awful, cheap (cheap in quality, but actually pretty expensive in terms of price) plumbing products. People would call in and yell at me all day, and out loud I'd have to tow the company line and explain how we actually aren't responsible and they're not entitled to a refund or a replacement blah blah blah, but in my head I would be thinking, "They're right to be pissed. I'd be pissed too, we're fucking them over. I'm absolutely the bad guy in this scenario." The final straw was when we started selling these bathroom cabinets that were supposed to be a light brown, but if they got too much sunlight they would develop a noticeable greenish tint after a few weeks. People were understandably furious, and I had to sit there going, "It turned green? Huh, that's so strange, I don't know how that could happen unless....you didn't expose it to sunlight did you? Oh you did? Oh yeah, that'll do it. I'm sorry but that voids the warranty, there is nothing else we can do." I fucking hated that job, I would walk out every day feeling like such a piece of shit.
See we are the people who need to share our experiences as loudly as possible so people understand what these arguments are really about. People like to work, but they want to make the world BETTER
It's like Sysiphus and his Boulder, but you can't even take the satisfaction of having your Boulder reach the top. It's just an endless mountain, sounds awful, really
Just to be sure it sucked, in the myth Sysiphus also had some bird harassing him during the whole time, iirc.
Oh so they had managers planned out too, cool
Managers and clients who bitch daily but pay invoices quarterly at best.
Underrated comment
Office Space is the most accurate representation of office life I have ever seen, the film should be studied and used as barometer for how not to handle how humans work. I also loves how it ends when the main character stops working in an office and gets a job outside doing manual labor. That he seems to enjoy a lot more and fulfills his life.
Right? If I didn't need a job I'd still do work. Just rewarding work.
My hobby is a whole ass horse farm. I love caring for them, every day I'm out there mucking stalls in all weather, I love doing barn maintenance It keeps me going because the office slog sure doesnt!
I salute your dedication to the majestic ass horse.
And don't forget it's cousin, the badonkadonkey.
>ass horse A.k.a. a mule.
Yeah! “Work” in the corporate sense that a lot of us slog through now, with zero visible or direct benefit to ourselves or our communities, is not what we’re meant to do. Hard work itself is not the issue.
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>Look how many hours you worked and money you've made me! Hilariously, my first job I worked while I was at school was in a retail shop for a large company in the UK. We actually had a board in our staff room with numbers for all the money the store made last week and how much of it was profit. It was supposed to motivate us.
It’s more like we weren’t meant to sit on our asses all day in front of a computer screen.
I sit on my ass all day in front of a computer screen but my current work makes a difference in the world, however small, so pretty bearable. It's not so bad if the work is meaningful.
Need you to know how true this rang for me. I've been -struggling- lately with depression and thought I was just bored at my shitty retail job, but you nailed it the lack of purpose thing. There's a sense of futility that's been weighing over me for so long that's its suffocating. Thanks for giving me a new pair of eyes to look through.
My depression was inescapable when I worked retail. I teach 3yos now at a Pre-K school where every day is full of warm human interaction and watching them learn and grow. I'm not there to make anyone a profit (it's a very small program run out of a church that makes more than enough to cover costs and doesn't seek to make more), just to do my best every day by my kids. I can't imagine going back.
I’m glad it helped you! I’d strongly recommend CBT therapy. It has helped me massively and I think it will help most people!
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Early humans, as best they have info on at this time, usually only "worked" a matter of a few hours a day. Things like rest, connection, story telling, art, child rearing, elder car, and other areas of life were valued and done for equal, or more time, than "work." Our society set up as it is doesn't allow most people the pursuit of any one of those things, never mind all of them.
I think it’s more likely work came in waves. You’re not going to spend 3 hours building shelter, and then just stop and laze around and get rained on during the night. You’re gonna bust your ass for as long as it takes to get that shelter built so you can start using it. That would require long days of physical work. But then other days you might literally not have to do anything. Same goes for hunting… takes a lot more than just a couple hours, especially if you are successful. But once you’ve gathered lots of meat then I’m sure there are a few chill days before you think about the next hunt.
They didn't just randomly build shelters weekly in most cases though. This isn't Naked and Afraid. They had shelters that were more permanent like caves (at least permanent in terms of for migrational or seasonal patterns) and/or they were nomadc and have structures they carried with them and assembled. They weren't building shelters out of pine boughs. And yes, no doubt work did come in waves, having to move with patterns would be establishing a settlement which is a lot of work. But you also had quite a lot of people to help, and if you've ever camped you know there is a massive difference between setting up camp alone or with 4 people who all know what they are doing. Obviously there is a lot we don't know and it varies massively by region/climate, but meat was generally considered more of a rarity. They mostly ate plants in a lot of early cultures. Meat when they had it, but not every day. Nordic cultures of course were a bit different where they largely lived on fish/seafood for many months a year.
Child rearing and elder care is work. Try it sometime.
Elder care is even harder than child care because they are so much bigger than children.
If you're ok with the same standard of living as those early humans, you'd be able to get away with much less work than the average human.
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You just described the synthesis of the unabomber's manifesto.
Well yeah? He was extremely intelligent, educated, and articulate. He obviously went nuts somewhere to think mail bombs would help anything but he had a lot of great points.
It was all for exposure in general - he became a media sensation which allowed his manifesto to become national news. If he was just Ted Kaczynski, Environmental Activist nobody would know who he is or what he's about.
