You said there’s nothing sad about it and then followed it up with some pretty sad realities. It’s incredibly sad. People should be working less as we advance as a society, not more.
Not to mention, from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong. This isn’t about enjoying a retirement which is near impossible at that age or shortly after, it’s about not screwing over people by putting them into poverty due to really no fault of their own.
I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
> from strictly a human view, working someone to their death is just plain wrong
This is the sort of statement that clutters up all discussions of government benefits, but it's meaningless. There's no such thing as a "human view" or right/wrong in these contexts. Historically, people worked much harder than we do today. Was that "wrong"? Were people back then not fully human? If so, who was responsible for this "inhuman wrong"?
No. Poverty is the default state of humanity. People being poor isn't the result of someone screwing someone else over, it's the result of people not creating wealth.
> I hope the youth are kinder to you when you reach old age.
I'm expecting that the state won't provide anything by the time I reach old age, not even a stable currency. The youth won't have had much to do with it either way.
Like the rest of us are over-complicating it, and human economic prosperity is as simple as blindly accelerating value creation.
What you're rambling on about is some Ayn Randian technicality that has nothing to do with reality. The word "value" here means "non-measurable quantity in the neoclassical paradigm, approximated by indirect measure through unit of account", not anything meaningful.
A childcare worker raising children is "value". A mother raising her child is not "value". In other words, you're just measuring how much human activity conforms to a specific formalization.
If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.
When you have to work for an income that is a type of forced work, and generally speaking forced work is not going to be as effective as work done of your own volition.
It’s intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation. When I think about your point of view I see a lot of waste and misery. Instead of naively maximizing value production, I want to see a future of contentment and quality value production. Value produced because people are inspired to produce value, not because they have to.