Time to quit your pointless job, become morally ambitious and change the world
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'm all about changing the world, but I also have an obligation to take care of my family, so my way of changing the world is working a traditional job, donating to charity from my earnings, and using my time/talent/treasure outside of work hours to make a difference.
In that case, moral ambition may not be for you. I mean, once you have a labradoodle, a set of cheese knives or a robot mower, there’s generally no going back
Oh wait…
[1] If by 'wealth' we mean numbers in computers. Actual wealth, like healthy land and clean water and manufacturing capacity should be shared by everyone, but currently money is what controls it.
This isn't totally false. Social change can be uncertain and rocky. If you want to be serious though you've to look at the risks of inaction, namely, allowing the funnelling of resources to the top percentile to continue.
I'm not sure how many people realise how out of hand that funnelling has gotten, or how concentrated at the very very top it's gotten.
As an example I saw recently, here's a graph[0] of French society from 2014 to 2021. Along the x-axis it's the poorest percentiles on the left, richest on the right. Y-axis is the percentage annual increase in revenue.
I think the reality is that inaction is arguably at least as likely to lead to the kind of "..." that you may well be hinting at.
[0] the graph itself -- https://elucid.media/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/170-croissan...
Taken from here (French article) -- https://elucid.media/analyse-graphique/inegalites-revenus-fr...
Wow, I didn’t realize people might be so ignorant of history. What I stated in my comment is how Soviet Union got started in 1917. Do I need to explain how that experiment ended?
You know very well that when I said "because of... history, or something" I was alluding to the fact that you had not in fact specified your historical reference at all. You did not state anything about the Soviet Union in 1917, you alluded vaguely and noncommitally to the redistribution of wealth being bad, maybe - it's unsure because, as I've said, there's no specifics.
If you don't make your point, we can't assume what it is. Or do you think that the Soviet Union in 1917 is the only moment in history where wealth/poperty was redistributed? If so, that would be a display of a pretty serious level of historical ignorance on your part.
In any case, now that you've deigned to share your point with us - the choice isn't one between a. what we have now, unchanged, and b. the Soviet Union in 1917. This false dichotomy is a common favourite of people heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, often people who are monetarily invested.
On the off-chance that you're not one of those types and are simply ignorant of the richness and complexity of human social organisation, I warmly invite you to read some anthropology to discover the myriad of ways human societies function and have functioned throughout history. You could be in for a very eye-opening experience.
(not as taught from Texas-approved history books)
The Soviets lifted an unprecedented number of people out of poverty. This was unequalled until China in the following century. They would likely have achieved more and lasted longer without the constant harassment of capitalist countries. (Remember when the US even invaded Soviet soil? Most Americans do not.)
The US and some European powers managed to convince Soviets to switch to an American-style economy, run by oligarchs. Those countries proceeded to loot the Soviet Union for anything they could find. And so we have today.
I've only read one excellent (French, translated) collection of the writing of Alexandra Kollontai, and otherwise nothing much of length on the topic. Kollontai was already enough to suspect that the usual simplistic narrative as whispered by our interlocuteur here might not be the whole story whatsoever.
No, thank you. I'm not a fan of capitalism, either, but that society was hardly a stellar example of an alternative.
This is what happened in France, what happened in Russia, and what has happened in many other cases. It is not an ideological phenomenon, has nothing to do with communism, and it happens because a society refuses to reform for so long that the system collapses under its own corruption. We are heading down that same path by refusing to institute moderate reforms while we still have the option to do so.
And of course, the chaos of revolution is not the only way for a vicious tyrant to gain power and institute a reign of terror...
This was not only driven by vicious men, this was there from the very start, this was inherent in the revolution and its ideology, and mainly caused by real shortages stemming from economic issues
You can see it with Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and i'm probably only missing more examples due to ignorance. You have an economic system which is "scientific", but is actually just a mass experiment resulting in deaths of millions. And an ideology that is so sure of itself as it is "proven" it never stops or self-questions
It goes both ways, of course.
When people say: "Oh, we can't do socialism, or anything that looks or feels even a tiny bit like socialism, because look what happened with Lenin et al!", I think they are ironically engaging in the very essence of what lead to these attempted revolutions going so poorly.
Social and economic rigidity and dogmatism is the issue.
Socialism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Capitalism has some good ideas, and can be hellishly bad. Same for anarchism, veganism, hedonism, and so on. This isn't to say that all ideologies are equal, but that dogmatism is generally very dangerous.
