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> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all? Everything else. You are worth so much more than your produ

by Telaneo 3mo ago

> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all? Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity. I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough). It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work. I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).

avalys 3mo ago
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
- neom 3mo ago
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- beanjuiceII 3mo ago
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  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?
    - a-french-anon 3mo ago
      Of course nobody sane wants something like this to happen. The problem isn't the people unable to make ends meets, it's the unwilling.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        How can you even tell the difference? Most people can't. They just assign everyone to the bucket of unwilling.
        a-french-anon 3mo ago
        (Reasonable) Good faith at the individual level is a good thing, but when trying to scale it and build a working socialist system out of it, you're 100% set for failure.
      - Telaneo 3mo ago
        Most people want to work. Most people want to provide value in some form. The author of the article is unable and willing, but is still treated as unwilling by the system. We're better of acting in good faith and treating everybody who says they are unable as that, and give them the support they need.
  - CursedSilicon 3mo ago
    This smells a lot of "I'm miserable so everyone else must be as unhappy as I am" What if we make a better world for everyone, instead of a planetary crab bucket?
  - CalRobert 3mo ago
    Sometimes they are forbidden from making the things they’d like for themselves. You used to be able to get your own food, build your own home, etc. But enclosure put a stop to that. And besides, who made the land you live on?
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
  - pj_mukh 3mo ago
    “We have enough excess in society” How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
    - XorNot 3mo ago
      The world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.
      - anovikov 3mo ago
        ...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
    - pharrington 3mo ago
      In the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.
      - pj_mukh 3mo ago
        Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number). Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
      - 3mo ago
- deleted 3mo ago
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- germinalphrase 3mo ago
  Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.
  - ajsnigrutin 3mo ago
    This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers. This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have". Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
    - germinalphrase 3mo ago
      Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big. But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
- smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.
- freehorse 3mo ago
  Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even. At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
- jplrssn 3mo ago
  > Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
  - avalys 3mo ago
    If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive. If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange. When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
    - jplrssn 3mo ago
      My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society. I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
    - birksherty 3mo ago
      Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
    - qwytw 3mo ago
      Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference. While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
- ahoka 3mo ago
  What a tone deaf comment.
- astral_drama 3mo ago
  > Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
  - avalys 3mo ago
    A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege? I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled. That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
    - astral_drama 3mo ago
      > A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege? You do > I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled. Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once. > That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books. Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
    - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
      And yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between. People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
- Suzuran 3mo ago
  Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
  - chneu 3mo ago
    Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
    - Suzuran 3mo ago
      It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
    - efficax 3mo ago
      Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.
      - ImJamal 3mo ago
        I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS > A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors Just replace investors with tax payers.
- RobinL 3mo ago
  By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
- alexgieg 3mo ago
  Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy. Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
  - kbelder 3mo ago
    A billionaire makes more like a thousand times what a normal working stiff makes in a lifetime, not a million times.
    - alexgieg 3mo ago
      Depends on what's being compared. Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
- bjertoref 3mo ago
  Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - byutifu 3mo ago
    I hate being a contrarian for my first comment, but not everyone is lucky enough or afforded parents and opportunity like Hawking.
  - gymbeaux 3mo ago
    He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.
- GeoAtreides 3mo ago
  At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.
- birksherty 3mo ago
  3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.
- onraglanroad 3mo ago
  I know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.
- trial3 3mo ago
  Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
  - WarmWash 3mo ago
    The people getting paid by the other time I spend productively.
- didibus 3mo ago
  The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go. If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
- AngryData 3mo ago
  There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.
  - tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
    You could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you. The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
- george916a 3mo ago
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- xhkkffbf 3mo ago
  Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others. Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.
trescenzi 3mo ago
The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need. This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
roenxi 3mo ago
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there. Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
  - hallole 3mo ago
    Because one's value to society doesn't determine their wage (an economic matter) or status (a social matter). The parent comment is right. What you've pointed out is a separate "injustice" of a kind: that we generally under-appreciate others.
- wasfgwp 3mo ago
  > then your worth is very much linked to your productivity Also coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious… The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck.. > the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions. It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.
AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15). Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships. As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
giov4 3mo ago
could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint? I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
- giov4 3mo ago
  also the comment "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?" was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    > could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint? > I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment. I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words. People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity. Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth. My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that. > also the comment > "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?" > was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends? The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
swed420 3mo ago
Relevant: In Praise of Idleness https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.458601/2015.458601.In-Praise-Of-Idleness-And-Other-Essays_text.pdf https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...
bko 3mo ago
> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive? This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health" Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exercise-charity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > Is playing Candy Crush productive? If you enjoy it, then yes. > Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense. Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
  - bko 3mo ago
    If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing. I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
swat535 3mo ago
> the protestant work ethic, I can't speak for Protestants because the denominations vary (though I doubt they would differ greatly on this point) but for Catholics "works of mercy" is defined as caring for the vulnerable, the elderly and tending the sick. It's not meant to shame those people into guilt. Additionally, there are many other facets such as the spiritual works of mercy such as comforting the sorrowful or counseling the doubtful. I think you are perhaps better off putting the blame on the Capitalism hustle culture that forces people to work day and night to be "productive" than Christianity.
- wasfgwp 3mo ago
  Most Catholics also don’t believe in double predestination and think that (more or less but that’s the gist) god has pre-picked people who are destined to be successful and those which are destined to be lazy and worthless or even outright evil. That’s one of the core tenets of Calvinism and similar religions.
dubeye 3mo ago
Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers? As someone who spent four years reading 'the' Classics at uni, I doubt it's very true you comment wouldn't read quite so well if you swapped classics for posting cat tiktoks and hanging out with strangers you bump into in the street. But what makes that inferior?
- hallole 3mo ago
  Yes, it is more productive. Becoming more familiar with the English language and skillfully written prose is good. The notion that modern prose is of lesser quality is widespread. This comment reads as snarky post-modernism.
  - dubeye 3mo ago
    I think you missed my point. But you think the bounds of every field of research and technology has expanded, except language? To learn how to read and write well, then you would do just as well, if not better, to read modern authors at the top of their fields. I wouldn't exclude thrillers. Reading Chaucer in old English, to stretch the point to breaking, is not going to give you any kind of edge. Maybe it will teach you a bit of French, but again, you are better off reading modern French literature for that. I suspect you were not forced to read the classics as I was. Much of it is stuffed with overly flowery prose and immature ideas. It's mostly tradition that keeps them alive. There is much personal satisfaction in literature, but I would place it much closer to leisure than work.
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers? No. You can play Candy Crush for all I care if that's what gets you more enjoyment. The classic were just what were on my mind when I wrote that comment.
  - dubeye 3mo ago
Henchman21 3mo ago
The Protestant Work Ethic is just learned slavery by another name
surgical_fire 3mo ago
I am not from the US, so this "protestant work ethics" sound foreign to me. And to be honest, very harmful. Measuring someone's worth by their productivity sounds incredibly misanthropic, to a cartoonish degree. It's part of the same societal illness that only considers something worthy when it has a monetary value. Looking at some responses to your post (that should be very uncontroversial) is an interesting experience in that regard. Luckily I don't have any disabilities, but I pity those that do. I think that society has a duty to help the less fortunate. That should be an uncontroversial stance too, but oh well
jumpinjack710 3mo ago
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george916a 3mo ago
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by Telaneo 3mo ago

