Can We Imagine a World Without Work?
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
It's mind boggling to me how some people can't see that getting 2/3 of life back to do with as you please would be .. absolutely amazing.
Unless something is rather strange in your country, that is not when you can retire, that is the age you can collect a taxpayer-funded old age pension. Retirement is an amount of money, not an age - if you won the lottery, presumably you would not be conscripted and forced to work until age 69?
If you had free room and board and healthcare, you would not need to work. But of course you would be free to. Whether it be for someone else, or for yourself, or just to find some non-work activity that gives you meaning and pleasure. That's the point - the freedom to choose, not just a lack of freedom but in the opposite direction.
"All meaningful work" going away is pretty unimaginable to me. And if that's what you're imagining, then IMO you've gone way past the realm of reasonable speculation and into fantasy.
[1] to be clear, this isn't about intelligence. I know a billionaire who couldn't bear more than a few weeks without structured work and almost immediately started a new company after already making ~100MM which is why he is now a billionaire.
The trouble is that the world after the institutions is a wild west, and so people who were well institutionalized struggle to adapt or flee to comfort inside one of the institutions (big corporates count too). Happy enough with the outcome, they are defensive of the institution that supports their lifestyle and perspective. Fair enough really.
I am being a bit general here, there is heaps of nuance and room for individual perspectives. But I think you are spotting exactly that, institutionalized individuals.
Surely a few percent would pursue meaningful (for humanity) pursuits, but it would be relatively few. Is whiling away your time at the beach any better than sending memos (emails) around?
I don't think we can basically go back to being apes. We are human and cannot rid ourselves of that.
I think 99% of humans would say 'yes'.
If you fish it’s productive, else it’s not. Pushing emails could result in apprehending a criminal or treatment for a disease…
People with no purpose tend to self-destruct.
A life “lived to work” is a meager thing indeed.
Who is going to chop the wood for the cooking fire?
Who is going to churn the butter?
What galley slaves will row the cargo ships?
Who is going to drive the oxen ploughing the fields?
Reading the article reveals that the first thing in it is a woman who was annoyed by women having to clean the home, and who invented a self-cleaning home. That was in the 1970s. We're long past being able to have self-cleaning toilets if we wanted that. And pre-fab homes. And and and.
You can retreat into 'God of the gaps' of ever-shrinking necessary work, but that's usually a last ditch argument by people who have nothing stronger to argue with. Goodness forbid that your position be reduced to "toilets should have to be cleaned by a person, and it should be organised by money, so done by someone poor" as that would be strawman bad.
Yes self-cleaning toilets would take iron ore mining and steel manufacturing and so on, but factory work has been more automatable decade by decade, and it won't be a thousand years of current rates of change before basically everything is automatable.
That seems pretty reductive!
Calling it a "purpose" takes this concept too far.
If my toilet is clogged and there's shit water all over the floor, I would do well to fix it. I wouldn't call it the purpose of my life, my raison d'etre, or whatever.
People propose we start thinking about what a world where AI can do the drudgery looks like.
What would you do for purpose if robots can do what you can do, for cheaper, and thus put you out of a job?
Like Zizek says, the conditions of society dictate what it’s even possible to believe at a subconscious level.
For most of us, financial resources are finite and the cost of existing in America - let alone living, let alone thriving - is out of reach for most. My job (technical field) was considered high paying and high skilled at one time in the not-so-distant past. My salary would now be considered entry level for tech people as defined by the HN community. This will not improve with time and the Ferengification of the society in which I was raised and educated. Every other place in the world is sliding down at an equal or faster rate so there is no outlet. Hobbies, passion projects, and service are all well and good in the abstract but many do miss the mental exercise from a job with infrastructure, equipment, and people.
Tithonus, without his knowledge, was granted eternal life without eternal youth. The modern horror, at least in the US, is outliving your savings.
Another way is to be good and be diligent on how you spend your income. For most of us, the easiest way to escape the grind is to save our way out of it.
There are certainly people out there who can be happy just watching TV and playing tennis, and that's fine, but the correlation of (voluntary) late retirement and longevity suggests that for most people, when we stop producing / having purpose, we just start to decompose [0]. I saw this contrast firsthand between some of my grandparents.
[0] https://hbr.org/2016/10/youre-likely-to-live-longer-if-you-r....
What I CAN envision is my labor becoming worthless. A level of worthless that no amount of education or personal character could make valuable again.
Its great to talk about not having to work. The mechanics of how we get there typically amount to hand-waving magic. Which if that is how we get there then I also want a pony.
At this point i am more curious how people envision a continuation of the work week as is. Especially with an explosion of noncommercial innovation by individuals who can now do what took companies teams and years¹. Are we going to dig trenches and fill them back up to keep people from making existing business models build on planed obsolesce disappear? Even that is doubtful given the lower barrier of entry thanks to technological progress.
¹ https://github.com/circuitvalley/USB_C_Industrial_Camera_FPG...
Edit: Giving you a pony is not that expensive btw. Especially with a lot of people likely building stables given enough free time. And you ordering one a year in advance producing plan-ability. Reducing costs and profit at the same time is just killer for the economy as is.
