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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but LOL. You can't opt out of competition any more than you can opt out of gravity.

If you aren't "strong" enough to do the hard work, someone else in your town will do it and reap the rewards while you become irrelevant. If your whole town opts out, some other part of the country will do it while your town drifts away into irrelevance and poverty.

If the whole country opts out, some other young and hungry country will take advantage of the opportunities your country passes up, until that country makes your country irrelevant.

Everything we have is because we or our ancestors (whether literal ancestors or the people that built the countries we live in) did the hard work. A few people can opt out and free-ride on others. But if the whole culture opts out, the whole culture will become irrelevant.

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> You can't opt out of competition any more than you can opt out of gravity.

Perhaps not as an individual, but I wonder about as a society - I don't know how we would get to this point, but imagine the sheer potential we as a culture could unlock by moving to a more cooperative model; consider the billions upon billions of person-hours wasted on things like stock trading, internal politicking, and marketing/advertising: all the things that provide no value to the race, but "required" to facilitate interpersonal competition.

Of course, none of that is against your primary point, which is that hard work is still, on the whole, required. It just irritates me to see competition equated to a law of nature; we're not animals, we can choose whether and how competition applies.

Sure, I agree with that. There is plenty of cooperation in the world, when two strong parties come together and say "this will work out better for us if we do it together."

My main point and I think you agree, is that you can never get there from a position of weakness and laze. No one is going to throw in their lot cooperating with you if your ethos is to "do nothing" or if you aren't functioning as an adult (whether an adult individual or an adult nation/country.)

> Everything we have is because we or our ancestors (whether literal ancestors or the people that built the countries we live in) did the hard work.

1) You can work hard in a non-competitive society.

2) That being said, hard work isn't -- contrary to what you seem to think -- inherently good. An industrialized genocide took place because my ancestors were diligent and hard-working. And I'd wager that a significant portion of modern-day hard workers is complicit in committing ecocide.

3) Besides, the way that you fetishize your ancestors' way of life I surely hope you're not vaccinated against polio and tetanus. And heaven forbid, I hope you are not wearing contact lenses or glasses. Disregard the current levels of automation and manifold other advances, putting in the hard work in a competitive society and eventually dying of typhus is most definitely the way.

I would sum up your point as this "necessary does not equate sufficient." Sure... Not only do we need to "do work" but we need to make sure it's helpful to us and our children. Obviously.

The fact that one could do useless or evil work isn't an argument against work. Just don't do dumb/evil shit.

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