6 ms·

The Mythology of Work (2018)

68 points by robtherobber 2y ago

spunkie00 2y ago
Posting their cool essay on a computer that needs internet that needs electricity that needs power plants that needs natural resource extraction that needs heavy machinery that needs metallurgy that needs large factories that needs engineers that needs universities that needs thousands of years of human capital etc etc etc If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods. Why is it always other people that need to change? You change.
- thrwaway1985882 2y ago
  You did it, you posted the meme. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
  - MiiMe19 2y ago
    If your main complaint is product bad, yet you personally buy products you have no real need for, the meme is true. Stop telling everyone else how making unnecessary things is evil if you are the person buying them. Its like complaining about consumerism next to your funko-pop wall.
    - implmntatio 2y ago
      Yeah, don't give negative feedback at all. If you don't like a feature of the product or the supply chain, fuck yOu (in a Randy M. kind of way)
      - MiiMe19 2y ago
        Their negative feedback consists of stating the obvious, with such gems as the economy makes things that go to waste, and the economy should make happiness, instead of products. They are stating blatantly obvious things. Yeah, everyone wishes things didn't go to waste. Everyone wishes they were happier. Say something new or stop being a hypocrite; pick one to be taken seriously.
        implmntatio 2y ago
        "They" are not always stating that which is obvious to everyone. "They" are usually suggesting better ways and these ways are often enough based on engineering and science. What is put on the front page of media is, of course, the obvious, the nonsense, the sensational, the clickbait. You don't have to say something new to a younger generation if that younger generation hasn't understood or even heard the old, the obvious, yet. Youngsters might have heard some of it but their brains are often high enough on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ... and then there are the 'media-sigmas and cool kids' who sing that shit in choirs and canons. A lot of things go to waste and yet there is tons of useful stuff coming out of recycling and up-cycling and that's just two methods with a very small "margin" and undeveloped. There are those design and architecture blogs and firms and there is cool shit all the time and wonderful projects everywhere but the pointlessness of the over-engineered financial reasoning behind yearly sursurpluspluses is stacked against that. You don't catch and bring a culprit to justice if you drop the investigation, which might have to circle long enough for some other brain or pair of eyes to find the final puzzle piece. And not everyone wishes they were happier. There's enough to criticize about anarchist, leftist critiques and groups and collectives as well, though, just as much exploitation of youth, gullibility and pain and crisis, and problems, really, but not systemically. And there's that fallacy, something ad hominem, I think, so we should focus on what is said and written and, if obvious but unsolved, get to the bottom of it instead of saying "I don't care", "nobody cares", "human nature in the 21st post marketing psychology and decades of punched food, drink, drugs, meds and media century"
        MiiMe19 2y ago
        And this investigation consists mostly of just repeating the same thing over and over again? Acting like work or having to put it real effort to survive is some new invention is stupid and incorrect. To live fairly, you must work. To pretend otherwise is foolish. Once again, say something new or give a new way to solve this "problem". This anti-work bs is stupid and has been stupid for all of time, in all of the many forms it has taken.
  - lotharcable2 2y ago
    Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation. The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something. Stuff like this: > Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything. The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty. A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed. The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm. Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement. It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order. This wasn't that long ago. We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article) Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't. But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    Ironically, the first two panels in this comic are themselves a meme, i.e., a sort of lampshading. It is of course at least a little bit hypocritical to use your iPhone to post about how terrible Apple is. The second two panels are just strawmen.
- implmntatio 2y ago
  oh, it's a matter of means, opportunity and peace of mind. this little dependency sequence is exactly how I, again and again, come to the conclusion about what climate change is driven by and climate change (re-)actions should be. but in terms of change: others need to change so that change can hold the line. example: good teachers are scarce. and when there are a few or only one at your school, most of their good impact is offset or entirely negated by their colleagues. and that's not life, that's not what it is, that's not how it goes. It's because people in the dependency sequence refuse to change and instead serve someone who poses as a devil because the motherfucker gets them high on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'that's not my job', 'I don't care', 'I don't even care about not caring', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ... AND: at almost every step in that dependency sequence, there are better ways to do things. implementation takes quite a bit of time and so there is no surplus to last years surplus, something that hasn't created any added value to civilization since the beginning of time. everything is going on and these 'nobody cares' people are f u c k i n g annoying and so are all these 'normalizers' ... instead of adding value, they just serve those who ruin games and playing fields in exactly the ways that others are actively trying to change for the better, which is why there are demands for bottom-up change: your bossies won't tell you to change so you have to get it