Creating demand for pony supplies might soon be the best thing you can do for the economy with your time.
Edit1: Having looked at pony prices, it seems i can get you a pony in 2025 if you want one. Show me some pictures how you are going to keep it, financing plan for its upkeep and character witnesses for you treating it well and i should be able to get you a pony.
They did seem to want shorter hours, but they took a lot of pride in how much time they spent working, humble bragging towards each other about how many hours they worked last week for example.
I think our work titles are too tied with our social status and identity for anything to change here.
You just need to push. Great leaders do it all the time.
I have seen it happen when leaders are clear about what they want to achieve. Leaders who change goals and values with the wind end up on hamster wheels to nowhere.
A great example of it in large corps is the ability to push financial engineers around. Ofcourse you need finance background in addition to whatever your base skills are or its hard to pull off.
So financial engineers will show up to meetings with all kinds of tools to leverage cross border tax rate/interest rate/labor cost/currency/real estate/rent/insurance gaps. Plus ways to use large corp financial muscle to snuff out competition, play market capture games etc.
These guys are great to have on the team especially when the corp is going through bad times.
But when the tide turns and the skills of others shine, I have seen two kinds of leaders. One who gets so mesmerized by what profits financial engineering can achieve, they forget what their own strengths, goals, values and defer to finance logic.
But I have also seen leaders who will just push the financial engineer out of the room or convince them of some direction that will break their model. And its funny to watch cause no one can really argue against great profit making financial models. But it happens all the time when leaders know where they want to go.
And yes, you choose the live you live because you want warmth and shelter and dental plans and good food and a laptop and a pension, and you reasonably think those things are better - but that's not someone taking your life, that's a choice, your choice.
And when you put it like that, "live in a tent and eat scraps so I can have 16 hours a day to myself" doesn't sound so "absolutely amazing" anymore, does it?
The holiday season is so nice for gathering family and people who will soon move to another plane, but we have a limited time to enjoy all this because of a foolish convention that was invented where we must keep the gears turning 9-5.
It's a shame we didn't know how to appreciate the gift of life as we could have.
I am no saint, but I have some useful things I'd like to pursue with extra energy and time.
It's funny that most of my peers don't even think about that, or even a life with less work.
I'm a bit obsessive and easily distracted, so perhaps I'm way outside the norm.
> "ROCKFORD, IL—Retired post office branch manager Nancy Hollander, 97, died at her home of natural causes Tuesday, after spending her life completely unaware that she was one of the most talented musicians of the past century and possessed the untapped ability to become a world-class violin virtuoso."
> ""Nancy was the most gracious person I ever met," said retired coworker Geraldine Hunter, 82, echoing nearly verbatim what Pope John Paul II would have said after inviting Hollander to play at the Vatican in 1989. "She really lived every day to its fullest, and I don't think she could have been blessed with a better life.""
etc. etc.
As we know, this hasn't happened. Instead, factory owners build other widgets, either something that is currently undersupplied or something that is brand new. And of course they do this by changing the machinery in their factory and re-training their workers (or hiring new workers). Changing from gasoline-powered automobiles to EVs (to the extent this is happening) is an example. Most of the things we buy today, with the exception of meat and vegetables, are things that didn't exist a century ago. Even automobiles, tractors and airplanes little resemble those of a century ago.
In some cases the old factories are torn down and work moves elsewhere, along with the laborers, but this is mostly building new widgets that couldn't be built in those old factories. The Rust Belt and the coal mining areas of Appalachia are examples.
>Even in a perfectly just society, there will be people who just don’t want to do any care work at all: they will prefer to freeride rather than do their fair share, whatever that turns out to be.
>... If we really want an equitable division of care work, some people will need to be coerced into doing it.
>... Unwanted work can serve as a teacher, shushing the would-be brat that lurks in every human heart.
>... When a sulky teenager is made to set the table by her parents, her labor is alienated; she would rather be doing something else.
>But to know whether the teenager is wronged, it is not enough to know how she feels about setting the table.
>... Someone whose work serves a democratic community—a community for which they serve as a trustee, rather than merely as a mute resource—is not wronged, regardless of whether her work is dull or stimulating, cherished or resented.
The article mentions composing a sonata as something one might do if one had the time. I'm not sure that's entirely a serious suggestion; I don't think many people even know what a sonata is, much less have an appreciation for them--and still less have the ability to compose one. In any case, the idea that many people without work would create art--any kind of art--seems dubious. I can barely draw stick figures.
Issues:
1. Lack of work will cause billions of people to drift around with no purpose, leading to serious social problems.
2. Work cannot be absolutely eliminated. Because the machine which feeds, clothes and houses people will need to be understood and maintained. If several generations of people literally don't do any work, including learning how to maintain the utopia, it will all go to hell in a houndbasket.
3. Some of those who choose to work won't necessarily want to coddle the others. They will view the majority of nonworking people as a superfluous load on the planet, that serves no purpose.
