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Comment by hansword | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here.

If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like!

I suspect a big problem is that many people actually don't know what they like to do. Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix. (If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem)

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> If a person has enough to survive, why would they toil and labour? Just do whatever you like!

It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be the political elite or the entrepreneurs or should it be inherited or or should it be the the people from special blood or religion or should no one be bourgeoisie and everyone should be working but you can't really argue over the resources and work done that is need to sustain a society.

You simply cannot have all the population on planet Earth retire on their savings because you cannot eat the numbers on the screen. With automation, robotics and other technologies we can increase the productivity and as a result we can afford to have greater percentage of people in leisure but we are nowhere near total machine labor. In fact, the percentage of non-working people probably is not that different than the past because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.

In dominant countries you might have the percentage higher and live off on imports from countries where everyone works much harder but the gap evaporates as these countries catch up.

So, the trick is to be part of a society that is so much advanced than the rest that their produce can buy off the produce of the society that relies on hard work. You can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas but this scheme falls apart when Hondurans start making their own apps and now you need to grow your own bananas.

Unsure why the post is downvoted, this point of view is really interesting. Could you link some reference materials to explore this more?

I think the topic is quite nebulous but I recall some articles on these issues here on HN that reached the front page. I recall something about historical ratio of the non-working elites being about the same and societies crumbling over that threshold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

I guess you can read “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” by V.I. Lenin to explore the topic more

I am downvoting because the comment acts as if it's a mystery where all the wealth gains in productivity have gone.

It is NOT a fucking mystery, and I'm outraged that so, so many people are or act oblivious to the obscenely obvious cause. (Since it's not actually obvious to everyone, thanks to shit education and propaganda, the uber-wealthy have hoovered up the gains in productivity and kept it to themselves.)

It's very clear by looking at the numbers [0], and it's outrageous to ignore this factor and blame a slightly older population.

[0] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...

And no one cares about your diatribe or outrage.

The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.

Always, for all time this is what happens in society. Don't care about your one example of some communist paradise that was great.

>The point is that there is always an elite or wealthy class, pick which group you like best.

Citations required

I do not agree whatsoever, just because you don't have the imagination to come up with a better system for organizing labor and resources doesn't mean it isn't possible

How would you organize labor and resources such that there is no elite class? How do you enforce whatever rules are required and ensure that those enforcers don't become the elite themselves (if nobody else..)?

I'm not holding my breath. As of yet, no one has had the imagination. This has become a fav piece of rhetoric by ancoms who believe complex supply lines, infrastructure and essential services could be maintained, let alone improved upon, with a "flat hierarchy" society doing away with representative democracy. No one can take that seriously. The universe hates a vacuum and you can be sure that, as in the past, if goons have an opening to seize power under the guise of Communism, with their party being the only legitimate, then they will. Removing checks and balances will do that.

Citations aren't required, a basic knowledge of history, though, that is required and what you lack.

The idea, your idea is that there's a way to tell everybody what to do to make all the things work and everyone will follow the plan and like their spot in it. You lack the imagination to recognize individual will let alone the fact that society works because there are millions of experts making choices everyday. No central planning board to 'organize' 'labor' can accomplish that or house the knowledge of these individuals

So what, giving up so easily on problem so obvious is usually done by people who are well off and actually have to lose, or those who for some basic reason don't understand they are also the ones getting fucked over (ie patriotism can push folks easily in very stupid positions and in the same time make them feel good about their actions).

If you traveled a bit around the world, maybe you could see that nothing is binary, and neither is this topic.

Elites always exist in some form, yes. They do not always have to be so disproportionally distanced from rest of population like in US, not in democracies, not so untouchable. There are tons of countries, ie in Europe who are managing this in much better way.

The wider problem/situation I see is that US is much more everybody-for-themselves-and-fuck-the-rest because it maximizes direct incomes of few (ignoring how much they will spend on ie healthcare or education of their kids, these 2 can easily wipe out aby gains for middle/upper middle class), rather than living in actual modern society.