yourself instead of 'just doing your job', ffs. you are right, of course, it's a personal matter, fuck whoever; but from a rational, game-theoretical, and super-rational perspective, what you said is nonsense and so is using that dependency sequence as an argument. Especially in the lights of all that shit in storage, or cleaning out storage for new shit that can only be marketed via deception and cross-media priming, and so on ... ... just provide people with means, opportunity and let them have peace of mind, then you'll see what side they pick, which is where we end up, again, "burning men" with psychedelics and our decades of experience in cool fields and wonderful remote places, 'just doing our jobs' ... we really ruined too much potential of capitalism. it's sad, but the wall-street rich did to capitalism what communist leadership did to communism; only that communism didn't get to develop that long ... Title: Portfolio Communists threatening to ruin Capitalism and America from the Inside. ... no, needs work, any ideas? Hypocrisy is a baseline human aha-moment, btw, you can't use it in or as an argument. There should be a fallacy for that, if anyone has time to formulate one.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
The pay increases just enough to make it slightly less uncomfortable to stay at work, than to do something else.
sQL_inject 2y ago
I wonder if the author could enlighten us on a more successful system? Do they envision a world where...no one works or produces value? Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals? If they can't understand the difference between Capitalism and corporatism then I can't take their case seriously. If they can't cite an alternative to a system driven by the reality of the human incentive engine then I can't take their case seriously.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  > Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals? Trade offered! You receive: enough sustenance to live for a day and a roof above your head so you don't have to sleep under a bridge. I receive: your 12 hours of labour of my choosing. Yes, it is a mutually beneficial transaction, and millions of people historically have accepted it. Yet somehow there is this nagging feeling it might not be "fair"... but that's absurd, isn't it? It's both completely voluntary and mutually beneficial, so it has to be fair. That's what "fair" means, after all, doesn't it?
  - dominicrose 2y ago
    The authors speak about denial. Thinking that something unfair is fair is denial, when it helps you cope with your reality. Finding a solution to being homeless doesn't make your life fair. It can mean you're being exploited though.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Thinking something fair is unfair is also denial.
  - implmntatio 2y ago
    Keep the thought rolling: "Hey boss, someone has an idea to make my work less unhealthy to body and mind. I figured you make a lot off my pain and might want to implement some of those ideas. I understand the fairness of my work and compensation but you have not compensated my pain thus far. Nice custom car, btw, and I really like the size of your house. Maybe you want to build a school in there or something?" Pain compensated. Environmental consequences hit the fan. Documents disclosed: catastrophe was avoidable with a few dollars investment ... And then there's the issue of sponsoring schools, hospitals, services and all kinds of shit not even remotely as often as it should be done even though the Pyramid of the benefits is stacked exactly that way. I mean there is scarcity of kindergardens in some places, shitty meds, hospitals don't have what they need, supply chains are full of hazardous nonsense and there are scientists and journalists and citizens hunting all of that but there are walls of insurance people and lawyers as well. So yeah, the whole "fair" thing is cool and all, but the entire system is a bit over-engineered against it. Oh, you don't want them to waste the taxes. Got 'ya, corruption and bloated administrations, of course, lack of efficiency, uh-huh. How about more control mechanisms for just those financial mechanisms? No? Why not?
msteffen 2y ago
“Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?” As someone who programs for fun, I think what everybody needs is a to-do list app, but better than the other ones
- buffet_overflow 2y ago
  Interesting and novel take. Do you think making that would enable you to also make a better distributed note taking system, or do you think you need the distributed note taking system first? Perhaps we need to make a diagram to decide.
  - avandekleut 2y ago
    That sounds like a perfect use case for my new collaborative diagramming and whiteboarding app!
- drewcoo 2y ago
  To do: - find someone to collect my garbage and recycling - find someone to fix my utilities when broken - find someone to put out fires - real ones - make sure there are enough people in those roles - find ways to make those things seem "fun"
  - n4r9 2y ago
    This will sound weird, but I work close to the waste collection industry and there are decent reasons why loading bin vans can be enjoyable: * Great exercise. * Builds local knowledge. * Cameraderie with a tight-knit team. * Driving trucks and planning routes (assuming role rotation).
bttf 2y ago
In 2025 and beyond it is my sincere hope that we stop lauding articles that merely present problems without providing any substantive thoughts on how to solve them.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  I'm not going to say if this author is successful or not, but isn't the first step to addressing a problem identify there is one? Step 0 of stop, drop, and roll is to say to yourself "You know what, I think I'm on fire."
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The first step is being honest about if the problem is even solvable, and second if it is solvable would people really want what the solution means. This article is dishonest in using a definition of work that excludes the vast majority of work people have done over history. The sexist view that women never work because watching kids, making clothing, washing clothing, preparing meals (all traditional things women did in various societies) was not real work, while the things men did (hunting, fishing) was real work.
    - bottd 2y ago
