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Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

If losing your job is traumatic, I’d suggest reviewing your relationship with employers and employment in general. It’s not a stable situation, and there is no social aspect in reality. It’s an accounting decision.

Employment is almost always exploitation on one side or the other, with the best case being mutual exploitation.

Employment inherently involves paying less for your work than it is worth. In an ideal situation, in exchange you get access to tools at a cost less than they cost to access on your own.

It’s inherently violent on some level. Ending violence shouldn’t be traumatic.

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I challenge you to think about the implications of if you were right.

If employment is violence, we should end it. But then almost everybody would die.

If paying for labor is violence, paying for a product is violence. Nobody should be allowed to buy or sell (or trade). But then everybody would die.

In a good economic transaction, whether purchase of product or labor, both parties end up happy with what they got out of the transaction. What is your time not working worth to you? If that value is higher than the money you get paid for your time and labor, then quit. Nobody is forcing you to work. But then, if you don’t have anything to eat, the value of your empty time might decrease in your own judgment. You might think, actually, I’ve got an excess of time and energy, and I’ve got a need for money and food.

I think it’s a pretty sweet deal to be able to work and get paid. Not violence.

That employment is exploitation is evidenced by profits. Employment is a commodity. Any business expects to get more value out of a commodity. Not to break even.

> If employment is violence, we should end it. But then almost everybody would die.

Everyone would die? Are you assuming that employment gets eliminated and nothing is replaced by it?

Anyone who is against the employment relation wants something different. Not something farcical like voluntary self-elimination.

Can you accept that two parties can make an exchange that leaves them both better off? If you can’t accept that, there’s no real point in any further discussion.

Of course! I don’t think I said it couldn’t be mutual.

> Can you accept that two parties can make an exchange that leaves them both better off?

Yes.

> If you can’t accept that, there’s no real point in any further discussion.

There’s a lot of assumptions packed in to this statement.

But you can be the arbiter of the Overton Window. I know that I am swearing in church.

Part of the profits come from employment of capital. Almost no company relies solely on labor, they typically rely on both labor and capital (machines, buildings etc.). Owner of capital wants compensation for their investments, and he gets it via profits. Meanwhile, workers want compensation for their work, and they get it via wages. The exact split between compensation for capital and for work is a subject of negotiation (and often laws).

The capitalist has more assets and commodities than just the labor commodities? So what?

It is correct that the business expects that your time and energy is worth more to them than it is to you. Profit.

But then literally every trade between two people—trading four sheep for one cow, say—is exploitation in both directions. I expect to benefit more from the product I receive than I can profit from what I give away. I have plenty of milk but need some wool for clothes. But to improve my own situation is somehow to abuse the other person!?

You’ve seemingly declared every form of economic transaction immoral.

> But then literally every trade between two people—trading four sheep for one cow, say—is exploitation in both directions.

No. That could be a win-win. One might be a sheep farmer, the other a cattle/cow farmer. They both gain from exchanging these livestocks.

For an employee? See the value produced versus the wages earned. There’s the exploitation.

The nice thing about one single universal value—money—is that it makes things like this obvious. Just look at the numbers. It’s just one, single currency. Much easier than comparing livestock...

I’m not saying that violence is bad. Farming is violence. Mining is violence. It’s a compromise we make. But ending a session of it shouldn’t be traumatic.

And yes, in many cases it’s a win/win. Without farming, many animals would have been hunted to extinction. Instead, they are amongst the most numerous on the planet, but that isn’t much consolation for the march to the slaughterhouse.

Sacrifices are made. Compromises are accepted. Often, it’s good. Often it’s exploitation. Often it is perhaps worse than slavery, and often it is a path to relative wealth.

It shouldn’t be part of one’s identity or sense of worth, to be a really exploitable person, even if it’s to your own advantage at times.

Losing your house because you couldn't pay the mortgage is violent, or at least backed by the threat of violence: what happens if you refuse to leave?

In a looser sense, so are having your utilities cut off, losing your children because you can no longer afford to care for them, skipping meals, driving an unregistered car that will get you into an altercation with the police, and everything else that comes as a result of poverty and unemployment.

I'm a little baffled by what you believe the consequences of a layoff are.

> Farming is violence. Mining is violence.

