Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

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> But those are not made up problems, those are necessities and cost only a minimal amount of time per day

Minimal, LOL. What world do you live in? I suggest you pay a visit to Amish country some day and see how people unencumbered with "made up problems" live. Farming and other survival-related tasks are literally ALL they do. And it's all you would ever do without people sitting in offices and factories tending to "made up problems" in order to make your life simpler.

> How is there no time to pursue anything? When I was travelling and not working at all for two years, my quest for survival meant that I had to get food and water

Were you hunting and farming or scraping together a couple bucks so you could head down to a store or restaurant to get food? You would not be able to do that without an army of people in farms, factories, and offices making the whole thing work.

> If there is any hard physical work to do, we have machines for this

Who builds the machines? A bunch of people tending to "made up problems" in offices and factories.

It's very tempting to think you've unlocked the meaning of life after slumming through Europe for a year and a half but you're totally ignoring the fact that there are numerous people working on "made up problems" in tech, agriculture, and manufacturing making it possible for you to do that. You absolutely do not want to revert to an agrarian lifestyle. It's not fun. Realize that some of these "made up problems" in the first world help you actually live a better life than a life of subsistence would.

No offense, but I disagree with pretty much all of this. We work more than our ancestors do, not to make an easier life, but for the sake of incorporating the ephemeral and inconsequential into our lives. And an agrarian lifestyle can be loads of fun, actually. I got more of a sense of accomplishment helping on my grandparents' farm than from any blue collar job I've ever held.

Yes the work can be rewarding but I'm really addressing the author's misguided point that all our modern work is to solve non-existent problems. In reality, it's to make our lives easier and more comfortable.

The flipside of a completely agrarian society is very little safety net. Crop disease? Drought? Animal sickness? Broke your leg? Life just got a lot tougher. Like, life or death tougher.

Again, because you don't seem to read what I'm typing:

Not all modern work, just all the work that has directly or indirectly to do with money and jobs that come forth out of that (like the cleaning crew or receptionist of an insurance company or bank).

We do a lot of redundant, unnecessary work, just for the sake of working, without ever consciously asking ourselves what the use of this work is and who is actually helped with this. Unconsciously this question comes by a lot, and that makes people burn out in the long run.

Drop your assumptions and prejudice and read my posts again. We are actually able to make our lives easier and more comfortable, but instead we let ourselves be fooled and forced into doing robotic labor, never-ending jobs, and repetetive tasks. Just because we are told it's necessary and makes our lives more comfortable.

> Not all modern work, just all the work that has directly or indirectly to do with money

And then the point of doing this work would be...? There's a reason "money" is a universal concept: it's compensation for time spent working on things that aren't necessary for the survival of an individual person. Remove that and you've removed motivation for people to do things that they don't want or need to do. Your line of thinking does not scale to society at large.

> We do a lot of redundant, unnecessary work, just for the sake of working, without ever consciously asking ourselves what the use of this work is and who is actually helped with this.

I don't know about you, but I work so I can be paid and live a more comfortable life. I'm pretty sure that's most people's motivation. And perhaps working on nonsense is a Valley thing, but my coworkers and I certainly work on software that improves the lives of others. Perhaps you should try to find a company like that instead of declaring that everyone works on useless junk, money is pointless, and we can all be farmers on 4 hours per week of work.

IMO the truth is somewhere in the middle. A lot of people tend to underestimate the extent and pervasiveness of 'make-work' in the economy. But then again there are lots of vital but rather onerous tasks that would never get done if there wasn't any financial incentive.

Financial incentive wasn't attached to labor for the bulk of our species' history though. That's relatively new. Prior, there was working for survival (far less hours per week than today), and beyond that the obvious slavery that was more overt than modern industry. All said, now I think it would take a mother of a global psychogenesis to remind people of benefits to working other than the mere monetary (physical, spiritual, etc). But it is in our genes. We are just lazier than our forefathers, that much less willing to scrub our own toilets and the like unless we can see the carrot at stick's end.

You seem to assume that I would be for 'back to basics', without machines and stuff, like the Amish, but that's not what I'm saying.

I'm just taking money out of the equation, which means there will still be a lot less jobs to do, resulting in way less work load.

Of course machines need to be produced and maintained, but only a fraction of what we build now, and as there is no reason to exercise planned obsolescence or nibble on the costs by choosing inferior materials, these machines have a way higher quality than we make now.

Another difference is that whatever work is still done, this will be done by people actually wanting to do this, out of interest and passion.

> You seem to assume that I would be for 'back to basics', without machines and stuff, like the Amish, but that's not what I'm saying.

Without incentive (financial or otherwise), that is what happens. Who's gonna run electric plants? We don't _actually_ need electricity if you wanna get technical. Planes? Maintain roads and bridges? Be an ISP?

Pretty much all of the things we take for granted today were created because of financial incentive. After all, if we're all trying to not work as much as possible, why would anyone _choose_ to do more than they have to to survive?

Although I don't advocate living like the Amish, I think that reality is mostly not like what you describe.

Only a TINY percentage of office or factory workers are really working on problems related to farming, food, or "satisfying basic necessities" problems.

Most are working on problems much higher on the Maslow hierarchy of needs - for example, a LOT of work is devoted to advertising, and very often I believe it's zero-sum. A lot of other resources are devoted to entertainment, government, finances, etc.

Heck, agriculture is less 2% of the U.S. GDP.

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