      You’re failing to separate work and labor.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        Correct - the distinction makes no difference in this discussion. Call it would you will, you have to do things and not all will be pleasant.
        JodieBenitez 2y ago
        > Call it would you will, you have to do things and not all will be pleasant. Couldn't agree more... all this work/labor hairsplitting makes no sense.
JodieBenitez 2y ago
Ah... and what about the mythology of no work ? Granted, there are vast amounts of wasted work hours these days, be it farmers producing food when 30% of it goes straight to trash or those poor souls stuck in bullshit office jobs. But this: > Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work. Is a straight-up lie.
- dominicrose 2y ago
  assuming the "work" as defined in the dictionary has always existed, there is a time when the way we're working now didn't exist
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Sure, subsistence farmers didn't work the way we work now, with hyper division of labor. If you think it wasn't work, though, you're kidding yourself.
  - robtherobber 2y ago
    Many researchers (labour historians, anthropologists, sociologists etc.) draw a distinction between labour and work, as well as the different kinds of work [0]. [0] https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.png https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.p...
- sdellis 2y ago
  No one said anything about "no work", but that's an attractive straw man. Most people don't mind working hard, but they don't want to be exploited which is the point of the essay. Exploitation is rewarded under capitalism which must perpetuate the myths the author calls out to make it easier to exploit people.
  - JodieBenitez 2y ago
    > No one said anything about "no work" What straw man ? It's written in the essay: "everything got done without work". Nope, it never happened.
code_for_monkey 2y ago
Tech has been a boom field for so long, is the demographic of this website really who this is for? I feel like this is not the place where a critique of capitalism and the modern wage system is going to go over well
- sdellis 2y ago
  That's because hacker news is often an echo chamber of venture capitalists (or VC wannabes) whose success depends on perpetuating these myths.
  - code_for_monkey 2y ago
    its a couple things its what you said its also the way america handles stem education, often times you skip a bunch of humanities classes. So its really easy to get into this mindset of "I made it, I work in tech and make 300k because Im smart, smarter than everyone around me" and from there people just reach the assumption that if you dont make hundreds of dollars a year its because youre dumb, or lazy, and its your problem and theres nothing wrong with the way we designed society. sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby
    - scarecrowbob 2y ago
      "sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby" I think that's a quality observation. One of the helpful observations of humans I've gained from this site is that people tend to assume that their position in society is some kind of natural given. And typically the folks here are either what some folks might term "labor aristocracy" or literal aristocracy. Hence the reason why skipping humanities classes has been so harmful- they haven't spent the effort to appreciate the vast width of human experience. So when they are confronted with ideas about how other folks live, their inclination to see themselves as naturally in a solid position makes it difficult to see why other people make the choices they make. Fundamentally the folks on this site have a highly chauvinistic picture of their culture and really, at their core, are "anti-democratic" because they don't feel other folks can make rational choices about life. It's only recently that this has become an "out loud" thing to say, but I have been hearing it quite a lot lately. This trend has been something I've been paying attention to for a long time- I've had a quicklink to search for "musk" in titles of the site since about the time he bought twitter because I could see where this is going, and I feel unfortunately validated in that feeling. But if you want to check the pulse on the nihilistic sociopaths who are now in charge of parts of the US Gov, this site is very helpful. Also good for finding out about running doom on various devices, but that's just a side benefit.
bluGill 2y ago
I sometimes do enjoy taking my tent out and roughing it for a weekend - then I want to get back to all the expensive comforts that my modern life gives me. I could grow my own food. I sometimes do grow things like good tomatoes that money cannot buy. However I don't want to grow all my own food I know how to do this, and it is a lot of work. People have this romantic notion of history thinking that nobody had to work, it was just play all the time, but that is almost entirely false. Worse in the few cases where somebody didn't have to work we quickly discover that it was because they had many slaves doing all the work for them. In reality your typical person today is working much less than at any previous time in history. If it seems otherwise it is because you are not counting all the work - hunter gathers may have only spend a few hours a week hunting/gathering, but they spent many many more hours once the hunting/gathering was done preparing the results of that work. Those mud huts they live in - a lot of effort to build and keep up. Those blankets they sleep on to keep warm - a lot of work to make them (and they don't last forever).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kiliantics 2y ago
