"If I say yes (that my life requires work to be fully justified) you will disregard my agency as being a part of a "trap."" Because it is a trap. No one demand

"If I say yes (that my life requires work to be fully justified) you will disregard my agency as being a part of a "trap."" Because it is a trap. No one demands our grandparents to work all that much if at all. Watching the kids maybe, but not much else. And I'd hardly call that work considering it's a social relation beyond mere monetization. "If I say yes (that my life requires work to be fully justified) you will disregard my agency as being a part of a "trap." If I say no then I suspect you will again fail to provide concrete examples to match your rhetoric, because frankly I haven't a clue what point you are trying to make." I did, see above. "Everyone should have a function, at least. House-spouses who run errands and raise children are just as much a worker as the breadwinner, for example." What if I told you caring for kids isn't a job? And what if I told you doing errands for friends isn't a job either? Those aren't jobs, those are normal tasks of a household (of social relations that we enjoy) that should never been measured in dollars/pesos/yuan/etc. "But some people will fall through the cracks and we shouldn't worry about managing everybody unless they place an undue burden on society." Who decides the quadriplegic is an undue burden? You? Or their friends and family? "If you have anything specific to say, say it. Otherwise, we should probably get back to work." I multi-task. If you can't keep up it's not my problem. /s Beyond my snark, the point is that work as you and I see is has to be done, but what IS work? Mises wouldn't have called household chores work as they're part of living. Work for him and me are things we do for an exchange of wages. Those wages are beneficial since they allow us to specialize in a singular task which in turn everyone benefits. But most importantly a wage is meant to free us from drudgery of doing other things by purchasing goods or services that save our labor in other instances. This is all assume that we live in a properly balanced free market (one which has never existed at least in the last two or three centuries). But the reality is that we're burdened by work when we require less labor hours to produce the same goods and/or services. Even taking out robots from modern industrial processes doesn't yield the amount of labor that our parents or their parents endured. Technology just gotten that good as to liberate labor to do what is assumed more valuable work. The reality is that if we don't need to labor for the same basic goods/services then maybe we ought not work. Or at least we ought not work as much as we do now. Yet here we are debating this point as if it's inherent to society and the economy that we ought to work. All I'm trying to point out here is that there's something wrong with the economy that demands us to work to excess of market demand for goods/services in question. It's just busy work. Dig a ditch then fill it back in. Pick up those rocks and move them to just repeat the process again tomorrow. See the issue now? If not, then we're likely on ideologically opposite ends of this discussion.