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Eh, no. Just because you aren't getting paid doesn't mean that what you're doing is useless. "Useless" is a word the writer chose deliberately to be provocati
by lisper 4y ago
Eh, no. Just because you aren't getting paid doesn't mean that what you're doing is useless. "Useless" is a word the writer chose deliberately to be provocative and thus get attention, but it's wrong.
To be fair though, "a life doing useful things you aren't getting paid for" doesn't roll so trippingly off the keyboard.
- rmk 4y agoThere is some truth to this. Having children and raising them is an unquestionably useful activity but most societies, particularly the industrialized ones such as the US, Japan, and Korea, do not 'pay' for. Many mothers are paid indirectly by their husbands (housewives), but there are many single mothers or fathers who do unpaid work as parents. Interestingly, caring for one's parents used to be an unpaid activity, and still is in non-industrialized countries. But there has been a successful transition to paid (albeit poorly) work as far as older parents are concerned, in industrialized countries such as the US and the UK (I do not think this is a popular phenomenon in Japan and Korea AFAIK).
- dazzawazza 4y agoTo be fair, many people would describe many of those activities as "useless". But I think you make a good point.
- lisper 4y agoIf they call everything that one don't get paid for "useless" then they are using the wrong word. In fact, the examples that the author cites were manifestly not useless at all even on the criterion that money is the ultimate measure of utility. In the one case, the work produced a book which, one presumes, some people bought, and in the other case, art (music) that people at the very least went out of their way to listen to, and possibly even paid for. (I've never been to a punk rock concert, but I presume that at least some of them had cover charges.)
- Apocryphon 4y ago"Not all need be monetized."
- seba_dos1 4y agoIn my experience, it's easy to get paid doing useless things just because someone believes they may turn out useful anyway; and for some kinds of actually useful things it's pretty hard to get paid for doing them at all.
- JohnFen 4y agoYes. "Useful" is only loosely correlated with "income-producing".