  I am a member of the local food co-op. While not a perfect model for society, I think it's a good example to provide some alternative to the system of work we all take for granted. I want to be able to buy food at the co-op but only members can shop there. All members must do a work shift at the co-op in order to maintain their membership. This way, in principle, there is no labour cost or labour exploitation required to run the co-op (in reality there are a few full-time employees for certain jobs). I can choose the job I would like to do for my work shift and this way everyone who is working at the co-op wants to be there, has some satisfaction in doing their job and everything tends to run well. There are ways to make the less desirable jobs more palatable, though you'd be surprised how many people are only too happy to do the bathroom cleaning shift over other shifts. In addition, every member is a part owner of the co-op with no one owning more than anyone else. So there is no exploitation of the consumer either. All money goes back into the co-op. All decisions are made by elected committees so everyone has a say in how things are run. This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships. And similar models can be used for other basic needs, like housing co-operatives, common in Europe, where people are collectively their own landlords. It's really strange that all the comments in here take any question of an alternative as forcing us back to a hunter-gatherer state of nature kind of situation. Other models exist and have proven successful even at pretty large scales. The fact these are seemingly inconceivable shows just how susceptible we are to this mythology of work.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
"Work" is a heavily overloaded word that cleaves meaning in a very unhelpful way. I've met great artists and scientists who tell me about "their life's work". Things they did, or would have done, even without money. There are people in therapy who are "doing the work", and they pay well for that. I know one millionaire who volunteers at a hospital and another at a theatre. When you get older and get a measure of life, perspectives change. What the author describes is domination and the abject penury of exploitation that flourishes under failed systems. We need a richer language to talk about these things. The real poverty is in our understanding.
__natty__ 2y ago
> For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete. I’m missing something probably but isn’t quite opposite? Today we work about 40-50h per week vs 60-80+ in the past. Also, we can rely often on technology instead of doing everything manually. I’m truly curious what author of the article had in mind.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The millionaire mustache guy retired young. He still did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, but only on his time. It lasted for about a decade. Then his (now ex) wife realized she liked the things money can buy and the fallout from that forced him back into a job. (I'm not sure where he is now)
  - loco5niner 2y ago
    Is that how you read it? It seemed more to me that he was making bank from his website.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Is he? I never really got into reading his website, but it didn't seem like a money maker. I read a few articles here and there, and I admit I don't know his current status. It wouldn't surprise me if he has now turned it into a money maker (given life has forced a need to generate more money on him it would even be expected)
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      The point where I bounced on the site was when I realized this "retired" guy was making things work by having three jobs and the health & prior work history to quickly get re-hired doing something at an ordinary company if his family needed good health insurance again. And that one of those jobs was his blog. He was tricking me into reading it by exaggerating things, so I'd maybe click some of his affiliate links and make him money. What's funny is he wasn't even really coy about what he was doing, it was all right there, yet he had (and I think still kind of has?) tons of loyal fans.
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
There needs to be a mechanism in capitalism that provides some essential goods for free and incentivizes that behavior. A likely source is to tax it from companies making luxuries (the economic definition), provided companies actually pay the tax fairly, and lawmakers don't leave gaping loopholes. We need to undo how expensive it is to be poor - this is exploitative capitalism against the poorest. And the essentials should seek to be lowering prices, not go up like luxuries. The deal then changes to: "you don't have to work, and you won't starve or freeze, but you also won't have any luxuries". And yes, all luxuries get more expensive.
- js8 2y ago
  This already exists, somewhere between universal basic income and social democracy.
  - hnthrow90348765 2y ago
    It doesn't - if I have zero dollars in the US, I have no guaranteed food/water/shelter, and people will tell me to go get a job.
    - torlok 2y ago
      There's more than 1 country.
      - rezmason 2y ago
        I think it's very sneaky, how the world manages to conceal so many alternative ways of life by situating them outside the United States /s
- yarekt 2y ago
  I would go one further: give government powers to simply purchase things that work well out of the free market, and run it in a way that is pro-quality-of-life rather than profit. Is fast internet working well? buy and invest profit to increase coverage and speed. A lab makes good drugs? don’t buy its drugs, buy the lab. The capitalist incentive remain: A gap in the market can yield you wealth for 10-20 years until you’re bought out. and government only buys the highest performing stuff of the bunch. Challenge is having a system that is resistant to gaming
deleted 2y ago
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googamooga 2y ago
There is a lot said about exploitation in the book and in the comments here on HN. I would like to start a kindergarten (a day care for toddlers and pre-school kids) in Switzerland, where such service is very scarce and expensive because the state does not subsidize preschool childcare. What HN community recommends me on the form of legal entity that I should use to start this venture? Options available are corporation, non-profit association or co-operative. What would be the most ethical and non-exploitative option which would work business-wise at the same time?
torlok 2y ago
I think there's enough to discuss around the stranglehold monopolies have on employment, or that pay should allow people to live, not just survive, or that we shouldn't tie people's value to their jobs. Articles like these do nothing to sway people away from the uncontrolled-capitalism lobby.
randcraw 2y ago
The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.) Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still. No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably. Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House

