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I hate working. There is nothing I want more than to NOT work, which for me means choosing what to do (including nothing) as much as possible. As many people p

I hate working. There is nothing I want more than to NOT work, which for me means choosing what to do (including nothing) as much as possible. As many people planning FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early), I've been working pretty hard - hah! - to maximize my income and meet my goals. But this is different than the eternal idleness being advocated by some. If you never save enough to be idle, and still expect to consume at normal levels, you are essentially asking others to work for you. Imagine being idle but still playing games, watching TV, reading books; someone had to make the game, film the TV show and write the book, i.e. work, to enable your leisure. If those working to maintain everybody else agree to arrangement, then it's all ok... This is generally not the case, though.

helpfulmandrill 5y ago
Plenty of work makes the world worse rather than better. It would be a net positive for the world if the people doing those jobs played video games, watched TV and read books instead.
thewakalix 5y ago
Even today, there's plenty of entertainment that you can find without either paying or pirating, and I think this would increase dramatically in a world without obligatory work. Of course, there's probably fewer people who have an intrinsic desire to maintain basic infrastructure, which isn't as easy to deal with. But I think that we could probably support "you don't need to work in order to live"; we can still have incentives for work, just not life-or-death incentives. Some people would view that as "supporting free-riders", but I think if someone is brought into this world, we owe it to them to allow them to exist. False positives ("this person would survive without free stuff") aren't as bad as false negatives ("we deprived this person of stuff to motivate them to work, and now they're dead").

helpfulmandrill 5y ago

Plenty of work makes the world worse rather than better. It would be a net positive for the world if the people doing those jobs played video games, watched TV and read books instead.

thewakalix 5y ago

Even today, there's plenty of entertainment that you can find without either paying or pirating, and I think this would increase dramatically in a world without obligatory work. Of course, there's probably fewer people who have an intrinsic desire to maintain basic infrastructure, which isn't as easy to deal with. But I think that we could probably support "you don't need to work in order to live"; we can still have incentives for work, just not life-or-death incentives. Some people would view that as "supporting free-riders", but I think if someone is brought into this world, we owe it to them to allow them to exist. False positives ("this person would survive without free stuff") aren't as bad as false negatives ("we deprived this person of stuff to motivate them to work, and now they're dead").