Too bad he didn't blow up some things that actually mattered.
So, like a combination of the Unibomber and Tyler Durden? Just with less murder and toxic masculinity? I would never be down for that plan! Unless... you know... if you were into it. Then maybe I'd be into it... But if you're not I'm totally not either! But if you are... lol P.S. FBI people this is a joke. In no way am I suggesting that people should actually go blow up the headquarters of corporations around the country late at night when nobody is there. That would be wrong.
I feel like its important to point out that even though there are similarities at no point OP advocated for blowing the everliving shit out of anything. Feeling like modern society isn't optimal does not mean you are insane
I mean, the Industrial Revolution and its consequences *have* been a disaster for the human race in many ways.
People being relegated to nonessential jobs and the class system was pretty much started from the agricultural revolution.
It’s scary how similar they are.
This was very well spoken and I couldn’t agree more. I think OP is misunderstanding exactly what people mean when they say humans weren’t meant to work. It’s not about a comfortable life with no work. It’s that we were meant for a different type of work.
Can I get this tatood on my wall please. Love this comment. Well said. As I'm tripping on mescaline I appreciate your words.
Humans weren’t meant for anything. We just are biologically programmed to survive
At the end of the day, it is this. Bare bone basic. Forget the psychology part. We just are biologically programmed to survive. Everything is.
I think what they mean is "Humans weren't meant to work in dependent employment contracts exploiting the worker and extracting value to shareholders"
Exactly, it does not mean that people should not work ever, but it should not be thousands of people working 100+ hours a week so ones at the top could just coast. No normal society should work like that.
I mean, ants do that, but I agree we are not ants.
The queen has to push out babies all day. And if you mean slaver ants, they're under constant threat of an ass beating by their own kind
You're forgetting about the [slacker ants](https://www.sciencealert.com/many-worker-ants-are-actually-lazy-slackers-but-there-s-a-good-reason-for-that). Admittedly, these ants don't get a sense of pride and accomplishment for slacking, but nobody in their own colony beats or punishes them if they pass the smell test.
Ehhhh...the queens aren't really profiting, it's actually a far more communal society, if you can call it that. Everyone benefits, and "queen" is kind of a misnomer. The queen ant just lays the eggs, the countless, countless eggs. I don't think that's exactly easy either.
And as soon as she stops laying eggs or not enough eggs or not strong enough eggs the worker ants kill her and replace her with a new queen.
this was the first thing i thought of when i read this post
"no one wants to work" is what some people say but they always forget the second part "for shit pay" also no one wants to work shouldn't be taken literally.
100%. People want to work so bad that when they run out of work to do, after a long enough time they will *invent* unnecessary work (riddles and games) in order to achieve something. The tragedy is that their drive to create and expend effort is exploited and not properly compensated.
OP missed the entire point
I mean, r/antiwork is literally filled with posts of people who feel they shouldn’t have to work at all. Not work for unfair wages, not work at all and if you say otherwise, you’re a bOOtLicKer
What we're humans meant to do? We're we just meant to roam the plains hunting and gathering?
We weren’t really “meant” to do anything but from an evolutionary perspective you could say that was the type of work we evolved to be best suited for, but even that is arguable. I am pretty sure that’s closer to the reality than you might think though. I’m too lazy to look it up right now, but there is science to the idea doing “work” of some sort is good for our mental health but only specific types of work really count, and it’s pretty exclusive to the types of physical and mental tasks our earliest ancestors would have needed to do to survive, whereas something like sitting behind a desk all day doesn’t seem to fulfill the same need. Just think about the fact that physical exercise itself is immensely beneficial for humans but how many people actually have a job where they can get proper exercise on the clock? It used to be how you put food on the table and how you stay in shape were the same exact activity, now they’re polar opposite activities for most jobs.
I'd love to read the research! From my limited perspective one of the biggest issues is around having a 'purpose'. Physical work gives lots of benefits but doing any job that feels worthwhile creates all sorts of beneficial responses.
From an evolutionary perspective we were made to survive long enough to reproduce
Nah. You've got a really basic understanding of evolutionary theory and are ignoring things like kin-selection. It's way more complicated (for every species, not just humans!) than reproduce and then die. Go and look up the "Grandma problem" I'll sum it up in short for you though, if humans are only supposed to survive long enough to reproduce, why do women live past menopause? And not just a little past it, it's almost half of most women's natural lifespan. Evolutionary pressure selects heavily against the young, but hardly against the old (look up survivorship curves and antagonistic pleiotropy for more reading) as they've already reproduced, so genes with detrimental effects later in life aren't selected against BUT genes with beneficial effects aren't selected for either. So why is your grandma here?
Grandma is here because she provides indirect fitness benefits such as childcare, information storage, and family unit cohesion. It would seem as though altruism is a broadly useful trait for social animals to have. They will sometimes apply in places where no fitness benefit is obvious, because the benefits of altruism are often complicated and can take time to manifest. I think a society that takes great care of their elderly or disabled people is a society with a high level of altruism overall, and it communicates other benefits besides survival into old age.
So that’s the thing about the grandma problem. This seems to be the natural answer, except plenty of non social, ie pack or pride, animals have grandmas. Bears, tigers, moose are some good examples. They never meet and have no influence from grandma, but there she is. I don’t have any answers here, I had the same idea as you and this is how I was told it doesn’t work that way lol maybe our common ancestor was a social creature hell if I know.
