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Connected maybe to the excerpt you mentioned, here is this excerpt (hopefully not too nihilistic or pessimistic) from E.M. Cioran - who seems to have become so apparent to me this past year - and his aphorism-filled, philosophical book titled The Trouble With Being Born:

"A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."

I'm so happy that I got introduced to Emile Cioran by Stephen Wests podcast. No philosopher or idea has more clearly expressed what I've been feeling and thinking about. But alas talking about nihilism is pointless so there's not much more to say.

>talking about nihilism is pointless

No.

It is by Talking and Thinking about it that we are forced to face Reality. This leads to true "Enlightenment" and allows us to develop our own unique path to a "Philosophy of Life". I think of Nihilism as the backdrop against which we paint our chosen "Schools of Philosophy". One needs to be very aware of this important difference. IMO, it is better to live with Unpleasant Reality than Pleasant Fancy.

The following passage from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London nicely illustrates this dichotomy;

===

As he went on his voice again grew soft, and a confiding note came into it. “Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”

He shook his head slowly, pondering.

“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”

He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:

“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”

“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.

“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”

“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.

“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”

“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.

“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”

===

PS: You might find the book Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia interesting.

Brings to mind McGilchrist's "The Master and his Emissary". I wonder what London would have made of that analysis.

Of course there's plenty to say and ponder, I was trying to be clever.

Thanks for the quote, It's been ages since I had my jack London phase but I guess he's worth revisiting.

Absolutely. Thanks for this. It's telling to me how dismissive/judgemental are about nihilism, and that's been a good signal for me in other areas that it's getting a lot closer to a basic truth and people are threatened with it and want to push it away. Which is what we shouldn't be doing.

Optimistic Nihilism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14) or Absurdism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOfbObFOCw) are maybe more accessible takes if nihilism seems too "scary".

This (beautifully written idea) may be the point, to me.

I Don’t like to work. I Like free time. But i know more than enough people who are just unable to stay still with themselves.

Could it be that society (by emergent behaviour) has actually turned up like this (with basically mandatory work and no free time) to cope with this necessity of most people to not be still?

Russel dismisses the possibility of this being the case, but it doesn’t feel completely far fetched to me.

In that case, it’s bad news for the ones who’d work less, because the ones willing to work more will always have more power- and they’re usually not afraid to use it…

This was also put forth by Pascal: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Of course, some people would probably quote Shaw in response "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." and say that this doesn't always manifest as a bug, rather a feature.

The Anti work movement seems mostly driven by US "unreasonablism" in the work place. 1 week holiday, unreasonable manager overreach, politics over competence, unworkable financial pressures on everyday people like medical and student debt etc. Shit is fucked, yo.

It's actually worse than that in the US. NO mandated vacation time (not even public holidays), no paid maternity leave, at-will employment, minimal labour laws, minimal consumer protections, etc.

When I was a kid, I supposed that robots and automation would make drudgery obsolete, and people would only work if they wanted to. Increasing productivity would mean that everyone had access to the necessities of life, and even some of the luxuries.

How wrong I was. Sure, the robots and the automation turned up, as I had anticipated; but the benefits were taken as profits by corporations, and people didn't gain any leisure time at all.

I think we were all betrayed.

I wonder to what extent my opinions as a kid were formed by finding In Praise Of Idleness on my mother's bookshelf.

Adam Curtis's short documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" explores this idea beautifully, and where we went wrong.

That is a remarkable documentary.

  > We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

its like the thesis of bulls*t jobs right there in the simplest of terms...

> Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials.

I don't know, my impression of antiwork is only through seeing some posts from the subreddit on the reddit front page. It comes across as "anti-my-job-specifically" or "I have problems at work so nobody should work" or "inequality exists so I shouldn't work". I really don't get the point of the whole thing. It's understandable that people will take the opportunity to complain about stuff but the overwhelming majority of those people aren't Bertrand Russell, not even close. It's a group of people who have found an audience to complain to - they have real problems but they're coming to all sorts of stupid conclusions fueled by groupthink.

The antiwork subreddit is now too popular and the signal to noise ratio has therefore dropped sharply. If you want to have some impression of why work can be criticized, In Praise of Idleness is much more interesting.

Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/

It's a bit like Feminist consciousness-raising in the 60s and 70s. Women started getting together and realising "my problems are not specific to me, my family, my marriage. We're all experiencing the same sorts of things."

I recommend ignoring everything on the front page of Reddit or at most treating it strictly as entertainment. Stuff only gets up there if a large group of people understand it and like it, which means almost all "discussion" that gets up there are one-sided rants that lots of people wanted to hear. A global popularity contest is a game of numbers that doesn't favour subtle goods like truth or intellectual challenge.

I would suggest reading Bob Black's The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, which is in the sidebar along with other antiwork books. He is both brilliant and very funny as he cuts through the bullshit around work and other topics. I especially enjoy his essay The Libertarian as Conservative http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/libertarian.html

Go work for your local Amazon fulfillment center / Walmart / McDonald's for 2 months. Let the manager know you really need the job for healthcare and 40hrs to make rent.

You'll either be fired before the 2 months (which would have serious consequences for most people) or experience horrible abuse.

The thing I wanted to do was science. I did a bachelor's and recently finished a master's in ecology (academic, I am not in the US). However, I was constantly anxious and in financial distress because, well, academia is not really financially stable and I do not have anyone to fall back to. So I decided to move into programming because it pays better and the job is, in comparison to academia, financially more stable so you won't run out of funds in a couple of years.

The thing is I really like programming and tinkering with computers (it was a big part of my masters) so it is a job I really like doing. However, there was something in research that made my mind itches when you got to follow your own questions and get a glimpse of an animals' life.

In the end, I am still torn out a bit about wanting to go back to academia or pursuing other career paths and I tough it resonated with your quote.

Although this ignores how important minor improvements are. It's easy to assume that only Nobel Laureates and the like are important without realizing that they depend on hundreds or thousands of minor scientists who make the discoveries needed for the big ones.

> it's honestly just like an abusive relationship

Yes. I'd go even further and say it's just another form of slavery. The lash just happens to be economic in nature rather than physical. Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.

In my opinion, this is an uncreative misuse of the term "slavery". Words have meanings, and slavery doesn't mean "someone with a shitty job", it means "someone who is fully owned by someone else".

I recognize that you're just trying to further a leftist "boo companies" narrative, but even if your employer treats you badly and you're hard pressed to imagine an alternative job, your employer does not own you and you are more free in your choices than any slave has ever been.

I recognize that there are jobs that are modern slavery (eg banana plantations), but I don't think that's the kinds of jobs this threat is about. The context is tech employees, or even amazon warehouse workers etc, and even when those are bad, it's not slavery.

I'm not trying to further a narrative, I'm stating my opinion. The fact we're more free today doesn't matter, we're still compelled to work if we wish to avoid misery. Your employer regulates your actions, your speech. If you aren't financially independent and can't afford to quit your job, your employer has so much leverage over you that they do pretty much own you.

Worst part is when capitalism finally automates itself into irrelevance we won't get a post scarcity society, we'll get some cyberpunk dystopia with corporations inventing artificial economies for the sake of maintaining the status quo of continuous consumption.

Slavery is so much more than employers having leverage.

To be clear I also don’t like or care for the current hyper consumption in our capitalist society, but this coercive behavior isn’t slavery and we should limit the term to people that are currently under suffer under human trafficking.

Well, I just don't see the distinction. Workers will also travel to places they don't want to be in. I just looked these ideas up and it turns out they're centuries old. I'm far from the first person to notice this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Wage slavery is much different and I do t have an issue with that term- its well established to describe a specific phenomenon of coercive relationship with the employer. I have an issue broadly with describing it as slavery itself, given slavery in the classical sell-your-children, force-people-to-sex, trap-people-in-your-house-for-unpaid-housekeeping sense still exists and needs addressing.

> The fact we're more free today doesn't matter, we're still compelled to work if we wish to avoid misery.

This is part of the human condition. Goods don't magically appear out of thin air (at least not yet) - they're created by directed action, i.e. - work. By your definition, every human that exists and have ever existed is/was a slave.

> By your definition, every human that exists and have ever existed is/was a slave.

Not every human has or had to work in order to have their needs met. The elites have always existed and it seems they will continue to exist.

