But we could say the same for disease, tribalism, rape, and murder.
Guess we better cease resisting, roll over, and surrender to the facts of nature?
You must surely know how much of our work is centered around consumerism and the role this plays in the impending climate catastrophe?
Besides, the vast majority of jobs have an abysmal effect on the health of the worker. And don't get me started on bullshit jobs.
This appears to be why we don't see eye to eye, as I am convinced it'd be of great benefit. If people wouldn't be stuck in a constant rat race, they could lean back, enjoy life, and ponder about more important matters. If so inclined, we could all live scholarly in the true sense of the word: having the luxury of enough free time to acquire knowledge.
> "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. 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. 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." – R. Buckminster Fuller
>It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
That only works if everyone knows who that "one in ten thousand" person is, and does everything that they can to support that person, so that they don't have to spend all of their time doing the things that we would have to do individually if most jobs went away. For those "one in ten thousand" people, the jobs that many people provide are conveniences to them so that they can focus on other things. Eg: delivery, food prep, handiwork, advice (sales, legal, health, etc).
But do they like their job enough to pursue it if they have their basic needs already covered? Unconditionally?
How many of them would quit and set sights on something far greater? We could find that out quite easily.
The independent people who are self-employed are already doing what they enjoy and their enjoyment results in other people getting their hair done. Doing hair for play, as opposed to doing it for a profit. The will of the person doing the hair is within their own agency and an expression of what they want to be doing and is self-fulfilling.
So you can style hair, and be self-fulfilled in doing it. You can take a scholarly approach and make better techniques for doing hair, create solutions to problems with hair, and you can share these things with others, and improve the society-level understanding of styling hair.
Take someone else who really needs to have an apartment to live in, and food on the table, and this is what they are trying to solve. They have a hair salon close by and they go get a job there, they trade their time and collect a wage to pay for the apartment. They are styling hair now to meet their basic needs, not as the fulfillment of their own self. This, I think, is the problem Anti-Work is pointing out.
That what you spend the majority of your life on, ought to be something which is an expression of yourself and a manifestation of your will, rather than an expression of someone else's business interest and a manifestation of your boss's will through you.
> That only works if everyone knows who that "one in ten thousand" person is, and does everything that they can to support that person, so that they don't have to spend all of their time doing the things that we would have to do individually
I suppose the counter idea here is that if everyone is fulfilling their own personal will and is within their own agency, the will of society itself will align to take care of everyone. It isn't that 1 in 10,000 people is special and should be given all of this extra support to do something that becomes massively beneficial, it's that if all needs are met, tens of thousands of people are now working on what they are interested in, rather than fulfilling other people's will, and you have far more of those 1-10,000 people actually doing massively beneficial things to improve society even further.
Food, clothing and shelter are all the products of people working. Maybe someday that can all be automated, but it isn't and anyone not working ends up exploiting others to obtain the fruits of the other person's labor, which is supposedly the exact opposite of what they advocate.
I think we should keep in mind that what they might be doing at work is exploiting others.
Most of the jobs I've had, I left because once I got to know the inner workings of the company I realized that it wasn't about solving real problems, but instead about justifying the ability to profit from a privileged position.
I don't have a lot of data here, but I'd estimate the percentage of people employed in the full time exploitation of others at about 50%.