68 points by robtherobber 2y ago

Posting their cool essay on a computer that needs internet that needs electricity that needs power plants that needs natural resource extraction that needs heavy machinery that needs metallurgy that needs large factories that needs engineers that needs universities that needs thousands of years of human capital etc etc etc If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods. Why is it always other people that need to change? You change.

thrwaway1985882 2y ago
You did it, you posted the meme. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- MiiMe19 2y ago
  If your main complaint is product bad, yet you personally buy products you have no real need for, the meme is true. Stop telling everyone else how making unnecessary things is evil if you are the person buying them. Its like complaining about consumerism next to your funko-pop wall.
  - implmntatio 2y ago
    Yeah, don't give negative feedback at all. If you don't like a feature of the product or the supply chain, fuck yOu (in a Randy M. kind of way)
    - MiiMe19 2y ago
      Their negative feedback consists of stating the obvious, with such gems as the economy makes things that go to waste, and the economy should make happiness, instead of products. They are stating blatantly obvious things. Yeah, everyone wishes things didn't go to waste. Everyone wishes they were happier. Say something new or stop being a hypocrite; pick one to be taken seriously.
      - implmntatio 2y ago
        "They" are not always stating that which is obvious to everyone. "They" are usually suggesting better ways and these ways are often enough based on engineering and science. What is put on the front page of media is, of course, the obvious, the nonsense, the sensational, the clickbait. You don't have to say something new to a younger generation if that younger generation hasn't understood or even heard the old, the obvious, yet. Youngsters might have heard some of it but their brains are often high enough on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ... and then there are the 'media-sigmas and cool kids' who sing that shit in choirs and canons. A lot of things go to waste and yet there is tons of useful stuff coming out of recycling and up-cycling and that's just two methods with a very small "margin" and undeveloped. There are those design and architecture blogs and firms and there is cool shit all the time and wonderful projects everywhere but the pointlessness of the over-engineered financial reasoning behind yearly sursurpluspluses is stacked against that. You don't catch and bring a culprit to justice if you drop the investigation, which might have to circle long enough for some other brain or pair of eyes to find the final puzzle piece. And not everyone wishes they were happier. There's enough to criticize about anarchist, leftist critiques and groups and collectives as well, though, just as much exploitation of youth, gullibility and pain and crisis, and problems, really, but not systemically. And there's that fallacy, something ad hominem, I think, so we should focus on what is said and written and, if obvious but unsolved, get to the bottom of it instead of saying "I don't care", "nobody cares", "human nature in the 21st post marketing psychology and decades of punched food, drink, drugs, meds and media century"
        MiiMe19 2y ago
        And this investigation consists mostly of just repeating the same thing over and over again? Acting like work or having to put it real effort to survive is some new invention is stupid and incorrect. To live fairly, you must work. To pretend otherwise is foolish. Once again, say something new or give a new way to solve this "problem". This anti-work bs is stupid and has been stupid for all of time, in all of the many forms it has taken.
- lotharcable2 2y ago
  Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation. The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something. Stuff like this: > Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything. The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty. A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed. The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm. Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement. It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order. This wasn't that long ago. We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article) Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't. But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  Ironically, the first two panels in this comic are themselves a meme, i.e., a sort of lampshading. It is of course at least a little bit hypocritical to use your iPhone to post about how terrible Apple is. The second two panels are just strawmen.
implmntatio 2y ago
oh, it's a matter of means, opportunity and peace of mind. this little dependency sequence is exactly how I, again and again, come to the conclusion about what climate change is driven by and climate change (re-)actions should be. but in terms of change: others need to change so that change can hold the line. example: good teachers are scarce. and when there are a few or only one at your school, most of their good impact is offset or entirely negated by their colleagues. and that's not life, that's not what it is, that's not how it goes. It's because people in the dependency sequence refuse to change and instead serve someone who poses as a devil because the motherfucker gets them high on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'that's not my job', 'I don't care', 'I don't even care about not caring', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ... AND: at almost every step in that dependency sequence, there are better ways to do things. implementation takes quite a bit of time and so there is no surplus to last years surplus, something that hasn't created any added value to civilization since the beginning of time. everything is going on and these 'nobody cares' people are f u c k i n g annoying and so are all these 'normalizers' ... instead of adding value, they just serve those who ruin games and playing fields in exactly the ways that others are actively trying to change for the better, which is why there are demands for bottom-up change: your bossies won't tell you to change so you have to get it yourself instead of 'just doing your job', ffs. you are right, of course, it's a personal matter, fuck whoever; but from a rational, game-theoretical, and super-rational perspective, what you said is nonsense and so is using that dependency sequence as an argument. Especially in the lights of all that shit in storage, or cleaning out storage for new shit that can only be marketed via deception and cross-media priming, and so on ... ... just provide people with means, opportunity and let them have peace of mind, then you'll see what side they pick, which is where we end up, again, "burning men" with psychedelics and our decades of experience in cool fields and wonderful remote places, 'just doing our jobs' ... we really ruined too much potential of capitalism. it's sad, but the wall-street rich did to capitalism what communist leadership did to communism; only that communism didn't get to develop that long ... Title: Portfolio Communists threatening to ruin Capitalism and America from the Inside. ... no, needs work, any ideas? Hypocrisy is a baseline human aha-moment, btw, you can't use it in or as an argument. There should be a fallacy for that, if anyone has time to formulate one.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

The pay increases just enough to make it slightly less uncomfortable to stay at work, than to do something else.

sQL_inject 2y ago

I wonder if the author could enlighten us on a more successful system? Do they envision a world where...no one works or produces value? Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals? If they can't understand the difference between Capitalism and corporatism then I can't take their case seriously. If they can't cite an alternative to a system driven by the reality of the human incentive engine then I can't take their case seriously.