That's not really related to my point, which was that your definition of slavery is a non sequitur.

Of course it is. You asserted that by my definition every human was a slave. This is obviously false since there is a minority that managed to free themselves from this suffering somehow. They make others do the work for them.

People with means also have to work to preserve their position - at the very least they need to navigate laws, invest smartly, be on the lookout for possible political upheavals etc. Nothing is free, and wealth preservation can be a lot of worry in itself. Just ask anyone in the FIRE subreddit.

Of course, technically you're right - there will always exist a minority of people who were so wealthy (and lucky) that, even though they didn't care about wealth preservation, their wealth didn't run out before they died. If, in addition, these people inherited all their wealth (as opposed to doing any work to obtain it), then they are the (only) non-slaves by your definition, proving that not EVERYONE is a slave.

An excellent point. Only 99% of all people are slaves.

Still, calling people like Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs (none of them inherited wealth) "slaves" severely misses the point.

But the only one who did that was you.

We don't fully own people anymore, we just lease them for a while.

That way ensuring they are provided the necessities of life becomes some else's problem. Less liability.

The Yes Men pointed this out explicitly in their presentation to the WTO on Leisure Wear for Managers of the Future. The golden penis suit was just the cherry on top.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEuzVMwsK7o

So you prefer owning people? Or you just object to work? It's not clear what you are advocating for. We live in a world where people need three square meals a day, they want heating and transportation and energy, and other people have to work every day to provide those services.

It seems a bit entitled to be moaning about the fact that one must work to survive in life -- that's kind of how this whole life thing works.

The important thing is not whether something is labeled slavery but rather looking at the dynamic where someone coerces another to spend their time working for someone else. Labeling the dynamic based on the amount of time and degree of suffering is counterproductive. I think most of us can agree that reducing how much that dynamic is in play in the world is ideally a goal for any civilized society. And that the current amount that people are forced to work for the benefit of others is far more than they need to for their own well-being and the wellbeing of society. The amount of labor many, many people are coerced to perform is used as a control mechanism as often as it is for productivity, and in some countries, its use as a mechanism of control rivals productivity as its primary purpose.

The problem is when you start classifying voluntary exchange as coercive, then language loses meaning and you can start reaching really dysfunctional and foolish conclusions.

So no, needing to provide a good that someone is willing to pay for in exchange for getting a good that you want to pay for is not "coercive". It is not slavery. It is a recognition of the fact that humans constantly need support from others. We are dependent on each other. Animals need to hunt every day. That's not coercion, its dependency on the environment. Humans are dependent on each other. That means we have to do stuff we may not feel like doing, but that others are willing to pay us to do. But the only reason you need to work is to get money, and the only reason you need money is to buy a good or service provided by someone else. If you start calling that "slavery" or "coercion", then you are distorting the language, and the only reason to play language games like this is to deceive, not to get to the truth of the matter or make any meaningful, practical, improvement.

So if you feel that, for example, modern industrial economies are too bureaucratic and have too many paperwork jobs, or if you feel inflation is unfair, or that wages are too low, then just discuss those issues. Don't twist the language to try to call needing to work "slavery" - which is a highly charged term - in order to hope that this type of rhetoric will get you over the finish line. The questions of things like wages and pensions and working standards are too important to be subject to this type of polarizing linguistic obfuscation.

> The problem is when you start classifying voluntary exchange as coercive

Is it really voluntary though? Without money, you'll starve, lose your home, etc. People need to get a job and make money.

Voluntary is when I sit down at my computer to hack on some project for fun. I'd do this all day but unfortunately I have to work.

> Humans are dependent on each other.

> That means we have to do stuff we may not feel like doing, but that others are willing to pay us to do.

If you have to do anything at all, you're being coerced. Being forced to work for someone else is slavery. All that's changed is the means of coercion: it used to be force, now it's debt.

> "slavery" - which is a highly charged term

The fact the term has connotations doesn't matter. The similarities are there, so I will call it what it is.

I understand there is this religion of "liberation" in which being bound by the law of entropy or subject to electroweak forces is considered coercion and slavery.