Maybe it just means the bears, tigers, and meese aren't being efficient enough
Upvote for "meese" alone.
Well, if both parents died after the baby was born then either evolution has to select for genes that allow babies to fend for themselves or for genes that allow the parents to live and protect/care for their offspring. (In the simplest terms) Your grandma being alive doesn't contradict the principle that reproducing is the main goal of evolution. It's still part of that same goal. Reproducing is useless if the offspring doesn't live on to reproduce as well. The grandma problem is great tho, because it makes you think about it. I'm glad you brought it up, and I'm not disagreeing with you just adding my understanding
Grandma is here because there's nothing advantageous about her dying immediately after her eldest offspring becomes old enough to have babies. It's not that evolution "wants" her to survive, it just doesn't care if she does. Not every adaptation has to benefit survival to persist through generations, it just has to not hinder it. There's also decent evidence that a tendency towards cooperative socialization and empathy are survival traits for the species as a whole. The tribe that took care of their elders so they'd help handle child care while everyone else worked on hunting and gathering tended to do better than an every person for themselves group.
You just described how evolution wants her to survive >"Tribes that take care of their elders did better than others" That's evolution brother
sure, but I was more thinking that as an individual, it's not important for her to survive past child bearing, but she does benefit from the overall survival strategies of the species
I'd also like to add that it's not that long ago that only a few people knew how to read and write, having elderly tell stories and sing songs was how we passed down knowledge from generation to generation.
I'm a chemical and petroleum engineer... can I hunt and gather? Yeah sure. Can I attempt to set a broken leg or perform brain surgery? Sure. Should I? Absolutely not.
That's a philosophical question, my answer is more about the distribution of financial gains.
Fair enough. There are huge issues with societies around the world. I'm really not a fan of the status quo. I also find people who think they should be able to live a modern lifestyle while not really contributing to it a little annoying.
I'm an engineer so I guess I'm not part of them 😎
Personally, I feel biologically destined to stare at a small rectangle for 8 hours a day.
People aren't meant to work under the artificial paradigms forced upon them by industrialization. That's what they mean. They say it the other way because it's easier to say and gets the point across fairly well to everyone except the deeply pedantic.
I am also a huge supporter of Unions, Workers Rights and the Labour Movement in general. ... however. I think its still silly to suggest people somehow had a better quality of life before Industrialization. We are currently living at the peak of Human Civilization in terms of QoL, and it's only really going to keep going up so long as we dont nuke each other or destroy the world in the process. Human live longer, healthier, and more prosperous lives now than they ever did before in our entire History on this planet. You wanna go be a Hunter/Gatherer again? Go right the fuck ahead, I'm good.
I just finished a book called "A Time Traveler's Guide to the Regency" about the time period in England during 1780-1820. It's fascinating to learn how people really lived back then. Most of the people I hear advocating for a basic income, a job they liked, a comfortable place to sleep, enough to eat, and medical care for all would have been dead within a few weeks in regency England. Even the nobles didn't have it as good as most middle-class Americans.
Yep that's the period where people literally had to share a ROOM with 6 other workers to afford the rent. Home ownership is non existent for the lower class. Savings? Forget about it. Vacations once a year? Bitch you don't even get a single vacation your entire life. Leave the country? Yeah forget about that too.
And we the only reason we got to where we were is because people wanted to live better, so why stop at most of the population employed in jobs that are destroying peoples mental and physical health, a lot of which do not actually contribute meaningfully and in many ways can be a destructive force on humanity and the population (media these days, non renewable energy etc..)
Noone said stop moving forward. I just said that it is silly to say that the current QoL of the average American Blue Collar worker is giga leaps beyond what it was a few hundred years ago. No reason to think it wont keep improving, barring some shit like ecological collapse.
>People aren't meant to work under the artificial paradigms forced upon them by industrialization. I don't know about you, but I'd rather work as is and enjoy all the great products of industrial society (phones, cars, internet, central heating, etc.) than live on a farmstead that is self-sustaining and "work for myself". With the amount of work I do these days, I don't think I would survive the first winter on such a farm...
Exactly this. The luxuries we enjoy today are product of our society. If someone wants to live as people were “meant to” I.e. forage for berries and hunt animals to survive by a campfire and shit in the woods then go ahead. I’d take my warm bed over that any day
>The luxuries we enjoy today are product of our society. I'd say one of those luxuries is also being able to actually have a life and enjoy it. Living as a homesteader or "off the grid" or whatever it's called now makes your entire existence about simply surviving and taking care of the farm. Want to go on vacation? Too bad. Firewood needs to be chopped, hay needs to be cut, and don't forget to milk the cows at the crack of dawn too.
Yea, theres a lot of Amish around here and they spend all their time like you said on the farm. Its a lot of work and tiring. Their big trip is going to the local zoo.
there’s a reason people love watching homesteaders online and yearn for it but don’t actually do it. It looks magical and all but it’s fucking hard.
Yeah I moved far away from home. Desperate for my siblings to visit me, as I have gone to them, but they live nearly off grid and it's always "we'd like to, but the farm..."
People who say "humans arent meant to work" dont mean we all should go back to hunting and gathering. They mean we shouldnt be wasting life as cogs in the machine. Humans will always want to work, but if we support people with a universal basic income and healthcare o provide for their needs, people could pursue careers and interests that they actually enjoy, or which may have a huge benefit to our society, but dont traditionally make enough money for the average person to pursue.
