This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
It doesn't need to be taken to that extreme. I find it hard to believe that the idea that work must take up all of your time, and any less means you're going to starve is this pervasive.
It is not unimaginable that we can improve things. We're constantly making improvements to efficiency, productivity, sustainability. We get more done in our time now than at any point in history. The same will be true tomorrow.
Why then, are so many still working such grueling hours?
In this country, and many others, the share of productivity gains has increasingly gone to capital rather than labor. Although I think that this is only part of it. Part of it is cultural, this ideology that work gives life meaning, and to reject it can mean losing a lot.
I'm pretty lucky myself, my job doesn't stress me out, it pays the bills and leaves me with some disposable income. A lot of people would describe me as unambitious, not driven, etc. I'd say I have it made.
He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html
It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored.
If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.
> "Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited."
Not "of course"; it's typically said or implied that even prime-age healthy males would have to work like abused pack horses and still barely survive. A limited data point it is, but there is another - his same scheme includes elderly women building their own homes, and young schoolchildren building their own school. Turning mud into bricks and bricks into a single story one or two room building, working together with no deadlines, doesn't need the labours of Hercules. The datapoint is not just "it's possible to be a subsistence farmer" which we did know, but "we always talk of subsistence farming as gruelling long hard work which leads to things like Russian peasants eating cabbage soup then starving to death in winter; here is a real live example of a community subsistence farming and surviving with at least an order of magnitude less work than commonly assumed, maybe more".
> "That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored."
He couldn't, he doesn't have the money or any marketable skills, he never did become a wealthy employee who choose to give it up for a rural life; from that page I linked "I worked hard but had no savings, just enough to make me survive day by day. I was disappointed with my life in the city. I couldn’t compete with anyone. I felt I had failed".
> "If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result."
Interesting that you've gone from "he could fly back to the city any time he wanted" as a dismissal to "he'd have nowhere to go if he needed city resources" as a dismissal in such a short time. But yes, no doubt those things could happen, he does say "learned to do many kinds of self-healing" and no doubt that does not include making antibiotics, anaesthesia, surgeons, dental fillings or living to 95 on a cocktail of statins and beta blockers and blood pressure pills and anticoagulants and antidepressents and metformin and all the rest.
The big question is not "how romantic is it" but whether "I do not feel bad about myself anymore", "When I started to do more things by myself, I have more confidence and less fear", "now I enjoy spending my life with my family and friends and plants" are worth the price compared to having readily available opticians and doctors while feeling like an isolated unhappy failure endlessly losing a forever-competition in city jobs while building no community.
Pick at the verbiage all you like; an American playing at being a poor subsistence farmer is theatre. The guy gave a TED talk after all. Did he do that from his 3rd-world farm?
> "Jon’s world view, from his upbringing in the rural fields of Northeastern Thailand"
> "Jon has over 30 years experience of being an organic farmer"
That's more than "playing".
These are all things that I can't do. On top of that, even if I could build a house from clay bricks that I made myself, I would be sleeping outside until the bricks and house were complete.
This doesn't sound like a very good counterpoint to me. I never said that working in a big city is the _only_ way to live. My point is only that the modern economy allows us to provide goods and services to other people and businesses, which in turn allows a small subset of workers to provide the necessary food and goods for survival of the entire society.
So, from that angle, working is not useless, it is just a proxy for what you would be doing if you had to provide food and shelter for yourself.
Some people find this idea of living off the land and growing your own food to be romantic. I don't, I enjoy modern society, and I feel like 40 hours a week is a ridiculously small investment to put in for what I get in return.
In the example you gave, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of current people would actually starve and die if they tried it. This TED talk speaker _grew up in rural Thailand_ and apparently had all of the tools to live this way. Most of us do not have that experience.
Very uninteresting counterpoint.
This modern economy is the exact religion that preaches the same gospel in the blog post: Maslow's pyramid of needs dictates that you need to work. Which is.. fine, I guess? My problem with that is that the work has become super productive in the past decades and that excess production allows only a fraction of people to stop working. Coupled with replacing the benefits of an actual community with the downgrade which is a workplace to give you that sense of belonging, self-sufficiency propaganda and employer-only provided healthcare, you get a nation of wage slaves.
We don't really need to work. I mean not all of us. A lot of the work done nowadays is bullshit [1]. The pandemic kinda showed us exactly who needs to go work to keep society going. The rest is just the result of:
- inertial protestant ethic
- wealth hoarding by the owners of production
- people tied to their workplace are easier to persuade/manage/manipulate politically
Work is good for the worker. Because humans need a purpose in life. We don't even need to experiment to see what society would be like if no one worked and a few robots produced our food. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking this would be a utopia - no, it would be a worse dystopia than you could possibly imagine.
Take away people's purpose, and you will be left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people with lots of time on their hands. Pretty clear recipe for constant depression and war.
I'll read the book before I comment on it directly.
That's unnecessarily condescending.
> Work is good for the worker.
That's some hardcore boomer logic right there..
> Because humans need a purpose in life.
Work is work and jobs are jobs. You can work without a job and you can have a purpose in life without a 9 to 5. Homemakers don't work or have no purpose in life? You're talking about a different thing here.. I was referring to what people are required to do in order to survive, eat and have shelter in modern society, not have purpose and fulfillment. Does caring for sick relatives with no pay constitute work in your view? Or is that person a slacker and a burden on society? If your purpose in life is your shitty 9 to 5 job then you kinda failed at life. I'm pretty sure the person blowing the leaves of the sidewalk doesn't stay awake at night with an existential life crisis thinking that he missed a spot.
It's the exact same narrative I always have to defend against when talking about financial independence. This is not to say people will be idle and just sit around doing nothing. People still do 'things' whether or not the things they do make money or not.
> left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people
There's that disgusting protestant work ethic again. It's really baked into the fabric of our society.. It's not your fault. Read a book or two, open your mind, I guarantee you'll recover.
You may find the options they offer to be unacceptable, but what if they didn’t exist? What options available to you if that were the case are not available to you because they do exist?
As far as I can see our current system is beneficial, if only because it allows people additional choices of how to live their lives.
The option to share resources in an egalitarian way so that people can meet their basic needs without subordination.