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Comment by amw-zero | Hacker News Reader

Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?

Filling out TPS reports is not a survival skill

This is a function of specialization. You fill out TPS reports to generate value for a company which allows you to purchase food created by people who specialize in food generation.

Not all work involves filling out TPS reports. A lot of workplaces have completely automated this aspect. And you should feel free to quit jobs that haven't for jobs that have; by doing so, you're making the economy more efficient.

Honestly asking, how is it not a survival skill? It's a high level abstraction that's part of the "need" for the company, which is why they're paid to fill out that report, with the skill being all the intelligent/understanding required for that high level abstraction. It's literally paying for all the needs and squishy comforts of life for that individual, most likely much squishier than an average individual.

That's why I said proxy. The vast minority of members of our society take care of our actual physical needs. The rest of us do other things to provide other kinds of value, so that the farmers can do things like enjoy a nice TV show at the end of their day without producing it themselves.

For some of those other companies, a TPS report is required.

Technology has allowed the rise of "made-up", survivally unnecessary jobs like Metaverse programmer, pop singer, and marketing specialists. If anything, the pandemic proved we don't need restaurants and tourism to survive.

You would consider Homer "survivally unnecessary" (the poet not the cartoon character)

Art, entertainment, and communication are not new human creations. These jobs are the result of psychological needs that humans have. Maslow's Hierarchy is more than a cave, nuts, and berries.

Furthermore, not everyone can survive without specialization of labor. Prior to specialization of labor, it was much more common for people to die young, and the world's population reflected this.

Was it the specialization of labor, or the harnessing of vasts quantities of stored energy in fossil fuels? I’d wager on the latter.

Agriculture brought 2 or 3 orders of magnitude in population growth. Industrialization of fossil fuels brought about 1.

Agriculture alone, or fueled by fossil fuels?

Specialisation of what labor? We've always had hunters and gatherers, and still do. We've always been specialised.

What I'm saying is Maslow's scale is tipped upside down with an overabundance of leisure and scarcity of high quality basic fulfillment. There's so much entertainment, that we can afford for a few markets to crash and disappear, hence why I called them "made-up".

We have tons of high quality basic fulfillment. Food is higher quality, more abundant, and cheaper than it ever has been. Educational attainment is the highest it has ever been. Global measures of violence are at historical lows. Specialized healthcare is more available than it ever has been.

I think you've got cause and effect reversed. It's our exceptional progress on basic fulfillment that has enabled our economy to support these so-called "made-up" jobs.

I don't necessarily agree. Food has always been "organic free range humaine grass fed unpesticized sun-shined unprocessed" - nowadays you'd go bankrupt buying everything from certified health stores. Education is aimed at an acceptable mean in large groups instead of pedagogues. Death and injury rates are down because of advances in medicine - people are inexplicably violent still (please read or listen to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman). European healthcare is great.

Everyone agrees that people need to do certain things to survive. What complicates this line of thinking are the social facts that are assumed when we conceptualize work. The way that work is conceptualized is culturally specific across space and time. The construction "eating implies survival implies work" doesn't imply that our culturally specific conceptualization of work is implied. There are many interesting ways to have conversations about work means, how it changes, and what factors influence how people think about what work is and isn't.

I buy this. Maybe this is what people mean when they are anti work - they're just anti modern work?

I think it's good to be critical, we can always improve the system. But I also personally believe our society is actually incredible at self-optimizing, and we are pretty darn close to an ideal system in practice. It's easy to focus on the bad, but our society has produced truly immeasurable good (very little relative violence, hunger, boredom, etc.) Of course it can be improved, and there are some real problems, particularly around wealth inequality. But I can't help but think that we're doing pretty damn good.

> I buy this. Maybe this is what people mean when they are anti work - they're just anti modern work?

It's not "modern work" but work-the-social-institution. Which is the primary definition of "work."

What they don't mean is productive activity. Every productive activity that takes place within the social institution of work also takes place outside of that social institution. For example, farming, building construction, cooking, cleaning, education -- all of these take place both inside and outside of work.

Work is not a proxy for survival. Sometimes have to take time off work to keep your baby alive. Taking care of the survival of your family isn't work. Changing diapers isn't work. Work is a social relation.

Work is much more than that - it enables you to feed your family. If there wasn’t a service economy and you had to grow or gather your own food, sometimes you would have to choose between changing a diaper and going to find more food.

That’s just what it takes to live, we forget that because of how far removed we are from actual survival. But take away modern society, and the world is much harsher and much less fulfilling.

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