People need work to feel fulfilled. I get that a corporate job may not meet that demand but this idea that you can just eschew any work and be mentally ok isn't true.
I, too, worry about the idle rich and think we should do something to help them find work.
I would agree that also not needing to be available for a boss at all, even "just in case something goes wrong", is better, but that doesn't seem to be the argument. Rather, that attaining freedom from being told what to do much of your waking hours is morally or psychologically harmful. Which obviously becomes absurd when we apply it to rich people. Which is my point. Why's it fine for one group and something to worry about with another?
[EDIT] More directly, I'm wary any time I encounter "be careful with that freedom, poor people, it might be bad for you, and I'm not sure we can trust you to do the right thing with it! Rich people, carry on as you were, you're all fine and need no oversight or pointers, obviously." as an argument.
You might have a point if you're talking trust fund babies but those people are miserable because they do nothing. They're not happy. The vast majority of wealth is not handed down.
>Rather, that attaining freedom from being told what to do much of your waking hours is morally or psychologically harmful.
Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY HARD WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no one is stopping you. If you think it's not going to be work I've got news for you. No one is going to just give you this freedom, nor should they because it would then be meaningless.
I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive, and lacking in any real world experience. You need to grow up and realize that almost nothing in life that's easily obtained is worth a shit.
This is most people, rich or not. The rich just don't have to do work they aren't enthusiastically choosing to do. The ~50% of normal folks' work that they're not paid to do—property maintenance, the boring kind of shopping, cooking, driving themselves and others around, fighting with insurance, keeping a schedule and making appointments, cleaning, childcare, et c.—are, tellingly, the kind of work that rich folks typically pay others to do for them. What remains is work that is done purely by choice. Not only no boss, but no personal work that isn't done by choice. That's the difference. The "idle" poor still have more work imposed on them—work they cannot avoid doing—than the "idle" rich, by a long shot.
So again: rich folks can have little to no work imposed on them (and in fact pay to avoid nearly all such imposition) and that's fine, but if poor people are in the situation of having merely a substantial part, but nowhere near all, of their required-work burden removed, that may be a bad thing for them and we should worry? That seems odd. My "idle rich" quip has you responding as if I've attacked something sacred, because, as you state, most of those folks stay plenty busy, but if that's the case, what's the motivation for worrying about poor people not being able to do the same?
It's also the case that having lots of money means being able to turn hobbies into "work", and maybe even money-making ventures, without ever having to do the parts you don't want to. That looks an awful lot like play, even if it's producing an income. Which, to be clear, I think is fine. Shit, that's exactly where I, and probably most people, want to be. The part where I get lost is when poor people gaining a fraction of that freedom is worrisome.
> Do you understand how this is achieved at all???? BY HARD WORK. Go out and create something of your own, no one is stopping you. If you think it's not going to be work I've got news for you. No one is going to just give you this freedom, nor should they because it would then be meaningless.
Where, exactly, the fuck, did I claim that getting rich if you're not already rich is not, typically, very hard work?
> I'm sorry but you just sound incredibly young, naive, and lacking in any real world experience.
This is perhaps the most appropriate time I've ever employed this: I'm rubber, you're glue.
[EDIT] Are we using very different definitions of rich, perhaps? I find this exchange baffling enough that I'm beginning to wonder if we're operating from entirely different terms. I wouldn't consider anyone who'd suffer a large drop in quality of life if they decided to stop working for several normally-work-aged years, to be rich. That's what I mean by rich. Not an entrepreneur with a whopping mid-seven-figures in the bank, or the owner of a modestly successful local chain of stores, or anything like that. People who hang out at expensive parts of the "Med" and ski the Alps annually, despite living in the US, who could afford a very nice new car every month if they decided that's what they wanted, keep a personal staff on payroll, and, crucially, who don't need to work to keep doing that kind of thing indefinitely, are rich. Fussell's "upper" and "top-out-of-sight", not his "upper-middle" (who may do much of the above, but can't keep doing it without continuing to work) and certainly not anything lower than that.
At what time in history has this ever been an option. You would be dead in a ditch with this attitude for most of our history. Maybe you need to go out into the woods and survive without help to force an attitude change.
You have a skewed since of reality egged on by a society that's let you survive off of doing basically nothing and yet you still complain. The problem here is that you believe all of the stuff to keep you alive just magically appears without anyone doing any work.
Do try to keep up, please. Thank you.
You're maliciously interpreting OP to imply that "slaving over a hot keyboard" is the only way to feel fulfilled.
Whether you are an employee, company owner, gardener, woodworker, whatever you are being fulfilled by "working". Applying yourself willfully and deliberately to a problem. If you are not being fulfilled you find something else. Or, like most people, you realize working for someone won't be fulfilling, so you instead seek fulfillment in work that you enjoy - such as your hobbies.
This equating of employment with slavery by the /r/antiwork types is why the subreddit is quickly becoming the butt of every joke. Yes, it's not uncommon your profession is unfulfilling. Most well adjusted people derive fulfillment from work outside of their profession.
But your statement is still quite meaningless as part of a discussion, because that's not how everybody else uses the word, and a discussion where one participant uses his own terms, wildly divergent from everyone else's, can never get anywhere meaningful.
While you're likely to get skewered for this line, I think it's because of a mismatch in vocabulary that is being ignored. The "work" in antiwork is usually referring to paid employment, but it seems that you're using it more akin to fulfilling accomplishment. I agree with you on the whole that people need to feel that they are making a positive impact on their surroundings to feel satisfaction.
Maybe that comes from paid employment, or volunteer work, or hobbies, or social interactions. A street preacher, a stay at home parent, an ancient cave painter, a bricklayer, and a software architect might all feel equally satisfied by their work, irrespective of the value placed on that work by their society.
In fact, I would argue that the (professed) goals of antiwork are aligned with your view -- people should be free to pursue the work they personally find the most fulfilling, rather than the most profitable.
Except it's not, the posts also reflect this.
"A subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles."
Who is forcing you work a mind-numbing job?
Do you want everyone else to pay for you to do nothing? Do what you want, but don't expect others to donate what they've earned to your finger painting or whatever it is you think you should do to be fulfilled daily. This idea that everyone will just suddenly become creative happy geniuses as soon as "mind-numbing" work is alleviated is false.