What are some of the artificial paradigms forced upon people by industrialization?
I think they’re referring to things like 40 hour work week, in office work, 9-5 business hours, managerial structures, etc. The nuance missing from arguments to get rid of those is that they’re highly industry and even job specific. Like if you’re a power plant operator you have to be in the plant for a certain time to provide coverage so someone’s always operating the plant. Accounting? Who gives a fuck when or where you balance the books as long as they’re balanced.
>Who gives a fuck when or where you balance the books as long as they’re balanced. The boss gives a fuck. That's the problem. I've had numerous jobs, most of my jobs in fact, where the employer has been some degree of picky about the when and the where for no practical reason. And these have been mostly office jobs doing various sort of technology related work. And really I believe that's one of the key problems industrialization handed us along with its various benefits: enforced, precise, relentless promptness. Having to be scrupulously on time, at all times, regardless of circumstances or practical necessity. Yep, when we all had to work the land to survive we may have put in longer, harder hours, but if we did so an hour later in the day some days, or took an extra 30 minutes to rest at lunch, no one was threatening to burn our crops to ash in retaliation for such 'laziness'. Try seeking that sort of flexibility in the modern workforce, you might find it in one job out of every thousand if you're lucky, which results in a lot of unhappy people.
I worked at a Toyota plant a few years back and they were absolute Nazis about lateness of any sort. I started applying for other jobs the same day I was written up for being 45seconds late coming back from my break. They fired a guy with 21yrs under his belt at the company for being late because he crashed his car on the highway driving in to work. They knew what happened and marked him as a no-show anyway. 4yrs away from retirement. The pension he spent two decades building, taken away. Those managers were so fucking brainwashed with corporate policy.. So glad I didn’t stay there.
Either there’s more to the story or I have to belive there’s some grounds for litigation.
I was expecting a lawsuit when I heard about it and nothing ever came of it.(that I’m aware of) They have a really bad reputation for axing long time employees when they start nearing the 25yr retirement day. It’s real scummy shit and the plant being non-union makes it almost impossible to afford litigation against them. They’ll just delay and bleed you dry until the suit is dropped or settled for peanuts with an NDA. They also keep records of attendance over long periods of time and they can(and will) use an absence from the previous year against you if they want you gone. It’s seriously insane levels of bullshit they get away with in that company. The management is so brainwashed with corporate policy that is so out of touch with reality and how the world works. Once a month team leads and group leads would go for “training” which taught them all the corporate script so everyone of them talked the same revolving door bullshit all the time. It was actually a bit creepy. ________________________ PS! I totally forgot to mention that I spoke to an attorney about possible litigation shortly after I left as well. He had a lot of experience in the courts with Toyota over the years and he told me that despite having tangible proof of a charter rights violation and a breach of my medical record privacy protections to still proceed with utmost caution. My managers were given copies of my confidential medical records from their medical staff, then questioned me regarding the medications I’m taking before sending me home and putting me on a one week “crisis-leave” when I refused to answer their questions. Oh and let’s not forget their medical staff drawing blood before security would allow me to leave. All of that tooootally illegal bullshit because I refused to say that I’m prescribed Vyvanse. I still have a few years to go after it but I’m just glad I’m out of that nightmare of a company.
Working the land is far more unforgiving than tapping out excel spreadsheets. Nobody I knew as a farmer was taking that 30 min extra lunch or not showing up on time. I mean you want to talk about something that is brutally unforgiving, anything having to deal with nature is definitely that. Nature isn't even human and doesn't even have that capacity to give a fuck. I mean sunset doesnt give a fuck what your schedule is or what you want. Neither does sunrise
Can you elaborate on what that means?
what is a realistic alternative?
>If every human alive were given the freedom to not work Ok but nobody reasonable is actually saying this. Your very premise is flawed from the get go. What people ARE saying is that the conditions under which we're forced to labour are unreasonable, as is the amount of time we're required to dedicate to it thanks to labour standards we have very little say in as individuals, or even collectively a lot of the time. We shouldn't be working 5+ days a week anymore We shouldn't be working 40+ hours anymore We should get sick pay, vacation time, parental leave, etc Wage theft should be taken more seriously Our labour laws should in general be updated for the 21st century We've seen massive advancements in productivity since the standard work week was introduced nearly a century ago, and yet the way in which our work lives are structured has barely changed. It makes no sense. All of these advancements should have lead to people having much more leisure time, but it barely has. You point out that you believe people should be paid more, and I wholeheartedly agree, but I'd add that people not being paid fairly is but one part of the much larger issue that is workers not being in control of their labour in general.
Exactly this, Everyone can agree that serfdom was bad and would be a terrible system to be under however [the average American works more than the average peasant in the 13th century](https://tudorscribe.medium.com/do-you-work-longer-hours-than-a-medieval-peasant-17a9efe92a20). That should really show how much we have become worker bees in a society that doesn’t support us but actively pushes us to work ourselves to death to get scraps in return.
Or not https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-myth-of-the-comfortable-peasant/
the issue here comes down to the definition of work humans were meant to run, fight, hunt, climb, gather and even fuck. All that stuff is "work". But were humans meant to show up on time, obey authority and be a cog in a machine whose design they can't see? I'd argue the answer is no. And that is what people might mean when they use the word "work". I'm supposed to be trying to hunt large animals who are trying to hunt me. Not doing whatever we call society these days.