That is not what these terms mean. Man is a limited creature dependent on and subject to many things by necessity of being real rather than a mind object. He is also subject to biology, geography, customs, etc. Those who attempt to rip man out of these constraints in the name of liberation always fail and in the process hurt humanity just as lifting a fish out of water to "liberate" it from being dependent on water is doome to fail and to hurt the fish.

> If you have to do anything at all, you're being coerced

So you are coerced into needing air to breathe. You are a slave of entropy. This is not what these terms mean. Words like "coercion" or "slavery" refer to an actual person forcing you to do something that you could conceivably not do if they didn't intervene. If you expand the definition to coercion to include the second law of thermodynamics, then everying is being coerced and the word loses all meaning. Another attempt to lift the fish.

The only the reason you need money is to get something from someone else. So if you can't get that thing voluntarily, you need to coerce them into giving it to you by force so that you can be "liberated" from paying for it. In other words, you are defining liberation (for you) as coercion (of the other) and freedom from coercion (for you) as slavery (for the other). But even this wont work because it takes a great deal of effort to coerce someone into giving you stuff for free, and that effort itself is work which you need to do yourself or pay someone else with money to do. So it is inescapable -- getting that sandwich always requires work:

We don't live in a universe in which things like food appear out of nothing (entropy again) but they require effective effort to create, and money is just one technology we use to track that effective effort, also called work. This basic fact is just the result of electro-weak forces and entropy. Complaining about being subject to these forces as "coercion" or "slavery" serves only to obfuscate.

There are real slaves still in the world - Libya has open-air slave markets - and there was real slavery in the past.

Saying "I'm a slave, too, because I can't get free sandwiches" damages what the word "slavery" means and hurts the language.

Similarly declaring yourself subject to "coercion" because you are subject to the laws of physics makes everything subject to coercion and thus the word is rendered meaningless, making it harder for people actually undergoing coercion to be helped.

So please try to help rather than hurt. Please use the words in their commonly understood meaning if you intend to engage in productive discussion rather than in destruction.

Slavery has many types and as the Yes Men pointed out in their leisure wear for the future managerial class, one of the most efficient forms of slavery is wage slavery. There are many other forms of slavery that differ from chattel slavery and while I prefer better conditions of my enslavement, being forced to work for others in order to eat and live is still slavery. The conditions which people must navigate in the modern world to survive are not natural and are purposefully set up in order to force people to work for the benefit of others in order to survive. There are many good arguments that wage slavery is still slavery and they are not all a leftist take on things.

But the important thing is not whether something is labeled slavery but rather looking at the dynamic where someone coerces another to spend their time working for someone else. Labeling the dynamic based on the amount of time and degree of suffering is counterproductive. I think most of us can agree that reducing how much that dynamic is in play in the world is ideally a goal for any civilized society. And that the current amount that people are forced to work for the benefit of others is far more than they need to for their own well-being and the wellbeing of society. The amount of labor many, many people are coerced to perform is used as a control mechanism as often as it is for productivity, and in some countries, its use as a mechanism of control rivals productivity as its primary purpose.

>Of course the slave owners don't want the slaves to stop serving them.

Even if they did, we'd all starve if it happened in an unorganised way. I'm toying with a postindustrial fiction setting where one of the libertarian-inspired factions is explicit about this - capitalists whose highest value is freedom, where anyone can mint as much currency as they like, but it's backed by hours working as a slave. The eventual goal of the society is to have nobody redeem slave-tokens any more, but of course a lot of people's individual goals are more about accumulating as many slave-tokens as possible. I think it would take that kind of massive collective intelligence to really solve such a fundamental contradiction like our love for freedom and our love of telling other people what to do.

It's impossible to resolve this contradiction when an economy exists. The ambition to accumulate wealth and secure independence immediately manifests itself. The solution is to automate everything and free humanity from want permanently. When everything is abundant, there is no need to economize: post scarcity.

Post-scarcity is a noble goal! But a lot of people seem to put the cart before the horse and imagine eliminating the economy would cause post-scarcity to show up.

To my mind the economy is a jagged, violent tool that aligns everyone's petty, selfish interests roughly with everyone else's. As the 'everyone's a central bank minting slavery-backed currency' thought experiment highlights, it's self-contradictory in some important ways. I still think it's the best tool available for the kind of changes that might lead to post-scarcity if we're lucky.

