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Comment by askonomm | Hacker News Reader

I've asked a lot of people about the potential future of not having to spend 2/3 of our life working to be able to feed ourselves and have a roof, and I'm afraid so many people are what I could best describe as being "institutionalized" (to borrow a term from The Shawshank Redemption) that they can't even envision such life, to the point that they instantly start defending the current status quo, the 9-5 grind.

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.

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Institutionalized is exactly the word you want, and many argue that this outcome is the more practical purpose of the school system.

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.

Instead of thinking of it as the binary work/not-work, think of it as activity/non-activity. Whether people are active building widgets or active planning things, people have to do something. Else people, at large, descend to animal level behavior (be it Netflix binging, gaming, gambling, drugging, etc.)

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.

> Is whiling away your time at the beach any better than sending memos (emails) around?

I think 99% of humans would say 'yes'.

Mostly because the beach is a treat. After a while it’s just a place like another, with sand, salt, bugs, seaweed, etc.

If you fish it’s productive, else it’s not. Pushing emails could result in apprehending a criminal or treatment for a disease…

Even for the “more enlightened”, there is a sense of Stockholm syndrome. IE I’m one of those who’d really love to escape the grind, but I’ve had to placate myself with all sorts of thoughts and “it’s not so bad”s in order to cope

One way to escape the grind is to be exceptional and exceptionally rewarded.

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.

> absolutely amazing

People with no purpose tend to self-destruct.

How can we conflate “not working” with “no purpose”?

A life “lived to work” is a meager thing indeed.

Who is going to clean the toilets?

Who is going to wash the dishes?

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.

It's useless trying to predict what human society would be like in 1000 years. I've read enough scifi to notice that none of the authors even get 20 years into the future right, not even close.

If the purpose of your life is to sell your limited time and health to be able to afford food and housing... My condolences. You don't need to self-destruct, you were already destructed.

Somebody's got to grow the food and build the housing.

So much of "work" is unnecessary product cycles and reinventing the wheel: useless things for society.

Having only one producer of each product has never worked out well. Besides, how are you going to decide who gets to work and who gets the results for free?

>Having only one producer of each product has never worked out well.

That seems pretty reductive!

I don't disagree. Some things need done.

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.

If only one could find purpose outside of work.

Sadly most don’t have the time or energy to find that purpose, precisely cause it’s all been spent on work

Somebody has to do the work. Who do you think it should be?

Robots, eventually.

You're avoiding the question :-)

No, you’re avoiding the answer. No one proposes everyone quits working today; the problems there are obvious.

People propose we start thinking about what a world where AI can do the drudgery looks like.

Thinking about it without resolving who is going to do the work nobody wants to do is just fairy tales.

People are very, very actively working on the "robots can't do everything" challenge. Planning ahead for the societal impacts of that scenario instead of going "oh shit, what now?" afterwards seems... wise.

What would you do for purpose if robots can do what you can do, for cheaper, and thus put you out of a job?

That doesn't seem like a relevant statement to me.

Medium-sized quibble; an individual working 2000 hour years is actually spending about 22.8% of their time working. If you subtract out 8 hours per day for sleep, they spend about 34% of their waking hours on work. These are, of course, overestimates, as the young and the elderly often do not work.

When I look at it from the perspective of having to work since 18 to 69 (which is when I can retire in my country), that's 51 years that I have to plan everything _around_ the fact that I spend the daytime of most weeks from mon-fri working. That I have to squeese whatever hobbies I have, whatever friends and family I'd like to spend time with into the little space in a weekend or the few hours I have after work, and suddenly it no longer feels like I only spend 22.8% of my time working.

> "69 (which is when I can retire in my country)"

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?

Not even counting commute times, there is a lot of undercounted prep-for-work hours. WFH, I am ready to login within 10 minutes from my alarm clock after basic hygiene. If I go into the office, significantly more time on preparing appropriate dress, grooming, whatever. After work, I need additional time to wind down from the commute +work stress.

Well the thing to understand is "institutionalized" people can be pushed off whatever track they are on.

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.

I have to do more than imagine since there is always an outward pressure on my cohort to get off the payroll, maybe to come back as a lower-paid contractors. There is still the matter of being able to take out from the systems into which I've been paying for over forty years. That is a few years off unless it gets pushed even farther off which is a distinct possibility.

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.

I can't imagine the boredom of not producing anything -- I love to build. I consider this work. I would consider pure leisure to be defined as doing something with no obviously productive output.

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....

Some people do enjoy work, find meaning in it, and strive to have successful careers. Does a world without work still provide opportunities for people who want to work? Does it allow people to advance their wealth and social status?

Or even exercise their hands, minds, and brains?

I can't imagine a world where you're literally forbidden to perform any work. That someone could even ask that question just boggles my mind.

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.

It's not about being forbidden, it's about all the meaningful work being automated. Sure, anyone in an ideal post-work world would be able to pursue whatever hobbies or interests, but work wouldn't be the same for humans, as nobody needs a person to work.

In a heavily automated world, you won't be able to get a job building widgets for Ford or IBM - but you will always be able to make hand-made furniture. There may not be jobs for security guards, but there will always be jobs for nursing-home attendants, and school teachers. If you WANT to work, there will always be meaningful things you can do.

"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.

I think another way of framing this is that many people rely on extrinsic motivation and are lost without institutional structure[1]. The question is whether there are other ways to channel that energy without our more traditional work institutions. I don't have the answer. In the past the church was another institution that could serve this need but for both better and worse church institutions are dying rapidly and nothing has really filled the void.

[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.

I’ve had this same conversation with people in investment banking, they work very long hours often with no weekend. The idea of not having to work a job is inconceivable to them. Even the ones who have hobbies outside of work like music, sports, etc felt strongly about the importance of their job.

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.

As a 40 year old "institutionalized" laborer at the bottom of the IT pyramid I also cannot envision such a life. What does that time look like where my needs are met without having to sell my labor? Is it through a violent overthrowing of the systems of capitalism? Is it through the less violent revolution of Universal Basic Income? Or do we need to subvert capitalism from the other end with post-scarcity economics where energy is free and abundant. Or will post-scarcity only happen with free energy and some sort of Star Trek'esq replicator.

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.

The jobs that currently make up the bulk of the GDP produced by humans will be hit by automation hard. And we already scraped the bottom of the employment barrel with stuff like uber eats.

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.

It’s ideology. I take a marxist view on this: the method and mode of production in a capitalist politico-economic system encourages people to take their job into their identity and to think of themselves and others in terms of the labour value they can provide. For example, look at the fervour stirred up by right-wing types over people on state benefits, dehumanising rhetoric is the norm.

Like Zizek says, the conditions of society dictate what it’s even possible to believe at a subconscious level.

You already have that time. You don't "get it back". You already do as you please. What you please is to work for money to keep up with the Jones's and other people's expectations. (Some) other people don't do that - they live as homeless, as itinerants, as wanderers, as beggars, as monks and nuns and religious devotees, as self-employed contractors, as nomads, as freegans, as thieves and criminals, as trophy husbands and wives, as gypsys, as communal farm members trading piecework for food and board.

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?

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