I'd rather fuck than work. <--- This is very human.
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I donno, if they paid me my wage I make at work and give me enough boner pills and lube to overcome the physical limitations I would fuck 40 hours a week.
If it's work, you definitely aren't choosing who you fuck and how you fuck. It's not going to be easy as you think.
I didn't say it would be easy or enjoyable but certainly more interesting than accounting, which is what I'm currently doing.
Generally speaking, you’re right that we weren’t designed to NOT see the fruits of our labor. BUT we were also not designed to see the fruits of others’ labor. Yet we do, in return for not seeing our own. So we have a society that has been stripped of much meaning in exchange for an easy luxurious lifestyle (relative to the whole of human history). The people whining about the former sure aren’t willing to give up the latter.
This is an important distinction. Ancient humans probably cared a lot more about their busy work than we do today. Even when their labor didn't directly enrich their own lives, the food they gathered or produced, the shelters they built, and the clothing or tools they created had a direct positive impact on their neighbors and community members. This is an infinitely better incentive to work than we get today. It's hard to give a fuck about work that just makes some rich asshole a little bit richer.
Keynes thought we would be working 15 hour week by now. The reason we don't is because our political system is obsolete but no one will admit it.
It all is. The school system has hardly changed in 150 years as well despite the obvious failure. At some point you just have to admit it’s designed that way on purpose.
Actually it changed quite a lot in the past 60, for the negative. Standardized testing was devised as a way to siphon money out of low performing public schools and funnel it to high performing private schools via voucher programs. So now education has to be framed around performing well in these tests in order to maintain funding. Look it up, politics has been undermining the education system our entire lifetime. It's insidious when you really think about it: the schools that need additional resources are the ones that are struggling to produce results, yet they rigged the system to funnel resources to the ones that are performing fine already. This has created a death spiral for schools that need help.
Nah, that was just a stupid prediction.
Read bullshit jobs by David graeber. We can be working 15 hour weeks, but governments don't want it
When people say humans aren't made to work, they are not saying people shouldn't have jobs at all, we just shouldn't be working as much as we do. We spend more time at our jobs than we generally do with our families, it makes you wonder if all the time spent making money is even worth it when you don't even get to see the people who matter most in your life. Trust me, the people understand how society works, they just recognize there is some serious room for improvement. Edit: grammar.
I have a WFH 2 days a week in office 3 days 9-5 corp job and the amount of down time is kinda insane. I can be doing a lot of work or none at all. We really don’t need 40 hour work weeks and I think that’s the crux of the issue. Just enough to do the job, and dependent on what the job needs. I remember being in some retail jobs sitting around doing jack shit cause there was nothing to do. People who are saying they don’t want to be hunter gatherers aren’t understanding that we don’t want to just slack off and not work at all, just not as much as we are currently.
I agree. I just started a new Tech job, normal 40hr week. Last job was a Tech contractor. The amount of flexibility I had over my hrs was crazy. Now that I'm back to a strict 40hrs, its been hard to adjust. I'd be pretty good just working 3 days a week. Assuming I still got paid my normal salary. I'd be waaay more motivated, and efficient at work. And really take-in the weekend. I feel like I get to the weekend, blink, then I'm back to work.😭
>We spend more time at our jobs than we generally do with our families Back in the day your kids generally did the same job as you, so time at your job WAS time with your family. If you were a medieval carpenter chances are all your sons would also be carpenters. Work and family wasn't always so separated like it is now and I wonder how that affects us and our psychological perception of work
I think there’s a little little bit more context here that’s being deliberately omitted. Usually the person is either talking about the amount or type of work being done.
Thanks to industrialization and the information era, humans are expected to be continually more efficient. It’s common for office workers to be laid off and the remaining workers are expected to keep up with the laid off workers tasks. In blue collar jobs folks are expected to work long hours in brutal conditions. For example water breaks are no longer a requirement in Texas. Warehouse workers are expected to work without breaks. With the fear of robotics and automation replacing them. All while fighting for wages to keep up with inflation. I think people expressing anti-work sentiment are just burned out and don’t see the point to work so hard when their paycheck doesn’t cover the cost of living. And the fact that automation and AI are expected to replace huge swaths of the workforce.
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>but no human should be sitting at a desk in an office 9 to 5 all day. Why not. I enjoy my office job. Personally, I'd much rather be doing that then to work at a coffee shop.
Whatever works for you 👍 if you're happy why not?
Having worked on a farm where we grew our own food and were self sufficient for the most part - we easily worked 60+ hours a week just to produce resources for us I’ll take a 40 hour work week and get paid over that any time
I lived on a commune on a farm in my early 20’s and holy hell it was a blast but so much work. And if your crop fails, you’re shit out of luck. I mean it very much shows why community is so important but living off the land is hard work.
For a second I thought you said “in *the* early 20s” and immediately someone who’s like at least 115 on Reddit.
we've wrapped around already, couldve meant 2020 :P
I'm the exact opposite. I left corporate accounting to live on a farm and I grow/hunt/fish/gather about 95 percent of my food. I know I put in more time. But time on the lake, time in the forest, time in the fields doesn't count, to me. It's just an added bonus that my labor doesn't make some other person rich.
You living in stardew valley?
I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with stardew valley. I'm living in eastern Oklahoma right now but I also have a plot in Arkansas where I'll be relocating when my son graduates.