The Anti work movement seems mostly driven by US "unreasonablism" in the work place. 1 week holiday, unreasonable manager overreach, politics over competence, unworkable financial pressures on everyday people like medical and student debt etc. Shit is fucked, yo.

> Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men so it's probably a bit scary for the media that the antiwork movement is gaining steam and no, it's not just a bunch of freeloading millennials.

Maybe not, but the majority of anti-work sentiment I see is coming from people who are clear that they are freeloaders, and aren't ashamed of the fact.

Also, you're really cherry-picking the data when you grab two outliers (in terms of brilliance) as support for your argument, and ignore the rest of the high-performance people throughout history.

As a percentage of brilliant people (using whatever bar you have for 'brilliance') how many espouse the same sentiment?

Not that I agree or disagree with the actual sentiment, I just don't find it convincing when an argument has to cherrypick datapoints in order to work.

Trying to convince using absolute numbers and not providing percentages is pointless. We need to know what the denominator is (samples meeting the criteria/total number of samples).

Sure but there's a lot of social pressure to say to everyone that you had to work hard to get where you are, because of the society we live in.

The data you're really after is how many people actually think that. Depending on your prior you might consider that even if a tiny number of brilliant people were to go for the Buckminster Fuller line, perhaps many actually think it.

Government mandated FMRI scanners aren't that far off so we'll see soon.

Did you read the piece?

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

Thanks. You are right. My bad.

> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

... but would they? Or would they keep scrolling down interminably. I know I'd like to think I would go back to school.

Yes, I would.

Russell's essay has the answer:

> The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

I wouldn’t! There’s never been anything in my life that I’ve been as passionate about as doing nothing.

I blame the federal reserve's 'maximum employment mandate'. It is official economic policy to sacrifice price discovery, i.e. efficiency, to make sure there's work for people.

This would be a really good take in a world where there was an all powerful benevolent dictator

I don't understand what you mean. My argument was along the lines of:

- Fed buys bonds to keep yields low

- Inefficient businesses are then able to secure funding at lower than 'natural' rates and stay afloat

- It takes more effort than necessary to produce the goods and services society needs

- But also there are more jobs, so the mandate is met

Also, simultaneously:

- Fed buys bonds to keep yields low

- A. increases the quantity of savings=investment dollars demanding a return

- B. lowers denominator in DCF valuations

- A & B apply dual pressure causing financial assets grow in price disproportionate to the amount of products & services provided to society (measured in cash flows)

- people who get paid a salary get priced out of economic ownership

- people who already hold claims on cash flows get "wealthier on paper" even though goods & services for society have not increased

Am I missing something? Because these arguments seem to me to explain, in pretty simple terms,the world as I observe it.

Why does "the media" care at all about anti-work? Wouldn't not working be GOOD for media companies, with more time to consume media?

I really don't follow what you said there

They're ad funded. You need the proles working to buy their circus tickets.

“ Neither of these guys were "slackers" and were brilliant men”

Actually, it is because of their status and the opportunity to be idle that they were able to nurture their creativity and become known as brilliant men.

And so seeing, they became proponents of idleness, both because they saw the benefit for creative minds, but also because they did not the consequence of idleness for the vast majority or people (nor how the idleness of the oppressed masses would — in the end — rob them of their own (profitable) leisure time.

It’s all about improving quality of life.

If we all are satisfied with living like they did in the early 1800’s, we could do it right now and nobody works.

Of course you’ll die of a bacterial infection, but otherwise…

I doubt very much that nobody would work, or that progress would stop.

I would expect the opposite as creative people who wished, were able to invest time prior to profitability as never before.

Given how one of the "Great Filters" of startups is reaching "Ramen Profitability", I imagine in today's age progress would happen much faster.

We could all be Ramen Profitable, or very close to it, for any venture that can start small.

Or people in the US could be allowed to work the same amount as people in other Western democracies. The work cultures in Japan and South Korea seem even more toxic and unpleasant in their embrace of overwork.

It is very unlikely that people moving to a four day work week would be less productive. The current number of people working 50 and 60 hours a week while millions are homeless is a scathing critique on how much we have failed to use work for productivity and as a tool to benefit society as a whole.