Comment by fnovd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnovd | Hacker News Reader

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Employment is an abstraction of resource-gathering. Every living being must gather resources to survive. Modern society does not enforce employment; employment is the manifestation of resource-gathering in modern society. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth is an incredibly popular lifestyle aesthetic. It's incumbent upon you to discover how to live that life while providing value to society, and if you cannot, then there exist some truths that others already discovered which are still foreign to your understanding. It's OK to think for your own intrinsic enjoyment, but if you aren't able to match the baseline of other successful thinkers then what is the utility to society of endowing you with what ultimately amounts to unlimited leisure time? Pontification is a perfectly acceptable hobby.

That would be true if there were vast numbers of truly creative people driven by nature to create and then create again. But there aren't. There are the correct number. The distribution of personalities reflects the need for those personalities as discerned by natural selection operating at the level of societies for 100s of thousands of years. There are the correct number of thinkers. The correct number of doers and they should all be supported to perform the functions for which they were designed by nature.

Complex societies haven't existed for hundreds of thousands of years, natural selection has not had the time or the ability to put selective pressure on creativity. This is simply an unfounded sociological theory that justifies you doing exactly what you want to be doing.

So is modern economics - a post hoc justification for greed. The same has been said of modern conservatism: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Brandon Sanderson did much of his early work while employed as a night security guard. If he hadn't had the time to write those early books, he might never have been paid enough for writing to write full time. That kind of 'growth hack' can make sense in some circumstances.

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