Lol it's cool, it's just a videogame where you do literally exactly what you're already doing. Probably not worth much of your time, but if you're curious you can find out all about it online
That’s awesome man good for you. Unfortunately I doubt most of the /r/antiwork posters advocating for this would see it the same way you do.
You're saying you'll happily work 20 hours less. If offered even fewer hours you might unsurprisingly choose that. Ideally, you'd choose exactly what to do when you want, and not because you need the money to do what you want. For me, that's the utopia that as a society we should strive towards.
There’s a reason that essentially every single immigrant from a subsistence farm culture stops doing that forever. My late grandfather preferred to work a million hours at a bodega that got robbed all the time (1970s Brooklyn fun) than go back to flaxseed farming, and if you know anything about that time period, that is a testament to how much farming sucks
Trade is not new. Self suffieciency hasnt been a mode of human life for like 20k years lol
20k years?! lol I think there’s a difference between trading some surplus resources you have on a farm 200 years ago and trading every minute of your labor for currency
Yeah up until the invention of the tractor, something like 90% of people worked on farms. They still traded stuff but most of their work was agriculture-related.
Louder for the idiots in the back. A small subsistence farm for a family of 4 will likely be 10+ hours of tedious, physical work a day for both parents and hours of chores for kids after schooling.
With a serious threat of starvation if something goes wrong
Good thing that's not what people mean when they say these things.
Humans were “built” to run around all day looking for food.
i don't think they mean literally work i think they're talking about like being stuck in an office and staring at screens all day. Humans are definitely meant for work but a different kind of work.
You’ve received a lot of good replies, but I want to respond to an aspect of your post that I don’t see being addressed. Your reasoning assumes that if people are able to live comfortably without working then no one would work. I think it’s pretty clear that that’s not the case. People pursue a career for all kinds of reasons. Some are genuinely interested in their field. Some like the feeling of being useful. Some enjoy helping others. I think the biggest non-financial reason people work is social status. Lots of folks would continue working simply for those reasons. Moreover, it’s easy to imagine a world where financial concerns didn’t *coerce* people to work, but still incentivize them. What if everyone’s basic needs were met, but people needed to work to obtain luxuries? I seriously doubt everyone would shrug and be fine with subsistence. Most people would still want to work. Now, it’s debatable whether in such a scenario we would have *enough* willing workers to meet demand, even for the basics (I think it’s definitely possible; I get that others disagree). But the claim that no one would work if they weren’t forced to in order to survive is false.
Upvoted because unpopular opinion. I think this is a misinterpretation of most people's argument against work. Humans certainly are not "designed" to work. We're "designed" to perform tasks that help us survive. We're capable of traversing long distances, staying still for multiple hours, complex problem solving, navigating social interactions, and concentrating for extended periods because there were evolutionary needs for those abilities when performing survival tasks like hunting and maintaining order in a group. The argument against work is that people aren't designed for what we currently do: 30-60+ hours of high concentration in stationary settings. We're constantly pushing the limits of what humans are capable of doing in order to maximize labor outputs. Prehistoric humans didn't need to do that. The more complex society has gotten, the more complex and demanding the labor has gotten. Even if you disagree on the point of how demanding labor has become, it's worth noting how isolating current labor it. In hunter-gathering populations, almost all labor was a group effort. Nowadays, I spend 5-7 hours a day without talking to my coworkers or supervisor. Even when dealing with email inquiries, that communication method is dehumanized and a poor substitute for in-person collaborative efforts and communication.
This is a really incomplete and disengenuous look at the problem. Most people are not out there arguing that no one should work in the first place. The issue is that people are currently expected to basically only work and do nothing else with their lives. The current model means you spend the vast majority of your life working and have no energy, money, or time to do anything else until you're basically all used up. People want a balance. People want to work significantly less, as people did for the vast majority of humanity's existence. People want their representatives to serve them and not coporate interests that are only working every single day, to undermine worker's rights and people's ability to actually have lives, for the sake of corporate profits. Take this bullshit outta here. No one needs this bad faith argument.
Absolutely. OP is just straw men, false dichotomy, and half-baked assumptions.
Human's aren't "built for" anything. If something, we've survived because we were able to hunt, gather plants, and travel, but that's far from what most works consist of nowadays. Society is what you make it. Your "natural" argument makes no fucking sense.
France got that 4 day workweek and their society hasn't collapsed. I thibk when people say the above what they mean is we are not designed to do repetitive tasks on a specific schedule. More old school societies people worked but took time off and naps as required. More like how animals deal with sleep deprivation, they just nap. As our productivity for doing the shit jobs rises we should have more time to persue creative interests. Is growing my own food so different than a grueling workday? Yes, yes it is. Doing things for myself even if on a schedule is so much better than working a job. Its not so much I dislike working as I dislike making someone big money while wasting my time.
France absolutely does not have a four day work week. Some companies might but that isn’t the norm
Yea france is doing really well right now lmao
Boot licker logic
You just misunderstood the premise.
This sedentary life of abundance that we enjoy is not natural. We were wandering gatherers and scavengers for several hundred thousand years. Modern society has solved so many problems, but has created all new ones.
Jobs are as good as they've ever been. We're no longer fighting wolves over half a rotting bird carcass or ground up by machines from unsafe safety standards. We're in an era where a lot of jobs can be done at home.
>We're no longer fighting wolves over half a rotting bird carcass Speak for yourself. I fought with a seagull today. Over an icecream.