The logic of 'contributing back and improving place you live actually comes back to you too and creates something better for future of you/your kids' somehow didn't click in US that much. I saw first hand rather primitive knee-jerk reactions in ie bible belt in US that equate well working society with socialism, (I guess phonetical step not too big, logical though much bigger) and well that's communism and you should be deported/jailed/shot on spot.

Its evidenced by many comments here. People are well off and the system has worked for them so we see the attitude of "it's working for me, fuck everyone else who didn't work the way I did or wasn't born into the right circumstances"

People that have never been outside of the US think they are living rough. They also like to compare their living with only the most egalitarian societies in the world instead of 'the world'. Odds are pretty great that you live in comfort everyday. Your concerns then get to be centered around all the material things you lack. And, odds are great you've never had to sacrifice much of anything. Nothing real. You would never commit to working in a place you didn't want to go or taking a bad schedule because you, right now, want everything. You deserve it, don't you.

That's the attitude that, unfortunately, will also be found in America.

So, for those that have worked, have sacrificed, we aren't interested in hearing the solutions posed from a homogenous society of one distinct culture and obvious problems with irregularities or deviations from the norm.... Here's looking at you Nords

The problem isn't that wealthy people exist, the problem is what percentage they get. It makes a big difference whether the top 1% own 10% of the wealth or 50% of the wealth, for example.

That could fix a lot of issues if you just look at America in isolation. The truth is though, even with the insane wealth distribution in America, the middle class here still makes a good amount of money. I regularly see people on here scoff at low six figure salaries. Those salaries are virtually impossible in many parts of the world and the only reason they're so easy in America is because we are exploiting developing nations the same way the ultra wealthy here are exploiting us. If we actually tried to redistribute the wealth that the ultra wealthy has accumulated, it would go to developing nations and not the hackernews crowd.

> because despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before.

The retirees in your example, with great probability, either have to rely on outside support (be it children or social security), or they will die with lots of wealth left over (aka inheritance). I hate to sound like a crummy communist, but this is a distribution problem, first and foremost.

Communists aren't crummy in the least, the ideas are important for developing new ideas that work better than our current system

They are definitely crummy. Communism isn't a new idea. It's a very old, very bad idea that's repeatedly failed.

> you can have a lot of bananas from Honduras if your society can make great apps that Hondurans love and willing to trade their bananas

Yes, or alternatively, you can live in a society which uses coups, death squads, and puppet dictators to keep Honduran labor cheap.

Unfortunately that's true. There are also many other models to have elites, some more fair or less cruel than others.

This way or another the main equation never changes. That is, the resources we consume are below the resources we produce. Left or right, communists or capitalist or other kind of ideologues are just different groups of people who have different ideas on how to distribute the roles.

This is a point that many people seem to ignore

US foreign policy and actions of private companies have absolutely decimated other countries, cultures, and economies so now those countries are reliant on the income from rich US capitalists exploiting their populace's dire straights. That we placed them in.

Humanity is much more productive per capita than 50 years ago, but we are collectively working more hours, not less.

The goal should not be for everyone to do no work.

The goal should not be for everyone to work full time and fear unemployment.

Part of the problem is that people have been conditioned into accepting this weird binary division between Work (measurable, institutionalized, subordinate labor) and Not-Work (everything else) that doesn't exist in healthy societies.

The kibbutzniks worked a lot harder than U.S. office workers, but didn't have the problem of alienation and the epidemic of mental ill-health (plus chronic inflammation, obesity, et al) that we have.

Almost all of us want the institutional, authoritarian nightmare we call "Work" to die, and it's past high time that it does... but, unfortunately, we've been stripped of our imagination when it comes to the question of how work (that is, useful activity) will get done without it.

Collective farms similar to kibbutz also exist in the US. They are an option for those who prefer that lifestyle. You can even start one yourself.

Who are you to tell everyone what their goals should be?

We work more in large part because we consume much more. Increased consumption requires increased supply which requires increased production which means more work to be done.

Debt also provides a large motivator, and just as you get close to being out of it you easily pick up more.

Debt is just a product of consumption.

