5 ms·

We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make

We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.

philipallstar 6mo ago
This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised. No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in. No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee. The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  But it's all just work, all the ways down. What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work. So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
  - strifey 6mo ago
    They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
  - wholinator2 6mo ago
    I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents? None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
    - WarmWash 6mo ago
      I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5. And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening. Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
  - ElevenLathe 6mo ago
    I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.
    - hallole 6mo ago
      In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.
      - Moomoomoo309 6mo ago
        Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.
      - philipallstar 6mo ago
        If you look at any society in history, those things disappearing is the opposite of natural. While it's true that there are some positive factors causing it (e.g. housework has been made far easier through inventing/factorying/delivering/installing of appliances like vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers, and the world has just become easier and safer to be in for women through things such as reliable cars with power steering, mobile phone, and policemen who respond) there are a lot of negative factors that just push those time-rich, more society enriching-capable women into the world of work. The main one being what I already mentioned: house prices force them to work to pay a bank back for paying a boomer a massive price for a house, to keep up with the other two-income house bids.
  - AlecSchueler 6mo ago
    > But it's all just work, all the ways down. > What you are describing is working for someone else That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work. But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
- jltsiren 6mo ago
  It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid. And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her. But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
  - hallole 6mo ago
    > "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract." I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about. Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics. Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
      - monocasa 6mo ago
        I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life. If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > No time for baking treats > No time for being a governor at the local school The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life. Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs. Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other. > No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee. You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day? This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
  - philipallstar 6mo ago
    > Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate. > Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week It depends where you live. If you're in a country with low population growth then the housing cost increase from 2-earner families isn't a big deal. You might be slightly lower down in the house affordability tier, but you will get a house. If you're not (e.g. the UK) you basically have to both work to get a dwelling. And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s, and their parents could in their early 20s. The trend is obvious, and its conclusion has arrived. If you can do significant community-strengthening work while also doing a normally 40-hour-a-week job then I'd be pretty surprised. Maybe you only sleep 4 hours a night.
    - Aurornis 6mo ago
      > I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate. You can raise and feed kids without a job without feeding them plastic-wrapped snacks all day. I bake and meal prep for my kids. They hang out in and around the kitchen and we play and talk. I think there’s some catastrophizing going on with these beliefs, combined with seeing life through exaggerated social media posts. It’s so foreign to read compared to how well adjusted people operate in real life. > And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s This is a major clue that you’re viewing life through histrionic social media posts. Did you know Gen Z home ownership is higher than the previous generation at the same age? If you thought that Gen Z would never buy homes like the previous generation, you are actually 180 degrees opposite of the truth.
andix 6mo ago
In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work. If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it. It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.
- AlecSchueler 6mo ago
  > Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
  - andix 6mo ago
    My claim is, that the market is encouraging segregation less than society. Jobs force people to work together. If nobody forces them, they often just don't work together, and stay in their bubble.
    - entropicdrifter 6mo ago
      It's kind of a six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation IMO. Modern society does tend to have extreme social bubbles, but those are also a product of market forces, which in turn were influenced by previous states of society, etc etc back to the beginning of time.
      - AlecSchueler 6mo ago
        Back to the beginning of time or back several centuries?
- 6mo ago
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities. We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.
- entropicdrifter 6mo ago
  On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor. I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
    - monocasa 6mo ago
      Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year. In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance. All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
      - lecor 6mo ago
        FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it. “There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-history-peasant-life-work/629783/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...

philipallstar 6mo ago

This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised. No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in. No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee. The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.