However, defending the revolutions that resulted in catastrophe and complete failure is in my opinion dangerous. We don't need another trial at an extreme ideology that knows everything to guess the end result
The author speaks to this directly:
> Now, you might be thinking: that’s all well and good, but I’ve got a full-time job, two kids and a mortgage. I’m happy to recycle and eat some tofu now and then, but a “fundamental transformation”? No thanks.
In that case, moral ambition may not be for you. I mean, once you have a labradoodle, a set of cheese knives or a robot mower, there’s generally no going back. But if that’s irritating to hear – and I imagine it might be – then by all means, prove me wrong. I have learned that there are always exceptions, and I want to show that you can be that exception. It’s never too late to step up.
To me limiting oneself to “idealistic but not ambitious” with a focus on fulfilling relationships and positive impact on family, friends, and local community seems like a good way to go.
“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions... Ideology—that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
He’s an author and journalist, not a doer of any kind as far as I can tell from his bio.
So I'll ask you straight out: why is the choice you've made salary man or nothing? Why can't you get started with a side hustle, and then if it gets traction, you can quit your job and it becomes your main living?
One of the big barriers to this is a lot of investors seem to expect founders to work for nothing in the early years, which is a pretty privileged place to be: most people with dependents just can't do that, so I hear you.
But you don't need VCs. You don't need to live on noodles. You can build something that replaces your day job, you just need to figure it out.
Working full time for someone and doing a side hustle is hard, from experience.
What I’ve found is that trying to do the side hustle takes away from a lot time spent with your dependants, which you will never get back, unless you are lucky enough to “make the break”
Not impossible, and you’ve got to try and find a balance. But it just may never happen.
I'm fortunate that I don't mind getting up early and I hate morning TV/radio/news, so I can find an extra hour for myself each day.
As it's being done collectively, there's more of a chance of it getting off the ground, as people could take turns working on it in their spare time instead of a side-hustle dominating your time.
Once it's established, those people could then quit their job and work at the coop.
There are credit unions that could help with startup costs, as well as guides on how to structure it based on other successful coops.
Potential issues: employers don't tend to like it if they get wind that a group of employees are doing something on the side, and may find reason to take ownership of said effort (which your contract might allow them to do).
If all you optimize for is the well-being of your family, your efforts should go into amassing wealth, not changing the world.
In fact, I'd argue that taking care of your family _is_ a morally right and meaningful way of contributing to the world.
There's a reason traditional Christian ethical frameworks often prioritize responsibilities in layers: first to God (or core principles), then to family, then to the neighbor (broader community).
According to Wikipedia, the author has dependents.
"Bregman is married to Maartje ter Horst, a photographer.^[43]^[44] They reside in Brooklyn as of 2025 and have a child together.^[45]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutger_Bregman
(Attention Wikipedia editors: Unless I missed something, reference #45 appears to make no mention of Bregman's family.)
Before the agricultural and industrial revolutions and our correct system of highly specialized labor, it feels as though everyone just hung out together, having a good time, and doing what was needed to feed the tribe. Minus the disease and war, of course.
There wasn't this need for an existential discussion about this job or that job, or whether you're lifestyle was morally justified.
There weren't power structures that existed on a scale larger than a single community, invisibly guiding everyone's lives in ways they couldn't control.
Thing is, a pre-agrarian society means hunters/gatherers, and for that to work out, you need quite a lot of land to provide for a single person (hence why those societies have such low population density). Thus, warfare in that era is all about directly reducing the number of people competing with you for those precious resources, either by killing them or by driving them off the land. And so pretty much all males are involved in it and regular mortality rates from constantly ongoing warfare can reach as high as 20%. Furthermore, warfare itself is explicitly genocidal in nature, e.g. raids of enemy villages, ideally while defenders are away so that you can slaughter as many as possible.
One theory about the Jacob and Esau story is that it's about a hunter gatherer (Esau) surrendering political power to a farmer (Jacob) because the farmer has much more reliable access to protein than the hunter, meaning that sooner or later, he can gain the upper hand in a negotiation with someone who's otherwise starving.
You might not ascribe value to this type of biblical 'economic history'. But the theory has explanatory power - if it wasn't for food shortages, why would our ancestors have given up 'hanging out together and having a good time' to embrace the toil of hoeing and herding?
This statement is subject to inverse survivor bias, gatherers and pastoral societies tended to not run out, they tended to move instead. Agriculture based early societies tended to run out or get decimated by plagues, thus leaving concentrated evidence of their passing.