Shelter costs have also increased massively, not only because shelter has gotten better but because there’s more room in people’s budget for landlords to capture.

Medical and educational costs have risen in the US, I would argue for the same reason.

And some adversarial work has expanded for no reason- look at all the effort spent in high frequency trading that could be replaced by venues running auctions every 100ms instead of having competitions for fractions of a microsecond.

If your boss is gonna take as much labor out of you as possible, no matter how productive you are, and no matter what advances in production methods you have achieved, productivity doesn't matter so much.

I live in Australia. Australia produces 190% of the food it requires, exports 71% of its agricultural production, and only 2.2% of its population work in agriculture. In earlier societies around 60% or more of the population worked in agriculture.

I don't believe most of this increasing agricultural productivity is due to us buying things from poor countries, although it's probably a factor at some level. I think it's due to the increasing technological sophistication of farming: the breeding of more productive crops, the use of tractors, the use of fertiliser both synthetic and man-made, better understanding and monitoring of soil health, better storage and better supply chains, new weedkillers, automated and partially automated animal handling, refrigeration and freezers, and everything else.

I do understand that someone has to do some work, but if we could have 8.8% of our population work in agriculture for 10 hours a week and not have to compete for housing against 40 hours a week incomes[0], that would be pretty great.

[0] Numbers are wrong: farmers work more than 40 hours a week. I think they explain the general point well enough, though.

People need more than food. Healthcare, education, electricity, water, the fancy phone or computer you’re reading this on, the infrastructure that connects it together with everyone else - all of these require people working in order to exist.

Food is just part of the human consumption. Starting with the agrarian society, we as species are having it very easy TBH. Disasters happen and some places are chronically problematic but overall food is solved problem since many millenniums.

Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.

I don't buy the argument that people living in Australia would starve to death if everyone in the world gradually halved their working hours over the next decade. I think current consumption here is so far above subsistence levels that there's a lot of room to drop without facing famine.

This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?

If halved working hours result in reduced output of the needed chemicals and machinery, that would definitely mean that less food will be produced. If Australia can keep up paying more than the rest and purchase the needed resources and machinery, then other parts of the world will starve and Australia will be just fine, I guess.

Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.

> Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.

And you'd have to assume nobody would change jobs. It's a useless extrapolation.

I think you're suggesting that

- the world is at literal subsistence level overall

- all nominal gains in productivity are just shuffling numbers around

- if anyone at all stops working, people will die

This seems obviously untrue given the increase in agricultural productivity. I know a few farmers, and none of them think agricultural productivity has stayed the same. Additionally, it seems really obvious that lots of industrial production is now going towards making luxury cars, TVs, smartphones, bigger houses, better healthcare, etc. and that not all of these are necessary for agricultural production.

Even further, global food insecurity has been decreasing. Only 8.9% of the world's population are food insecure, and prior to the war in Ukraine, those people mostly didn't live in agriculturally productive areas. I find it hard to believe that the remaining 91% are living off the work of the 8.9%. I think a much simpler explanation is that agriculture has actually gotten more productive even if you include the cost of making tractors.

On this topic, a question I've had for a while but never learned the answer to is: if nobody did anything outside farming, how expensive would farm equipment be?

I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.

Part of it is that there's a certain amount of food each person can reasonably eat - so if you want to feed a hundred people you can have, say, five or so with modern equipment farm the field and feed all 100, or you could have all 100 work with more outdated equipment (think: horses, etc) and farm the same amount.

I think I’m asking a different question: if we could actually work much less? Can we really feed people if everyone who isn’t currently a farmer or making farm equipment/consumables stopped working, or are greater economies of scale needed to keep the cost of that farm equipment and those consumables low?

Large swaths of people do work that is not even remotely related to farming, even if you need Google and AT&T for the companies that make the supplies farmers need, there's no arguable way the entertainment industry as a whole is necessary for farming or farming equipment. And I daresay there are others.

Possibly.

But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get.

Same for petrochemicals, steel.

I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.