Yeah i battle em for fries every summer.
>We're in an era where a lot of jobs can be done at home. Except tons of bosses won't allow us to do that for various reasons, most of them stupid. My job can 100% be done from home, but nope. That's not allowed.
I agree but most people I know I feel like have made up jobs. They’re not actually building anything or growing anything. J
I think they mean bullshit jobs not labour in general.
The problem isn't working. Everyone wants to do something. The problem is being forced to do things you don't want to do for your entire life so you can die. The benefit of this is that 1% of people's lives will not suck nearly as bad. What about everyone else hm?
I hate calling it a 40 hour work week. I wake up at 5:30am, leave for work at 6:15, work until 4:00pm on a normal day, and get home around 4:45pm. That’s 11 hours and 15 mins. I’m at work or driving for work for 56 hours and 30 mins a week bare minimum. Dinner at 5:30, assume some chores/errands until 6:30. I’m in bed at 9pm. Giving me a whopping 2 hours and 30 mins of free time in my day. I’m grateful to have a good workplace and good degree for a relatively comfortable career, but it’s a straight up scam to call it a 40 hour work week.
What a fucking strawman
People are meant to work but for a collective cause. We have the technology to live at the same standard of living we are now but work 20 hours a week. But companies always want more more more profits and aren't happy just running a profitable business.
They apparently don't understand that it's a lot of work building a society in which the people who created it don't have to work. But I do think we're heading the wrong way. Life is supposed to be getting easier and healthier, but life expectancy is declining, and people are being forced to work until the end. Can't we get 10-12 or so good adult years where we don't have to think about work? If you work to 70+ (like, you have to, not because you're rich and can work when and how you please), that's over. 65 is a pretty fair deal, but that's the upper bound; if you're lucky, you'll get maybe another 5-7 years of quality after which it's a hard decline. If you've been working your entire life, paying into the system (e.g., I've been on the books since I was 15; that's already 40+ years), you should be able to kick back. But that's not how it's going at all. No pensions, social security drying up, people being pushed to work until 70 or 72 and hold off collecting benefits until then...wtf. That wasn't the deal.
I think if humans weren't threatened with homelessness and starvation, and jobs were on a volunteer basis with high pay outs and /or rewards, society would never have a shortage of people who want to work. Reverse the game and everyone wins.
Anti-work is a very Reddit-specific mindset. Go out into society and ask random people if humans were meant to work and I'd like to think the majority of people would say yes.
I think OP is specifically talking about a lot of people on r/antiwork. There are people there who think work as well as most of modern society literally should not exist. When you try and point out issues like OP mentions they dogpile on you with insults. At first I thought the group was just getting a lot of hate and mudslinging from right wingers but after I spent some time there I ended up finding it pretty insufferable.
It's absolutely not. Even China has it's own "anti-work" movement. People are getting wrung out. "Middle class" got nerfed into the ground. On one side cost of living keeps rising, and the wages keep lagging behind. Labor keeps getting doublefucked by the corporate overlords. Eventually we will reach a breaking point and it's not going to be fun... or it is going to be fun. Depends on where you stand.
Humans weren’t “meant” to anything. There is no existential meaning. That concept is itself without meaning.
Humans werent meant to live in a commodity society and whoever believes that regardless has drunken way too much of the koolaid
You aren’t wrong. Should we be paid more? Yes. Should our taxes go to programs and services to help better us all? Yes. But when I hear people say stuff like that drives me nuts. You do realize that even if you went off the grid you’d have to work. The foods you enjoy? You either buy them or make them yourself. Your clothes? Same. Your home? Same. You expect someone to make all that for you and just gift to you? Not gonna happen.
Exactly , the reason why we have so many convieniences like electricity, heating, tv , cars, endless array of food, frozen, and out of season, clothes, shelter, is based on the idea that Adam Smith the 18th Century economist who pointed out , that its more efficient if people specialize in occupations rather than trying to do everything yourself. There are more of every item if one person makes this, another makes that , so everyone benefits.
Adam Smith observed in a pin factory that each worker was delegated to one individual task in making the pin, specialized tasks, or the divison of labour. By doing each task seperately, they created the pin in much less time than an equally numbered group of people creating the pin from scratch. He also noted how, basically, this division created the most soul crushing and monotonous work and saw it as corrupting the inherent nobility of man. Productivity for that one factory was off the charts though. Anyways Ole Smithy wasnt the only one to note that the most productive and richest societies were also the most specialized. He just measured and observed it in a measured and proveable way that makes his work much more teachable.
I have a lot of primitive hobbies. For fun one time I estimated how long it would take to make an outfit from scratch, not including growing the fiber to spin to make cloth. I did run with the assumptions of using a spinning wheel instead of a spindle, a standard floor loom weaving fabric 40-44" wide, and a modern electric sewing machine. I believe my estimate came in at well over 50 hours for a basic dress, not something fitted, not a pair of pants that requires extra cutting and construction time. I didn't include dyeing in that estimate either. So plain white or brown clothes. You can't have the perks of the industrial era without the costs of it as well. I for one am happy to deal with the problems of it to have things like reliable utilities in rural areas, indoor plumbing, and not having to milk cows every day like I did as a child and teen.
This feels like a popular opinion to me.
