Comment by hh3k0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hh3k0 | Hacker News Reader

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> there is still a threshold (and I believe it is a very early-on threshold) where turning down the number of people working starts to have a detrimental effect on society

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

I think that the notion of "unnecessary jobs" comes largely from the misguided desire to pressure people to want different things. For example, should I think that the beauty industry should be as large as it is? I am not talking about the big beauty corporations, I'm talking about the self-employed estheticians, hair stylists, beauticians, etc, who have their own rooms and buy their own products and tools. I think intelligent people like Buckminster Fuller would see them as mostly unnecessary to society, and that they shouldn't have to work, and should go to school instead. But guess what? People want their services. And many of the workers like their jobs (even if they don't like how much they work). So they work those jobs (that they like) and provide services to people who want them. An outside intellectual might look at the exchange and think "This worker hates their job...they should be an artist! And this customer shouldn't want nail extensions...they should go back to school!" That kind of thinking has a distinct authoritarian bend to it.

>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).

> And many of the workers like their jobs (even if they don't like how much they work).

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.

In your first paragraph, I think your example is actually along the lines of what Anti-Work would support.

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.

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