> despite the increase in productivity we also have increased lifespan which results in large number of retirees who consume the resources for much longer than before

Don’t forget "rising living standards" which in Western cultures is an euphemism for "extravagant consumption".

> It really boils down on how many people need how much resources and how many people produce these resources. You can argue over who should be your bourgeoisie, should it be (...)

How about we don't succumb to the desire to pull strawmen and focus on simple things to accomplish such as being able to make a honest living that leaves you with disposable income after covering all your cost of living with a simple 9-to-5 job?

Where does this need to create the illusion that there is possibly no grey area between a homeless slacker and a glorious millionaire investor?

Is it too much to ask the most prosperous economy in the history of the world to allow workers to actually live a modest life with your salary? Otherwise, why would those workers continue to support that absurd society?

I mean, how about we just take the wealth from the 10%?

How about it? You still wont be able to eat those numbers, albeit the numbers would be slightly bigger for some.

Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday, and thus the only "leisure" they are still capable of and thus know is low-effort "comfortable" things like watching TV/YT/netflix.

This is definitely a factor. It isn't just work: Maybe you 'only' work 40 hours a week. So does your spouse, though, and the children still need things as well. Housework still needs done, and someone has to produce food daily. It doesn't leave much time at all.

The other factor is money: If you have little to no money leftover to do anything, you aren't going to do it. Netflix and youtube are fairly low cost entertainment and can get you through a month, not to mention that they provide some sort of entertainment while you are doing other things much like radios used to. Housework is better when you are entertained.

The corporate work week was never going to go below 35-40 hours per week. Bosses know they only get 15 good hours out of most people, if that, and it doesn't bother them as much as you'd think it would, because they get enough. It's not about productivity; it's about control. The workweek has to comprise at least 50.1% of a typical person's otherwise discretionary time, because otherwise people could have two jobs and the employer's power would be reduced.

This is how a tech boss thinks: having 350 people under you means there are 350 people you can cause bad things to happen to if they don't do exactly what you say. They're not optimizing for widget production, and certainly not for welfare of the human species, but for their own personal careers. What they want is indivisible loyalty; they want to own people. And, if the rich people control the state enough to decide which laws get passed, as they do in the US, they will.

Who are these bosses? Managers? You realize they’re just employees too right?

I do realize that, at least if we're talking about middle managers. It'd be a stretch to say that executives are "labor" or are "employees" except in a strict legal fashion. Executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The reasons for this are sociological rather than economic--in short, so long as executives uphold the interests of the upper class, the other rich people who control the company (important shareholders) will look the other way on their self-dealing.

The fact that they are victims of the system does not mean they are innocent of all charges. Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook; that doesn't mean everyone who is not rich or powerful is a saint.

Good luck with that.

> Almost everyone who is and remains rich or powerful in this world is a crook

That’s an opinion.

Nah. Activist shareholders don't look the other way. If they see a profit opportunity then they won't hesitate to execute a leveraged buyout and sack all the senior executives. This has happened many, many times. When it comes to making money, any notion of class loyalty died in the 1980's.

It seems that there is a lot of emotion in your assessment because you use sweeping absolutes to describe millions of people. In my experience the world is complex and nuanced. Do you really mean to say all rich people are law breakers ala crooks? When you define rich, are you using a global scale? For instance are most people in the developed world crooks? There are good and bad people in all walks of life, all countries, races, etc. More often than not, when you get to understand the forces that impact people, you realize that what seem like simple decisions from the outside to make the world a better place have unseen negative consequences.

On a personal level, I can say my managers try to be good people, although the may not always do the best thing. In my case, my wife has stage 4 cancer and they have been tremendously supportive.

Edit: I should probably mention for full transparency I work at Amazon as it is sited in the article.

They fulfill the same role muscle men.

A manager's goal is to enforce submission.

> If you like TV, great for you, but it being the 'default' might be a problem

When I was younger, I multiple times tried to cut of all mindless crap like tv or browsing. It led to lite depression and low productivity every single time. Conversely, when I had a lot of free time or worked on easy boring project, the stuff I do in free time became more intellectually difficult without me intentionally going for it.