WarmWash 6mo ago
But it's all just work, all the ways down. What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work. So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.
- strifey 6mo ago
  They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.
- wholinator2 6mo ago
  I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents? None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.
  - WarmWash 6mo ago
    I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5. And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening. Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!
- ElevenLathe 6mo ago
  I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.
  - hallole 6mo ago
    In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.
    - Moomoomoo309 6mo ago
      Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.
    - philipallstar 6mo ago
      If you look at any society in history, those things disappearing is the opposite of natural. While it's true that there are some positive factors causing it (e.g. housework has been made far easier through inventing/factorying/delivering/installing of appliances like vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers, and the world has just become easier and safer to be in for women through things such as reliable cars with power steering, mobile phone, and policemen who respond) there are a lot of negative factors that just push those time-rich, more society enriching-capable women into the world of work. The main one being what I already mentioned: house prices force them to work to pay a bank back for paying a boomer a massive price for a house, to keep up with the other two-income house bids.
- AlecSchueler 6mo ago
  > But it's all just work, all the ways down. > What you are describing is working for someone else That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work. But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.
jltsiren 6mo ago
It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid. And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her. But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.
- hallole 6mo ago
  > "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract." I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about. Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics. Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.
    - monocasa 6mo ago
      I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life. If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.
Aurornis 6mo ago
> No time for baking treats > No time for being a governor at the local school The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life. Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs. Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other. > No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee. You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day? This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week
- philipallstar 6mo ago
  > Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate. > Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week It depends where you live. If you're in a country with low population growth then the housing cost increase from 2-earner families isn't a big deal. You might be slightly lower down in the house affordability tier, but you will get a house. If you're not (e.g. the UK) you basically have to both work to get a dwelling. And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s, and their parents could in their early 20s. The trend is obvious, and its conclusion has arrived. If you can do significant community-strengthening work while also doing a normally 40-hour-a-week job then I'd be pretty surprised. Maybe you only sleep 4 hours a night.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    > I don't mean occasionally. I mean as normal practice - no plastic-wrapped snacks at all other than an occasional chocolate. You can raise and feed kids without a job without feeding them plastic-wrapped snacks all day. I bake and meal prep for my kids. They hang out in and around the kitchen and we play and talk. I think there’s some catastrophizing going on with these beliefs, combined with seeing life through exaggerated social media posts. It’s so foreign to read compared to how well adjusted people operate in real life. > And it also depends when you live. Gen Z are saying they can't get started, and don't expect to buy a house until well into their 30s. Current parents could buy in their late 20s This is a major clue that you’re viewing life through histrionic social media posts. Did you know Gen Z home ownership is higher than the previous generation at the same age? If you thought that Gen Z would never buy homes like the previous generation, you are actually 180 degrees opposite of the truth.

andix 6mo ago

In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work. If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it. It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.

AlecSchueler 6mo ago
> Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work Could the market itself be encouraging demographic segregation. If we measure and focus on economic growth above all else then the workplace becomes the place more important than all others.
- andix 6mo ago
  My claim is, that the market is encouraging segregation less than society. Jobs force people to work together. If nobody forces them, they often just don't work together, and stay in their bubble.
  - entropicdrifter 6mo ago
    It's kind of a six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other situation IMO. Modern society does tend to have extreme social bubbles, but those are also a product of market forces, which in turn were influenced by previous states of society, etc etc back to the beginning of time.
    - AlecSchueler 6mo ago
      Back to the beginning of time or back several centuries?
6mo ago

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities. We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

entropicdrifter 6mo ago
On the other hand, ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces for people to congregate, socialize, and otherwise involve themselves with their communities
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > ancient societies had more in-person community and common free third-spaces For the elites. Most people in the population were doing back-breaking labor. I'm not saying there wasn't leisure. But when most of a society's labor goes into agriculture, most of the leisure time is going to be spent on the farm with fellow farmhands. (The exception being winter months.)
  - monocasa 6mo ago
    Medieval serfs typically worked about 150 10 hour days a year. In addition to the winter months there's a lot of gaps where the plants are in the ground, and now just need intermittent maintenance. All of this of course ignores women's work, which was more omnipresent across the year. But it was also pretty social as well, hence the lasting power of phrases like "sewing circles".
    - lecor 6mo ago
      FWIW: That 150 hour estimate came from work by Gregory Clark at UC Davis who has since cast doubt on it. “There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told (Amanda Mill). He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-history-peasant-life-work/629783/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/05/medieval-...