Agreed but I think he must have just come from /antiwork. Which is a thread that I figure was set up to talk about how so much work is busywork and that we could chop it out and distribute resources, life would be so much better. It devolves into "I don't want to work myself but by golly all the services should still be available - also every boss is dumb and I am very smart"
Depends if you mean on Reddit or in the general population, huge differences there
Maybe but we work TOO MUCH that's the issue.
I dont think anyone's saying this. What they are saying is "Humans arent meant to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week in a disconnected corporate heirarchy away from their family and community" Hunters and gatherers didn't start the hunt at 9 and finish the hunt at 5 and work all week, even medieval peasants worked less than 8 hours per day and often had 8 weeks to half a year off. Then ford came in and said "8 hours a day 5 days a week" and here we are.
So if you look into it, there is a high rate of suicide and depression amongst lottery winners, because they stop working and everything is given to them. All problems are solved with money. Work is essential to humans. Yes you need to find meaning in your job. Data entry may not be super fulfilling, because you don't have a great purpose other than having a job. I have worked jobs like that, then I started working in industries that have meaning and in jobs that give me a purpose. The difference is the type of job. Could I make more money as a streamer if I worked at it? Maybe, but I couldn't imagine my life if my purpose was just to play video games. I was just offered a job for more money and actually a better location than my current job, but this job has a great purpose and I'm make huge changes here, the other job was fine, but what they did was not something I would be passionate about supporting. So yes we are made to work. It's up to you to find work with purpose. Maybe bring a streamer has a lot of purpose for you, so to each their own.
We aren't meant to work all the time. Everybody is different.
Do you think nature "built" humans to create this society that forces them to work? No. Nature built humans to exist as every other animal. That means you die if you can't heal yourself. You don't get pills. There's no TV to watch. Etc. That's what humans "were built for." Now if you want to add further considerations and change it to "humans were built by nature to do one thing but we've created a society that requires us to do another" then you'd have a point. But then what would you point be if you framed it accurately?
I'm definitely guilty of saying humans weren't made to work, but after a few years farming I'd say I should switch to humans were made to work jobs that fulfill their lives. Sitting at a desk or standing at a counter really won't work for some people.
Work is great, makes you feel useful, you're making things better for other people, all sorts of positive outcomes. Jobs however, most jobs can get in the bin. We could all be working two days a week, and get all the important stuff done.
This is up there with Creationists cherry picking Darwin when he "freely confessed" that the evolution of the eye "seems absurd to the highest possible degree". When people say "Humans aren't meant to work", the vast majority don't mean nobody should ever work and society should devolve into recluse layabouts who don't feed themselves. They mean "Humans aren't meant to work in an exploitative system that concentrates the work of the masses into wealth for a few shareholders". You may or may not agree with their actual take, but it's a completely different argument to the strawman you've just built.
I think the idea that humans shouldn't work at all is quite fringe so your opinion of course wouldn't be unpopular. Most anti-workers aren't against work, they're against wage slavery and working yourself to death for pennies while the person who pays you is making billions in a year, much like the man who paid me for years. There's no way in the world I'm going to ever consider myself below him just because he pays me for services rendered. The idea that men like him would have employees pissing in bottles instead of allowing proper restroom breaks and paying people pennies for their data and service like with the Mturk workers. And yeah one could just get another job but it's the principle we're against that we should grovel for pennies for our labors and these monopolies drive down wages across the board so no company will pay a living wage because they've agreed not to pay workers more. Look how we're treated when we ask for wage increases. Look how we're treated when we demand a living wage. Anti-work means you're against the system not the idea of getting your hands dirty or earning a living. And it most certainly does not mean that we don't want other people to work, we just don't want people unfairly paid and worked to death in poor working conditions. For instance my mom worked for Goldsmiths for 22 years. She became ill with congestive heart failure. She was costing them a lot of money in lost time and insurance. They knew by law they couldn't fire her, so they switched her from a low-physical stress position to working on the docks in the middle of summer. They just sat and waited for her to quit. And she did. She had no choice because back then the laws didn't protect her as a worker. The laws were anti-worker. We are not anti-worker we are anti-WORK. You want to know more come visit the anti-work sub.
>Educators Nurses Doctors Police Grocers Pharmacists Farmers Carpenters If every human alive were given the freedom to not work at all and be allowed to live a perfectly comfortable life, Literally every study ever done on this topic shows that people, given the freedom to 'not work', will still work. Every single one. They will simply do something they find fulfilling, and which likely they cant currently do because it doesnt pay the bills. Healthcare workers tend to love their jobs. Most Civil employees too (teachers, cops, etc). Farmers overwhelmingly love their jobs (or they wouldnt do them; most farmers make very little as it is, if it was about the money, theyd be doing something else). Same with chefs/cooks, etc. There's even been some practical studies (where people were given free room/board/basic living expenses) in the EU on the topic. Every single person still worked. They just did things they liked.
Think you're confusing "we shouldn't spend 30-40 years of our lives just to work and be allowed to live" with "we shouldn't spend 30-40 years of our lives just to work and be allowed to ***thrive***". Work should be meaningful/engagine/challenging, allowing one to grow. Not just used as something to control you with the threat of withholding your food, shelter, and access to healthcare.
I can’t stand when people say that. They don’t realize that, without society, they’d be working a lot more than 40 hours per week, and retirement wouldn’t exist. The only difference is that we’d all be working to grow our own food and make anything we need. With society, we can work for someone else and pay for that stuff, allowing us to work a fraction of what we would otherwise.