My point here is that people cant be productive all the time. We do need some amount of mindless chill, be it tv or low key socialization.

For sure. Ever tried to go to bed immediately after sending the last email, your mind still preoccupied by work? It's impossible to get a good sleep like that. At least for me.

A hour or two of unwinding with a book or a Star Trek episode, talking about vacation with your SO or something else to get your mind off work is essential.

Which makes excessive work even more problematic. You have to commute, shop, do chores AND unwind.

Yeah but that's not even contended. In a hypothetical scenario where you didn't have to work to earn a certain quality of life (since, lets be honest, none of us have to "work to live"), would it be ideal to spend all of that time on passive, consumptive activities? Notwithstanding issues with life balance that are not endemic, I think work is good for people in most of its capacity. Coordinating with others and producing something of your labors, particularly that which others value, is validating and meaningful. You could quibble that some of that could be done at leisure, but things we take for granted won't. There's a lot of well compensated hard work out there that no one does for fun.

Leaving aside the question of the merit of work, I think a consistently low-productivity lifestyle leads to negative symptoms.

In that hypothetical scenario, it is likely that I would not ended up spending all of that time on passive, consumptive activities. Assuming that there would be options for me to be more active and it would be socially acceptable for me to do things.

(If I lived in suburbs where HOA makes it impossible to have garden, I might end up purely passive and depressed simply due to no activity being possible.)

Its like the joke of the businessman who sees a fisherman doing nothing on the beach. Why dont you go fish some more? Why would i? Then you can make more money, buy another boat and make even more money. But why? Then you can build a fleet and with even more money you can control the factories where your fish is processed. And then? Well then with your empire you can spend two weeks of the year on the beach, like me.

/short version.

Two contributing factors are religion and social identity.

The “Protestant work ethic” has played a role in shaping American social views about work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

American society often anchors identity in work (“Nice to meet you. What do you do?”). An example search result for “work and American identity” turned up this survey from 2014: 55% of Americans get a sense of identity from their job. https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...

I think it's also very easy to just look around at all the problems and mysteries in the world/universe and feel compelled to do something. Even in the absence of any kind of "religious work ethic".

>> Most people with full-time jobs I know don't have much energy left after their workday

I'm not buying it. Certainly isn't the way it worked out for me. After my last job got off-shored, I thought about retiring, I didn't work for 4 months. And I didn't look too hard for a new job. If the recruiter called, sometimes I would answer. I had all the time in the world. I didn't do much other than look at a computer screen. I had musical instruments that I thought I wanted to learn to play, a list of books I thought I wanted to read, a list of apps that I thought I wanted to write.

As it turns out, I don't want to do the things that I want to want to do, I want to do the things that I don't want to want to do.

Or as Bukowski wrote:

"if you're going to create you're going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or you're going to create in a small room with 3 children while you're on welfare, you're going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, you're going to create blind crippled demented, you're going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquakes, bombardment, flood and fire."

In reality, I'm not going to create jack shit, leisure time or no leisure time.

Just do whatever you like!

Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person. "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40. Are we so certain "just doing whatever you want" isn't equally toxic to our happiness and mental health?

Looking at the people I know there is a huge overlap between free time and happiness. Unemployment is stressful, but looking at the extremes comfortable retirement easily beats constant overwork. And voluntarily working part time beats a full time job as long as their income is sufficient.

It’s only when you compare full retirement vs part time work that there is something of an aberration. But, that tends to be a self selecting population.

> Are you sure they're wrong? Judging by the people I know, there's little overlap between having a ton of free time and being a happy, satisfied person.

As an anecdote to the contrary, I've just exited a half-year period of unemployment during which I spent a lot of time on hobbies, started eating much better, had nearly no stress in life, and built up a steady exercise routine. I met a lot of people from around the world and learned about them and the places they came from. I'd casually go on bike rides wherever and whenever I wanted and my absolute priority was my own well-being. Now I'm like a completely different person: stronger, more confident, healthier, and more appreciative and aware of the things in life that bring me joy.

