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"I think the issue is that when people say they’ve “worked hard,” they’re implicitly suggesting superiority" Yes, you compare it to others who do similar work.
by proc0 7y ago
"I think the issue is that when people say they’ve “worked hard,” they’re implicitly suggesting superiority"
Yes, you compare it to others who do similar work. Who actually says "I worked hard... in comparison to anyone who has ever worked.". It's usually you work hard for that line of work. A software engineer can be changing links and sipping coffee or pulling 12 hours coding all day. One is doing hard work. Article seems to be arguing semantics.
- themagician 7y agoWhen someone actually says they “worked hard” it’s usually bullshit, because people who actually work hard either don’t realize it or are too humble to admit it. So saying you worked hard is a justification for why you have something or why you have something and someone else doesn’t. Most people who make a lot of money don’t actually work very hard by virtue of the fact that most individual wealth comes from capital, not labor. Maybe you did work hard at some point to get that capital, but that’s also unlikely. After all, if capital paid out the true value then it wouldn’t exist at all. So somewhere you either exploited people or natural resources to get that capital. Hard work sucks. It almost by definition doesn’t pay well, with few exceptions. But we need to justify to ourselves and others why we value different humans different, and hard work sounds really good. So we invoke it to justify to ourselves, mostly, why we are superior to others.
- tuesdayrain 7y ago>people who actually work hard either don’t realize it or are too humble to admit it. This is a completely arbitrary way to gatekeep the concept of "working hard".
- themagician 7y agoIt’s really not. It’s just how it is.
- mikelyons 7y ago"it's just how it is" this is devilry, relative-truth. Not absolute.
- themagician 7y ago"They don't think it be like it is, but it do.”
- solveit 7y ago>So somewhere you either exploited people or natural resources to get that capital. Boy are you at the wrong forum. Another possibility is that you actually created value and captured a part of it.
- themagician 7y agoPossible, but unlikely. There are exceptions to everything.
- rmrfrmrf 7y agoThe author's point is that the "hard work" line is a post-hoc rationalization for the differences between one's own social/material conditions and those considered beneath them. It's similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect — a worker reports their own relative performance without possibly knowing the performance of every other worker, yet believes it to be true based on outcome, despite the fact that things like familial wealth and outstanding debt are much better determining factors.
- Noumenon72 7y agoI just compare it to myself. Did I go in and goof off and take the easy jobs, or did I do things I didn't want to do where I had to take breaks to recover? I think the second is morally praiseworthy and I deserve credit for doing so. It's also beneficial to society so you deserve status for doing so. The upper limit on that status is the actual value of your job. But we want everyone to work hard at their job so when they do, we should give them the sense of superiority they deserve.