Joker_vD 2y ago
> Is the author against the mutual and willing trade of goods between free individuals? Trade offered! You receive: enough sustenance to live for a day and a roof above your head so you don't have to sleep under a bridge. I receive: your 12 hours of labour of my choosing. Yes, it is a mutually beneficial transaction, and millions of people historically have accepted it. Yet somehow there is this nagging feeling it might not be "fair"... but that's absurd, isn't it? It's both completely voluntary and mutually beneficial, so it has to be fair. That's what "fair" means, after all, doesn't it?
- dominicrose 2y ago
  The authors speak about denial. Thinking that something unfair is fair is denial, when it helps you cope with your reality. Finding a solution to being homeless doesn't make your life fair. It can mean you're being exploited though.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Thinking something fair is unfair is also denial.
- implmntatio 2y ago
  Keep the thought rolling: "Hey boss, someone has an idea to make my work less unhealthy to body and mind. I figured you make a lot off my pain and might want to implement some of those ideas. I understand the fairness of my work and compensation but you have not compensated my pain thus far. Nice custom car, btw, and I really like the size of your house. Maybe you want to build a school in there or something?" Pain compensated. Environmental consequences hit the fan. Documents disclosed: catastrophe was avoidable with a few dollars investment ... And then there's the issue of sponsoring schools, hospitals, services and all kinds of shit not even remotely as often as it should be done even though the Pyramid of the benefits is stacked exactly that way. I mean there is scarcity of kindergardens in some places, shitty meds, hospitals don't have what they need, supply chains are full of hazardous nonsense and there are scientists and journalists and citizens hunting all of that but there are walls of insurance people and lawyers as well. So yeah, the whole "fair" thing is cool and all, but the entire system is a bit over-engineered against it. Oh, you don't want them to waste the taxes. Got 'ya, corruption and bloated administrations, of course, lack of efficiency, uh-huh. How about more control mechanisms for just those financial mechanisms? No? Why not?

msteffen 2y ago

“Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?” As someone who programs for fun, I think what everybody needs is a to-do list app, but better than the other ones

buffet_overflow 2y ago
Interesting and novel take. Do you think making that would enable you to also make a better distributed note taking system, or do you think you need the distributed note taking system first? Perhaps we need to make a diagram to decide.
- avandekleut 2y ago
  That sounds like a perfect use case for my new collaborative diagramming and whiteboarding app!
drewcoo 2y ago
To do: - find someone to collect my garbage and recycling - find someone to fix my utilities when broken - find someone to put out fires - real ones - make sure there are enough people in those roles - find ways to make those things seem "fun"
- n4r9 2y ago
  This will sound weird, but I work close to the waste collection industry and there are decent reasons why loading bin vans can be enjoyable: * Great exercise. * Builds local knowledge. * Cameraderie with a tight-knit team. * Driving trucks and planning routes (assuming role rotation).

bttf 2y ago

In 2025 and beyond it is my sincere hope that we stop lauding articles that merely present problems without providing any substantive thoughts on how to solve them.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
I'm not going to say if this author is successful or not, but isn't the first step to addressing a problem identify there is one? Step 0 of stop, drop, and roll is to say to yourself "You know what, I think I'm on fire."
- bluGill 2y ago
  The first step is being honest about if the problem is even solvable, and second if it is solvable would people really want what the solution means. This article is dishonest in using a definition of work that excludes the vast majority of work people have done over history. The sexist view that women never work because watching kids, making clothing, washing clothing, preparing meals (all traditional things women did in various societies) was not real work, while the things men did (hunting, fishing) was real work.
  - bottd 2y ago
    You’re failing to separate work and labor.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Correct - the distinction makes no difference in this discussion. Call it would you will, you have to do things and not all will be pleasant.
      - JodieBenitez 2y ago
        > Call it would you will, you have to do things and not all will be pleasant. Couldn't agree more... all this work/labor hairsplitting makes no sense.