I probably dragged out that stage of my life longer than I needed to or should have, because it was just so liberating. It felt like I was doing right by my body and soul for the first time in my life. Were it not for my slowly dwindling savings, I might have stayed even longer living like that. And that's the case of doing zero work. In a society with an emphasis on leisure you'd more likely be looking at work with flexible/reduced hours or extended vacations.

That assumes that people left to their own free will and time would end up in a dismal state as the default. I’m not sure.

I’d love to see a proper analysis but there’s lots of evidence both ways. Some people with excess leisure would end up doing nothing. Some would work on hobbies. Some would start businesses or maybe participate in local government or something.

It might also be that, given enough time in a leisure society, people would adapt for better or worse.

> "Just eating whatever you want" results in being a five hundred pound diabetic who dies of a heart attack at 40.

This is categorically untrue for much (I'd hazard to say most) of the population. It's certainly untrue for me. I don't like feeling full, and I don't really gain weight when I eat whatever I want.

I would even say that you need leisure and slacking off to discover what you actually want to do.

Then you might discover that you like doing something that doesn't involve paying for it!

As I’ve gotten older, I have been vocalizing a question to my friends and family: why is it so unreasonable of me to not want to work a job I don’t like, and instead spend my time producing documentaries and teaching audio production to kids? These are two things I’ve found I love doing. They provide value to society. Yet a sustained income from them is basically unattainable except in very specific, lucky cases, not to mention the income is minimal.

People love to consume art but don’t value the arts. People love the idea of kids - especially “at risk youth” - having technical or otherwise just interesting programming, yet in the case of audio production like I mentioned above there is just one nonprofit here busting its ass trying to make it happen as the only entity attempting it.

All of this is to say, if I didn’t have to worry about making a living and had a bunch of leisure time, I would be putting my time and energy towards these endeavors. Because I think they are valuable, they mean something to me, and I think society would benefit from it too. Unfortunately we have this ridiculous habit of tying morality to work in the US as a result of our Puritan hangover, which means I am not able to pursue the above unless someone deems it worthy of sustained funding (they won’t because virtually no ROI on documentaries or ethical kids programs) or I am sitting on a nest egg most people can’t ever achieve so I don’t have to worry about surviving.

Sorry for the semi-rant. The negative ripple effect tying work to morality has on our society is truly hard to overstate and it upsets me a lot. It’s such a cynical view of people and, unfortunately, is often tied to racial perceptions as well.

Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?

I don't think it's work specifically that's tied to morality, but production. If someone is obviously consuming more than they're producing, then they're going to get negative attention. In 2022 it's not always clear exactly how much someone is producing, so it's generally assumed that someone with a full time job produces enough to cover their needs while the unemployed surviving off of welfare do not.

We even make allowances for people trying to reach net positive production. Students, for example, aren't typically looked down upon. It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.

> Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?

This is how we end up with no art, no music, no culture, no raising of the future generations etc. If the only metric via which we value time spent and effort spent is money earned none of these (very important) things can compare even to the most useless widget making / admin job.

Do we even know what it is to be human anymore?

Plenty of people pay for art and music. I didn't say they weren't valuable, I said what you're trying to offer specifically may not be valuable. I know you think it's some incredible service that everybody wants, but have you considered that maybe it isn't?

Are you in the arts or a field adjacent to it, by chance?

That's not relevant to the discussion, if you have something you want to say then just say it. Don't try to ask me a question you think you know the answer to and then tell me my answer precludes me from having an opinion on the subject at hand.

This is one of the most common methods I see employed by bad-faith conversationalist and it's sickening. Your point should stand on it's own merit, not on your ability to invalidate the "oppositions" side.

> That's not relevant to the discussion, if you have something you want to say then just say it.

Hey ease off throttle man. This isn’t Reddit.

That makes no sense. People do pay for those things. They buy art and concert tickets. Teaching isn't super lucrative but they earn a decent living wage in most areas.

Agreed with your comment up to this:

>but they earn a decent living wage in most areas.