However due to the one way early ones are tracked by looking at stable settlements, the evidence is stacked against the nomadic ones. While what they often had is meeting places rather than residences. What we find is megaliths, but not the settled cities to support their building.
If you move and properly do not leave much behind, there will be no evidence left.m, especially after centuries, sometimes even years.
Eurocentric and thus wrong.
There were multiple societies that has structures of federation and collective government. It's just Europe that did not at the time.
Eventually you're going to find nothing but lots of loose collections of a hundred to a few thousand people.
Eurocentric and thus wrong.
What if the work itself isn't "the most important" thing in the person's life?
Finding purpose, fulfillment or joy in your work is nice, but as you grow as a human, or as the field you're in changes, or as the work dries up... well, you're left thoroughly adrift.
And at the end of the day, a job is a job. I do it because it allows me to live a lifestyle close to what I want, while not being soul crushingly boring most of the time.
I came to terms with the fact that I'm not going to change the world. The best I can do is not fuck it up anymore than when I got here. That's about as good as most of us can expect, since most of us are average in many aspects. Without stunning amounts of genius or resources, I think that hoping just to fade into obscurity is the best you can do, really.
Do yourself a favour and actually read the article this time.
It is very convincing for me personally, and it's got me considering making some big changes.
Work certainly provides meaning, you'll notice this when you can't find work for a while, ie. involuntarily unemployed. Also, you have to find deeper meaning outside of work: church, social clubs, raising kids, taking care of elderly parents, volunteering, etc. Getting paid to do moral work is rarely a thing and somewhat defeats the purpose.
Why are we all here, on this specific site, if we're not interested in building something ambitious and shaped on our own ideals of what we think the World needs? We might not be right, but it's each of ours, individually.
The people playing this game and winning at the moment are ambitious, but morally... I think we're starting to have some questions about their big ideas, more recently... and so you have the option: go do something to change the game and take the attention away from them.
Big changes come from small ones. If you don't like the status quo, figure out how to change it by building something better. And yes, it's hard, but you don't need to solve the whole thing, particularly when getting started, just a small corner of it.
I'm sure many of the other 80% would like to do something more positive. Should we really be trying to start a culture war between the two groups, rather than acknowledge that the system isn't great for anyone?
But its an interesting thought exercise. Slavery seems like a cut and dry issue in terms of harm and human rights, yet overtime the "easy" moral problems are solved and you're left with the gray ones. What's today's moral equivalent of slavery that we need crusaders against?
If you really want to change the world, come protest with me at the Sun Valley Conference, AKA the Billionaires SummerCamp on July 6th. This event is where the parasitic rich coordinate the years propaganda, further consolidate there stranglehold on the industry, and train the new round of corporate newspapermen on what information needs to be throttled, distorted, derailed or deleted so that those same rich parasites can stay in power.
> One evening, at a dinner with a few other abolitionists, ...
Category IV success is only achievable in groups or teams. And our education and capital systems, as well as our social and media systems, are increasingly pushing us towards more isolation:
- University graduates get earn more money with lower risk in consulting or finance than entrepreneurship (highlighted in the article)
- High level academia is basically an independent game from my understanding, with some exceptions like some security labs where the same people consistently work together
- Business structures tend to be designed for maximum specialisation and work extraction of the individual, not teams
- Third spaces are disappearing outside of work and home
- In-person relationships are being replaced with social media relationships and parasocial fandoms
- Politics is being replaced with drama
> But if that’s irritating to hear – and I imagine it might be – then by all means, prove me wrong. I have learned that there are always exceptions, and I want to show that you can be that exception. It’s never too late to step up.
It seems the author may not be aware of this though, and ultimately just ends up selling a different brand of individualist grindset.
Pick people from different countries, different cultures, different backgrounds and they will have very different views on what would make things better. Not in the end state of "people should be healthy, happy and free to pursue their passions; and we should explore the stars, too", but in "what would be a worthy goal for me to work on, today and for the next few years". And acceptance of such differences is, to me, a good thing: anytime countries are remoralized into pursuing a common moral goal, gulags for those who did not drink the kool-aid are not far away.
In my book people should not work on things they find immoral. But I am totally fine if my neighbors or my friends are competing against me at work, in technological or in moral space. If they do not consider their work immoral, it is all good. I like hearing their arguments, too, either to steelman my views or to find cracks in them. This likely puts me into the "spineless amoebas, useless species" bucket of the author's classification.