That's only true if you use a definition of "violence" which is so far outside the accepted definition as to make conversation impossible. Farming and mining are in no way violence unless you resort to idiosyncratic definitions.

I guess if you limit “violence” to violence against humans only? I’ve always thought that violence was applicable to animals and plants as well, so I guess we differ there.

Intentional harm that causes death is firmly in the violence category, imho.

the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy is pretty much the accepted definition, afaik

I’m not thinking of violence as some kind of universal bad thing though, it’s part of the natural world.

You are using a word in a way it is seldom used.

You could define your take up front.

Or better yet, figure out the words other people will be able to recognize and understand you, without unnecessary linguistic gymnastics.

Huh. I don’t think in my experience that the term violence is seldom applied to things outside of humans, and IME the terms economic violence and social violence, emotional violence, and many others are common parlance. Perhaps we come from different cultures. At any rate, given the definition I find in several dictionaries I think my point stands. I will concede that coercion, exploitation, or extortion might be better descriptors.

You are right, some people are stretching that word a lot.

I don’t think that’s changed how most people interpret the word. More of a weakening of its meaning often with an activist or persuasive bent.

Toxic is another word similarly getting stretched and watered down by some.

> Farming is violence.

This would definitely fall into the stretched / watered down pattern.

I don’t think the other strong words you are using are any different in this context.

I am not saying you don’t have a point, but over dramatizing can make it hard to relate to, when people are being expected to accept a level of verbal shrillness that isn’t necessary to make a point.

Humanity is certainly damaging a lot of ecosystems, not by any single farmer, but in aggregate. Change is normal, but we are driving it faster than nature can keep up with. It is a problem.

But outside of poetic or proselytizing use, violence usually means inflicting intentional harm, not a problem of conflict between reasonable local tradeoffs (creating food being a positive use of land) vs. the global impact that needs to be balanced too.

The term violence, when applied in any context, is applied in context. With a scope and meaning determined as much by tacitly accepted scope as it is by lexicon.

So, to all of your questions— “no”. You are wrong, on all counts, because you are using language itself to set a scene where it has no right, attempting to have a meaning context-free applied to one contextual—- but only when it suits you. That isn’t conversation or discussion— it’s performative, and so you cannot be correct where there is no correctness to be had, only performance.

I agree with you on context, but given my original context :

“Employment is almost always exploitation on one side or the other, with the best case being mutual exploitation.

Employment inherently involves paying less for your work than it is worth. In an ideal situation, in exchange you get access to tools at a cost less than they cost to access on your own.

It’s inherently violent on some level. Ending violence shouldn’t be traumatic.”

I invoke violence in the context of exploitation or coercion. It seems clear to me that “inherently violent on some level” clearly invokes an unconventional interpretation of “violence” implicitly aligned with the previous context.

I have to conclude that a misconception of what was meant by “violence” here is either pedantism, low reading comprehension, or intellectual belligerence for the sake of grandstanding on a point. I really am having a great deal of difficulty substantiating a more charitable interpretation.

Perhaps you are accidentally missing the OP in this case and are missing the entire contextual picture?

> If employment is violence, we should end it. But then almost everybody would die.

You need to try out for the jumping to conclusions olympics team, that was an impressive leap there!

Jokes aside, we can absolutely reject the basis of our current economic system on the basis that it is cruel and violent and replace it with something better, and it would be far from the first time we did that. By your logic, the end of feudalism or the abolishment of slavery should have killed entire countries...

And I doubt you are about to explain to us that slavery is not violence (that's one of those ultra-libertarian thoughts of yours you probably shouldn't randomly blurt out).

That is nice but my bills still need to be paid.

I’ve been on both sides of the table for decades. I try to find ways to bind incentives from either side so that they are better aligned, but it’s always exploitative in one way or another. It’s just suboptimal. Perhaps employee owned businesses are the solution.

The solutions will always be the same: demurrage currency and land value taxes.

Perhaps. But that also erodes the stability islands that motivate people to be hyper productive, and encourages investment in external economies, starving the local economy. So I don’t think those work, or at least I’ve never seen a working example. Costco, on the other hand, and many other employee owned cooperatives do seem to align incentives better than most situations without discouraging investment.

demurrage currency otoh is probably worth looking closer at IF a way to build an equitable two-tiered system could be developed. Perhaps corporate money would be demurrage , with personal money that has passed through a tax window stable.