JodieBenitez 2y ago

Ah... and what about the mythology of no work ? Granted, there are vast amounts of wasted work hours these days, be it farmers producing food when 30% of it goes straight to trash or those poor souls stuck in bullshit office jobs. But this: > Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work. Is a straight-up lie.

dominicrose 2y ago
assuming the "work" as defined in the dictionary has always existed, there is a time when the way we're working now didn't exist
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Sure, subsistence farmers didn't work the way we work now, with hyper division of labor. If you think it wasn't work, though, you're kidding yourself.
- robtherobber 2y ago
  Many researchers (labour historians, anthropologists, sociologists etc.) draw a distinction between labour and work, as well as the different kinds of work [0]. [0] https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.png https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.p...
sdellis 2y ago
No one said anything about "no work", but that's an attractive straw man. Most people don't mind working hard, but they don't want to be exploited which is the point of the essay. Exploitation is rewarded under capitalism which must perpetuate the myths the author calls out to make it easier to exploit people.
- JodieBenitez 2y ago
  > No one said anything about "no work" What straw man ? It's written in the essay: "everything got done without work". Nope, it never happened.

code_for_monkey 2y ago

Tech has been a boom field for so long, is the demographic of this website really who this is for? I feel like this is not the place where a critique of capitalism and the modern wage system is going to go over well

sdellis 2y ago
That's because hacker news is often an echo chamber of venture capitalists (or VC wannabes) whose success depends on perpetuating these myths.
- code_for_monkey 2y ago
  its a couple things its what you said its also the way america handles stem education, often times you skip a bunch of humanities classes. So its really easy to get into this mindset of "I made it, I work in tech and make 300k because Im smart, smarter than everyone around me" and from there people just reach the assumption that if you dont make hundreds of dollars a year its because youre dumb, or lazy, and its your problem and theres nothing wrong with the way we designed society. sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby
  - scarecrowbob 2y ago
    "sometimes this site is like if the worst parts of linkedin and reddit had a baby" I think that's a quality observation. One of the helpful observations of humans I've gained from this site is that people tend to assume that their position in society is some kind of natural given. And typically the folks here are either what some folks might term "labor aristocracy" or literal aristocracy. Hence the reason why skipping humanities classes has been so harmful- they haven't spent the effort to appreciate the vast width of human experience. So when they are confronted with ideas about how other folks live, their inclination to see themselves as naturally in a solid position makes it difficult to see why other people make the choices they make. Fundamentally the folks on this site have a highly chauvinistic picture of their culture and really, at their core, are "anti-democratic" because they don't feel other folks can make rational choices about life. It's only recently that this has become an "out loud" thing to say, but I have been hearing it quite a lot lately. This trend has been something I've been paying attention to for a long time- I've had a quicklink to search for "musk" in titles of the site since about the time he bought twitter because I could see where this is going, and I feel unfortunately validated in that feeling. But if you want to check the pulse on the nihilistic sociopaths who are now in charge of parts of the US Gov, this site is very helpful. Also good for finding out about running doom on various devices, but that's just a side benefit.

bluGill 2y ago

I sometimes do enjoy taking my tent out and roughing it for a weekend - then I want to get back to all the expensive comforts that my modern life gives me. I could grow my own food. I sometimes do grow things like good tomatoes that money cannot buy. However I don't want to grow all my own food I know how to do this, and it is a lot of work. People have this romantic notion of history thinking that nobody had to work, it was just play all the time, but that is almost entirely false. Worse in the few cases where somebody didn't have to work we quickly discover that it was because they had many slaves doing all the work for them. In reality your typical person today is working much less than at any previous time in history. If it seems otherwise it is because you are not counting all the work - hunter gathers may have only spend a few hours a week hunting/gathering, but they spent many many more hours once the hunting/gathering was done preparing the results of that work. Those mud huts they live in - a lot of effort to build and keep up. Those blankets they sleep on to keep warm - a lot of work to make them (and they don't last forever).

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kiliantics 2y ago
I am a member of the local food co-op. While not a perfect model for society, I think it's a good example to provide some alternative to the system of work we all take for granted. I want to be able to buy food at the co-op but only members can shop there. All members must do a work shift at the co-op in order to maintain their membership. This way, in principle, there is no labour cost or labour exploitation required to run the co-op (in reality there are a few full-time employees for certain jobs). I can choose the job I would like to do for my work shift and this way everyone who is working at the co-op wants to be there, has some satisfaction in doing their job and everything tends to run well. There are ways to make the less desirable jobs more palatable, though you'd be surprised how many people are only too happy to do the bathroom cleaning shift over other shifts. In addition, every member is a part owner of the co-op with no one owning more than anyone else. So there is no exploitation of the consumer either. All money goes back into the co-op. All decisions are made by elected committees so everyone has a say in how things are run. This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships. And similar models can be used for other basic needs, like housing co-operatives, common in Europe, where people are collectively their own landlords. It's really strange that all the comments in here take any question of an alternative as forcing us back to a hunter-gatherer state of nature kind of situation. Other models exist and have proven successful even at pretty large scales. The fact these are seemingly inconceivable shows just how susceptible we are to this mythology of work.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

"Work" is a heavily overloaded word that cleaves meaning in a very unhelpful way. I've met great artists and scientists who tell me about "their life's work". Things they did, or would have done, even without money. There are people in therapy who are "doing the work", and they pay well for that. I know one millionaire who volunteers at a hospital and another at a theatre. When you get older and get a measure of life, perspectives change. What the author describes is domination and the abject penury of exploitation that flourishes under failed systems. We need a richer language to talk about these things. The real poverty is in our understanding.