Going on a moral crusade to change the world? No, thank you. They do not end well; not for the world, which likely will not even notice, but for the crusader who will likely become disillusioned, radicalized or bitter when the world does not budge. My 2c.
Do people agree on basic math, physics, chemistry, etc or it depends on different countries/cultures/backgrounds?
> "Going on a moral crusade to change the world? No, thank you. They do not end well; not for the world, which likely will not even notice, but for the crusader who will likely become disillusioned, radicalized or bitter when the world does not budge. My 2c."
Your choices are yours, as are your 2c, but the rest neither follows nor computes. What follows from your logic is that serfdom and slavery are perfectly fine, you wouldn't bother to find a better way if they were imposed on you or others... but you would ride on the efforts of others while criticizing their actions as "moral crusade to change the world".
There are many people in the world who cannot practice basic maths, physics, or chemistry, etc. [1] is one source for the USA, which puts the number at 39% for Grade 8 students in maths, which would suggest higher for physics and maybe chemistry.
So the answer is probably "no" for the USA at least.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-students-perform-at...
> Your choices are yours, as are your 2c, but the rest neither follows nor computes. What follows from your logic is that serfdom and slavery are perfectly fine, you wouldn't bother to find a better way if they were imposed on you
Please explain how does "serfdom and slavery are perfectly fine" follow from what I wrote.
All three forces have different magnitudes and exist in all of us.
Capitalism is a system that exploits the second force to the greatest extent and is responsible for economic changes in society that have far exceeded anything produced by altruism alone. Have there been societies and economies that exploit moral ambition? I don’t think here have been examples.
To truly do good in this world we have to face our own nature. I’d rather be alive and rich before I do any favors for the world. So if you want me to change the world… first tell me what that gives me.
The Crusades seem like a good example.
But in the end soldiers are also getting paid and that’s the primary driver behind it.
This just seems like a confusion to me. My job is the time I spend getting money to pay for the things I need to live. By definition, the work I do then is of value to someone paying me, but not to me. The rest of my time I spend doing things which I can choose, including things I think are a positive contribution to the world.
I could make sense of arguments such as:
1. You should consume vastly less, so that you spend less time earning money and more time contributing to improving the world.
2. Society should be organised differently so that people have to work less and can contribute as they see best in their increased non-paid-work time.
3. You should spend a lower proportion of your free time doing things that benefit yourself and more doing things which benefit the world.
But "you should spend the time you dedicate to getting food, clothes, energy and shelter to contributing to good causes?" Doesn't really make sense.
It is not hard to decide if you're hungry or if more money is better than less money.
Moreover, many businesses operate under the "everyone is replaceable" model, implicitly adding "without much effort", but that's not really true. There are plenty of examples of political movements that never recovered from their leader or figurehead leaving. You can't just take any other politician and swap them, their positions are too personal. That's an extreme example, but I think it applies to most job positions that aren't just about following checklists, in varying degrees.
If you both have to cover a cost of living, and care about improving the world, there is some most efficient strategy which allows you maximise the latter, given the former as a constraint. (This obviously varies by individual, depending on your abilities, available work, etc.) How can one be sure that working at an 'altruistic' job is optimal, as opposed to for example working at a very highly paid job in some pointless but not harmful field, and contributing either some of your money, or some of your increased spare time?
The example of someone who doesn't care at all about altruism and who has maximised wealth while causing significant harm does not establish the right strategy for people who do care somewhat about both things.
Do share.
Does that require to have rich parents? Or rich friends that want to do business with you?
This. Don't want to hear anymore excuses. It can be done.
Now with AI, there will be even less jobs over time and likely a 10% increase in global unemployment in the next few decades or so.
Have some ambition and make 10k a month on your own without sending CVs to AI recruiters.
Not all office jobs suck.
Cancer is many, many things. It may not even be a thing we can "cure" together, whatever that means.
We may as well ask if we can cure Mondays.
Think about it. If everyone made $10k/month, the net value of that labor would have to increase about 10x over what it is now(1). I don't think that's an easy thing to do overnight.
And then there would still be variety in the outcome because a lot of us are too slothful or too unconscientious to actually go out and do the necessary. And that's ignoring how hard it would be for those with no network or access (refugee living in a favela in Bogotá, dlavevin Mauretania) regardless of their ambition.
(1)Https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
What's the answer for the other 90%?
Better probably to do what you find interesting, and maybe it will lead to greatness. If it didn't at least you did something interesting.