You want it both ways? It both is exploitation and motivates “people” (?) to be hyper productive?

Those people just need to violently exploit people to be “hyper productive”? They can’t be “hyper productive” by way of their own bodies?

But it’s fine by you. Parasites are after all part of the natural world.

> If losing your job is traumatic, I’d suggest reviewing your relationship with employers and employment in general.

Should I also review my relationship with my need to eat and have a roof over my head?

Being dependent to that degree on something you have ultimately no control over is the problem. In that situation, I am always hedging my bets and preparing for the worst.

Because it’s not if but when. I work like hell to get out of those situations and into a situation where I am more in control of my destiny.

That people get lulled into a sense of security in typical employment situations is to me extremely bad judgment on their part, if not outright denial of the reality of their situation.

The only thing sure about employment is that it will end.

Being told you no longer have the ability to provide for yourself is also violence, especially when the onus on finding a new means of provision is 100% up to you.

Clearly. And it’s also the 100 percent predictable outcome of every single employment situation. Employment is a stopgap measure on the road to something more stable.

Reaching high enough salaries so that you can coast 4-5 years between jobs is also an option, but at that point it’s not regular employment in any sense of the word, when your lawyer is drawing up your severance package.

ok?

> If losing your job is traumatic, I’d suggest reviewing your relationship with employers and employment in general.

This is a rather clueless and ignorant opinion to have. Your job is what pays your mortgage/rent and your bills, and it's a key factor in where you chose to live. Your job has a fundamental impact in your personal life and your family's experience.

Once you are fired, odds are your life will change radically. And not on your terms.

You should refrain from commenting on things you know nothing about. In occasions such as these, you are clearly both talking out of sheer ignorance and downplaying someone else's traumatic experiences.

I think they are saying you should look at the employment relationship more generally and see that this holds across the board.

It’s more like a woman breaking up with a man and someone else says “realize that all men are pigs”.

That's an interesting parallel. I suspect the point is that entering all relationships with the expectation that all men are pigs carries certain benefits, but then it also likely has costs, such as an inability to form truly deep connections.

Many societies are deeply partiarchal and misogynistic. Men can mistreat their wives with impunity. So is the solution to eschew men? Not if your somehow healthy existence is predicated on having a male companion.

Still there might be private spaces to speak frankly about such a state of affairs.

Perhaps it is unwise to leave your wellbeing and security entirely up to someone who has no incentive to care about the outcome? But, idk, you do you.

No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control. If losing your job is traumatic to you, that is a sign you need to work on improving your detachment from outside factors. Obviously we all have bills to pay and would like to keep a roof over our heads, but being traumatized by losing a job is an extremely unhealthy (and abnormal) response.

I think I kinda forgot that not everyone has stoic framing for their viewpoint with my original post lol. You do an excellent job of saying what I meant without describing things in a way that many (maybe most?) people would misconstrue. Thank you.

> No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control.

I don't think this opinion is realistic or helpful. Being fired has an important impact on your happiness and the quality of life of you and your family, specially if the next job forces your family to move.

Some people are forced into homelessness when fired. Are we supposed to pretend that losing your home does not hamper your happiness?

It's unhelpful to suggest we should not stress about things outside of our control, because we still need to deal with them.

If one is relying on their job for food/clothing/shelter, it is necessarily traumatic to lose those things. Perhaps for you, losing your job does not constitute a traumatic event, but anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck it most certainly would be.

Well I suppose then no one should be traumatized by getting cancer or from permanent injuries from an unprovoked violent attack.

After all, those are things we have no control over. No sense in being traumatized by them.

That is the main idea of stoicism. So although I realize your statement is meant to be sarcastic, I wholeheartedly agree. It’s a very difficult bar, but it is incredibly enriching and conducive to inner peace and a harmonious life. I have lived my fair share of highly traumatic experiences and I feel qualified to say that stoicism is a viable way forward when it seems that there is none.

I can’t speak for others, but as the op of that quoted segment, I say it as a person who has lost their job several times in my life. The first time was traumatic because my expectations were of stability. Never again. Really, it was the best thing that could have happened to me because it taught me the proper way to think about employment. At this point I can’t imagine putting that level of control of my life in anyone else’s hands.

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