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Comment by omcgrann | Hacker News Reader

This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.

Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.

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> Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on

There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.

I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.

"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...

> I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay,

I didn’t even notice! Thanks for pointing that out.

> but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.

I re-read the section to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I agree with you.

Here’s the section:

> We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.

If the piece was not trying to argue that loss of jobs leads to loss of meaning, I picked up on the opposite.

I read the section over again, and could almost convince myself that it's not about jobs-as-life-purpose. I was thinking that it could be suggesting that people get depressed and die when they lose their jobs because of financial fears and insecurity, instead. But the "We lose any sense of economic purpose" bit is what suggests it really is about life's meaning.

"Economic purpose" is a very specific kind of purpose, and I do not think that it's the same as life's purpose or meaning. I think the confusion here (and I suspect it's the result of the way I wrote it as much as anything, so I don't want to look like I'm sloughing off responsibility here), is that the section in question can be read too easily to conflate economic purpose (which protects oneself and one's family from precarity, among other things) and eudaimonia, which is what I would point to when thinking of meaning or "flourishing."

Appreciate the give and take here.

The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.

Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.

How big is the government/supporters compared to the population in any dictatorship? Tiny.

Well it depends on the style of societal breakdown. In the zombie apocalypse shows, the human population is less than halved, and the sorts of daily things we take for granted (electricity, clean water, gasoline, etc.) become hard to come by, along with police, fire, and medical services becoming lost or completely disorganized, with governments completely falling apart at every level.

But I could imagine a scenario where the AI-owning capital class becomes indistinguishable from the government, and the government retains control of the military. Regular disenfranchised folks usually don't stand much of a chance against their own country's military. It would be super super bloody, but it's a toss-up as to who would win. In reality, though, in the end, everyone would lose.

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