4. Some people work not just to sustain themselves, but for the sake of the work. Not only would it be cruel to take work away from them, but you basically cannot do that. Those people will find something to work on.
2. This assumes we can never make machines that maintain themselves. Opinions on how likely AI vary, but being unable to imagine it at all is odd.
3. We already deal with these folks today.
4. No one's proposing banning work. Just that it'd be nice not to require it to live.
2. Sure, but in the near future this is baseless techno-optimism just like fusion or colonizing the Solar System
3. Today they are a vocal, but mostly powerless minority. They cannot, by and large affect national welfare programs. Imagine if such a small minority held power over all means of housing and production?
4. Some work will always be required, even just to live. For now, to maintain a western developed standard of living, it's actually quite a bit of work, when you consider e.g. high tech electronics, transportation system, healthcare.
You're countering your own strawman arguments here.
4. If the western developed standard of living requires too much work, then one way out may be to abandon that standard. Perhaps it is a failed experiment. People in poor countries don't seem any less happy to me.
A good way to show that would be to stop activities like, oh, learning English and emigrating.
Someone else in the thread referenced Brooks from Shawshank Redemption; I think it's an apt comparison. A life lived believing work is the only purpose may well convince some that's the truth; they've become institutionalized.
They eventually realize that it just - doesn't - work in most cases. There are some exceptions, like the kibbutz that is tied together with some overriding bond like religion.
This article touches on some of the issues - the free rider problem, efficient allocation of resources, the perils of consensus decision-making, etc.
Nothing is stopping y'all from trying it again. It might work for a while, but human nature is betting hard against you.
Some resources are finite. Right now, land and time are good examples. In this future, how is it determined how much land you have, and where?
I mean, unless you want a generation of kids raised by robots and we expunge all records of private ownership from the historical record so the new generation doesn't get ideas.
"I want to live there, on the coast." What does this society do about that? Really explore this concept, don't just wave it off.
People are going to want things and not everyone will get them. And they'll invent ways to try to get what they want. And that'll be the re-invention of work.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
This is not sane as it is giving some "value" to armies of BS jobs.
Post COVID supply shortages shows the critical importance of many seemingly BS jobs. Similarly a spike in cancer deaths showed up when hospitals delayed less critical procedures.
Rather than BS what’s actually going on is more often chasing diminishing returns. Half the effort may be spent chasing 1% better outcomes as long as the difference is worth the expense.
Is asking Americans to have less than one car per adult family member really that much? Or to start buying smaller/more efficient cars instead of the monstrosities that pass for "Utility Vehicles"?
> children, winter, not being in their 20s and etc. etc.
Two kids, way past my 40s and biked year-round in Germany. Do I still use public transport and taxis? Yes. Have I spent less in a year on public transport and taxis that I would have spent on parking and car insurance alone if I wanted to have my own car? Also yes.
Which is somewhat ironic, given that the US is the richest country in the world yet the people seems to be okay with such a miserable way of living.
And yes, I agree it's pretty miserable.
And, yes, of course there are also benefits. On the net though, I think mass private vehicle ownership is one of the worst mistakes we've ever made although I don't blame any individual for their choices. The reasons people use cars are rational but the externalities of mass car ownership are significantly and ultimately I believe unsustainable and undesirable. At the same time, chill, nobody is coming to take your cars or your guns.
But those are reasons to be against car-centric design[1], and in favour of public transport - the disabled, children, the elderly, those with slowed reaction times, the poor - can't actually drive, or safely drive, or legally drive, or afford to own, cars. If cars are the only option for transport then life can only be good for the healthy mostly-able-bodied car driver[2].
> "One size doesn't fit all."
In all too many places, the only size available is 'car'; that you rally against bikes - and implicitly in defense of the status quo - while reminding people that "one size doesn't fit all" is dischordant. Can we have two, three, four sizes then? Walking, bussing, biking, tramming, driving?
> "is a thing someone else can't live without."
It's not an accident that you can't live without your car. Los Angeles had the largest electric tram network on the planet, and car companies used shell companies to buy them up and scrap them. Car companies spend a lot on advertising and propaganda to sell the idea of car ownership as a kind of American Freedom, and various zoning laws came to mandate car parks around businesses - pushing everything too far away to walk. It's not all conspiracy, but it's certainly not an inevitable "the way things must be". Arguing that 'fuckcars' people shouldn't want bikes, because some people can't live without cars, is reinforcing exactly the kinds of things they are angry about. That having to have a car to live, is an unquestioned default.
[1] not cars necessarily, but urban planning, laws, town and city layout, spending priorities, traffic priorities, where all the levers have been pushed fully over to cars.
[2] and being stuck in traffic on an ugly stroad which costs vast amounts of taxes to maintain and is dangerous to drivers and pedestrians, with car fumes, is not a particularly good life for those people either.
BS jobs are the ones that only exist to support hordes of people having jobs; middle managers, service industry (all the downtown office worker coffee/lunch/bar/cleaners/maint). And most retail.
If that doesn’t make the cut then 100% of jobs are BS. You don’t “need” a farmer when you can just plant your own food etc.