__natty__ 2y ago

> For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete. I’m missing something probably but isn’t quite opposite? Today we work about 40-50h per week vs 60-80+ in the past. Also, we can rely often on technology instead of doing everything manually. I’m truly curious what author of the article had in mind.

bluGill 2y ago
The millionaire mustache guy retired young. He still did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, but only on his time. It lasted for about a decade. Then his (now ex) wife realized she liked the things money can buy and the fallout from that forced him back into a job. (I'm not sure where he is now)
- loco5niner 2y ago
  Is that how you read it? It seemed more to me that he was making bank from his website.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Is he? I never really got into reading his website, but it didn't seem like a money maker. I read a few articles here and there, and I admit I don't know his current status. It wouldn't surprise me if he has now turned it into a money maker (given life has forced a need to generate more money on him it would even be expected)
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    The point where I bounced on the site was when I realized this "retired" guy was making things work by having three jobs and the health & prior work history to quickly get re-hired doing something at an ordinary company if his family needed good health insurance again. And that one of those jobs was his blog. He was tricking me into reading it by exaggerating things, so I'd maybe click some of his affiliate links and make him money. What's funny is he wasn't even really coy about what he was doing, it was all right there, yet he had (and I think still kind of has?) tons of loyal fans.

hnthrow90348765 2y ago

There needs to be a mechanism in capitalism that provides some essential goods for free and incentivizes that behavior. A likely source is to tax it from companies making luxuries (the economic definition), provided companies actually pay the tax fairly, and lawmakers don't leave gaping loopholes. We need to undo how expensive it is to be poor - this is exploitative capitalism against the poorest. And the essentials should seek to be lowering prices, not go up like luxuries. The deal then changes to: "you don't have to work, and you won't starve or freeze, but you also won't have any luxuries". And yes, all luxuries get more expensive.

js8 2y ago
This already exists, somewhere between universal basic income and social democracy.
- hnthrow90348765 2y ago
  It doesn't - if I have zero dollars in the US, I have no guaranteed food/water/shelter, and people will tell me to go get a job.
  - torlok 2y ago
    There's more than 1 country.
    - rezmason 2y ago
      I think it's very sneaky, how the world manages to conceal so many alternative ways of life by situating them outside the United States /s
yarekt 2y ago
I would go one further: give government powers to simply purchase things that work well out of the free market, and run it in a way that is pro-quality-of-life rather than profit. Is fast internet working well? buy and invest profit to increase coverage and speed. A lab makes good drugs? don’t buy its drugs, buy the lab. The capitalist incentive remain: A gap in the market can yield you wealth for 10-20 years until you’re bought out. and government only buys the highest performing stuff of the bunch. Challenge is having a system that is resistant to gaming

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googamooga 2y ago

There is a lot said about exploitation in the book and in the comments here on HN. I would like to start a kindergarten (a day care for toddlers and pre-school kids) in Switzerland, where such service is very scarce and expensive because the state does not subsidize preschool childcare. What HN community recommends me on the form of legal entity that I should use to start this venture? Options available are corporation, non-profit association or co-operative. What would be the most ethical and non-exploitative option which would work business-wise at the same time?

torlok 2y ago

I think there's enough to discuss around the stranglehold monopolies have on employment, or that pay should allow people to live, not just survive, or that we shouldn't tie people's value to their jobs. Articles like these do nothing to sway people away from the uncontrolled-capitalism lobby.

randcraw 2y ago

The best accounting I've seen of how much work people did historically were the mini-series that were aired on PBS a few years back: "Frontier House", "Colonial House", "Texas Ranch House", "1900 House", "The 1940s House", "The 1900 Island", "Prairie House", etc. Average modern families took up residence in a building of the times and had to use only the tools of the day to work as they did then. (Though they didn't have to grow their own food.) Without exception, the work was backbreaking and unrelenting. Some of the moderns chose to quit rather than finish the month-long 'experiment'. Everyone came away with aspects of shell shock in realizing how hard life was back then for the average person, even just 70 years ago. It also became obvious that the lives of slaves or those working with only hand tools were that much harder still. No, it's just insane to imagine that anyone in the past had easy lives. Nasty, brutish, and short, indubitably. Fascinating to see how hard our recent ancestors had it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House