Ah, so this is what privilege and luxury of time looks like. Thanks Seth - I'm sure the 99% will heed your wisdom to go surfing.
This should be the point of civilization and society. We should be working to free everyone to be able to go surfing when able.
I dislike that some people get to be "privileged" enough to be able to do so as much as the next guy, but I also dislike when people act like it's wrong to aspire to this.
The problem isn't that this is bad advice; the problem is that our civilization currently prevents this for most people, and instead aims to convince the 99% that they are the essential workers who can't go surfing.
This isn't bad, it means that you're an adult. If everyone lived this Peter Pan lifestyle we wouldn't have anything you'd call a civilization, we'd just have a bunch of grown up kids.
A community consists of interdependent people, it's not just a room full of individuals. Defining freedom in opposition to responsibility is an adolescents idea of freedom. That's a valid perspective in youth, not when it's time to be a person others can rely on.
…and?
It’s a lot easier to sit there and watch the Colbert Report deliver a sick burn than it is to care and work towards change. Online karma points are the equivalent of gambling reward spikes. It’s all gamified bullshit.
Lo and behold, most people do not want to make the sacrifices necessary to have this life.
Being a grown-up is about making these choices.
I guess I’ve never formalized my thinking about this, but I believe it’s a sad outlook on humanity if the goal is to partake in pleasure at will. There seem to be much more fulfilling pursuits. Maybe I’m taking this the wrong way.
For some, that's surfing. For others, that's building a rocket to Mars.
My point is that ideally we build a society where as many people as possible get to choose what they find fulfilling, and pursue it as much as they wish.
The problem we have right now is that opportunity, training, and investment for many things are restricted to the very few.
I agree that an exclusively hedonistic outlook on life is empty, but so too is letting the very few enslave the others to their dreams.
But then what of the work that nobody wishes to pursue, but is required? Like farming for food, generating electricity and water, and many of the modern comforts?
I'm sure everybody wishes to pursue their own passion, regardless of the value of that passion to _someone else_. But this is why it cannot be done today, because there isn't enough wealth and energy and resources to allow for this. The star trek style replicators don't yet exist.
One of the oddities of modern work is that the lowest paid jobs are mostly those nobody wants to do.
Sure, we're not at replicator level, but farming of many crops require far fewer people than many imagine.
Personally I find that many things that could be automated are not yet automated because humans are cheaper. Think cashier, waiter/waitress, and so on.
In white collar work land, an amazing number of jobs could be automated, but are not yet because it's cheaper to use humans. These are the people who essentially just move numbers from one computer to another with a small amount of work in between.
This is wrong, because the automation costed capital, and the capital owners who invested in the automation are the ones capturing the benefits (mostly).
Horses whose job got automated out of existence by cars don't get to retire lavishly - they got turned into glue. And so will the people, if such an event were to happen.
Maybe what we understand as middle class is actually just a well-fed pleb.
Real middle class probably should have control of their day at least, so we have almost no middle class.
I think that has always been the case - the middle class is what civilization rests on for productivity and creation of goods and services. They are the most exploited bunch, but some smart ones have managed to save and invest enough to escape that middle class, and into the financially independent class (which may be previously called the landed gentry).
With very rare exceptions, everyone has free time (and weekends count), but many of us (myself included) waste it away.
(e.g., like I'm doing here)
If anything, we should aim to betterment for our lives, and I bet nowadays many people browsing this website have this. In the future, even more people will be able to! :)