Debatable and only part of the problem. Education is a terrible example for you to bring up, as evidenced by the absurdly low salaries they receive combined with the broad expectations of their job (therapy, education, tutoring, crisis intervention, nutrition, baby sitting, special needs identification, the list goes on).

Have you seen the turnover rates in education? It’s in an appalling state. No resources, garbage pay, and now they’re being asked to shoot back at school shooters as their schools are redesigned to look like prisons, all while politicians play tug of war with their curriculum as a proxy battle for social policies.

The sad fact is we don’t value educators in the US. Hell we don’t value caregivers much either.

>Has it occurred to you that the lack of people willing to pay for what you're trying to offer may be indicative that it's not quite as valuable as you perceive it to be?

Is producing cigarettes, making apps more addictives, making food superpalatable, synthetizing pernicious drugs and so on more valuable than producing documentaries, studying ancient languages and civilazations, studying exoterical physics topics?

Not everything that we're paying for is valuable and not everything valuable is being paid for.

I guess that depends on how you define value. Tobacco, while unhealthy, can have great value to the user. Those addictive apps provide a low cost leisure activity for millions of people. We all benefit from advances in food sciences every day. Many of those pernicious have a purpose and are often more helpful than they are harmful.

All the things you mentioned provide at least short term tangible benefits to the consumers. How will the average person benefit from the study of ancient languages and civilizations or esoteric physics? People already pay for documentaries they're interested in, there's a reason they're produced. Why do you think academia for academia's sake is inherently beneficial for the rest of society? I see this notion of expressed here and elsewhere that if something is academically challenging or interesting, it must therefore be good to spend time studying.

> Not everything that we're paying for is valuable and not everything valuable is being paid for.

Honestly all of these threads could be distilled into this simple point. Way more concise than what I wrote that’s for sure haha.

> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon, and rightfully so.

Your view is manifestly incorrect. There are so many groups of people that are looked down upon, what you describe is just a tiny tiny subset of these. If you are grasping to find an example, that shows a great deal about your position in life.

(If you still struggling, start with sex workers, people working in waste management, and people with physical disabilities, aka 'hookers' and 'trash people' and 'cripples'. Yeah, they definitely not looked down upon. LOL. I could literally write 10 pages of further examples.)

I obviously wasn't saying the only prejudice in the world exists against lazy people and that no other group of people were ever looked down upon. You've got to use context clues before getting all fired up like this. The was in response to how we purportedly "tie work to morality". It was obviously meant as something closer to:

> It's only people who are actually lazy and not doing anything useful with their lives that are looked down upon *for not working a typically job.*, and rightfully so

Really you should try to avoid taking things intentionally out of context and getting yourself worked up over, it's not healthy.

You’re being very rude and antagonistic.

Do you think the measure of worth in society is how much people are willing to pay for it? Is that the metric by which we should judge all contributions to society?

Also, do you think documentaries are valuable? Because the vast majority do not have investors and do not make much money. Frankly without grants we’d barely have any.

One emergent process of the technological age is the drive to optimize ourselves (humans) as if we are machines for increased productivity. Think of all the ways we measure aspects of our behavior, goals, accomplishments.

I program for work, and not leisure. As prospective careers go, it probably ranks top among similar labor. All the same I could not be arsed to develop "for its own sake". Work offers coordinating with others towards a common goal and finding validation from the product, and the value it brings - but it also, it offers incentive.

If people don't "have" to do anything, they generally don't do much. Especially today where attention is easily hijacked by passive electronic consumption, advertisers. This leads to problems. Low motivation, ennui, health issues. It's not a question of "discovering what one likes to do".

>I am amazed at the disdain for leisure and "free" time and "slacking" in the comments here.

There is a strong incentive to craft a narrative where their present lifestyle (live in a filthy city, busy all the time, etc) is, if not the best possible, at least unavoidable.

The alternative is depression.

Security against adversity, delayed gratification for better future reward, leaving a legacy or your kids, or philanthropy... there are lots of reasons not to live by our animal instincts of the bare minimum of how much work is enough for "survival".

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