avalys 3mo ago

Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?

neom 3mo ago
[dead]
beanjuiceII 3mo ago
[flagged]
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?
  - a-french-anon 3mo ago
    Of course nobody sane wants something like this to happen. The problem isn't the people unable to make ends meets, it's the unwilling.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      How can you even tell the difference? Most people can't. They just assign everyone to the bucket of unwilling.
      - a-french-anon 3mo ago
        (Reasonable) Good faith at the individual level is a good thing, but when trying to scale it and build a working socialist system out of it, you're 100% set for failure.
    - Telaneo 3mo ago
      Most people want to work. Most people want to provide value in some form. The author of the article is unable and willing, but is still treated as unwilling by the system. We're better of acting in good faith and treating everybody who says they are unable as that, and give them the support they need.
- CursedSilicon 3mo ago
  This smells a lot of "I'm miserable so everyone else must be as unhappy as I am" What if we make a better world for everyone, instead of a planetary crab bucket?
- CalRobert 3mo ago
  Sometimes they are forbidden from making the things they’d like for themselves. You used to be able to get your own food, build your own home, etc. But enclosure put a stop to that. And besides, who made the land you live on?
Telaneo 3mo ago
We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.
- pj_mukh 3mo ago
  “We have enough excess in society” How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
  - XorNot 3mo ago
    The world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.
    - anovikov 3mo ago
      ...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.
  - pharrington 3mo ago
    In the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.
    - pj_mukh 3mo ago
      Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number). Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
    - 3mo ago
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
germinalphrase 3mo ago
Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.
- ajsnigrutin 3mo ago
  This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers. This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have". Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
  - germinalphrase 3mo ago
    Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?
pjmlp 3mo ago
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big. But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
smallmancontrov 3mo ago
People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.
freehorse 3mo ago
Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even. At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
jplrssn 3mo ago
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
- avalys 3mo ago
  If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive. If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange. When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
  - jplrssn 3mo ago
    My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society. I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
  - birksherty 3mo ago
    Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.
  - qwytw 3mo ago
    Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference. While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
ahoka 3mo ago
What a tone deaf comment.
astral_drama 3mo ago
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
- avalys 3mo ago
  A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege? I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled. That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
  - astral_drama 3mo ago
    > A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege? You do > I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled. Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once. > That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books. Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
  - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    And yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between. People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
Suzuran 3mo ago
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
- chneu 3mo ago
  Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.
  - Suzuran 3mo ago
    It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.
  - efficax 3mo ago
    Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.
    - ImJamal 3mo ago
      I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS > A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors Just replace investors with tax payers.
RobinL 3mo ago
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
alexgieg 3mo ago
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy. Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
- kbelder 3mo ago
  A billionaire makes more like a thousand times what a normal working stiff makes in a lifetime, not a million times.
  - alexgieg 3mo ago
    Depends on what's being compared. Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
bjertoref 3mo ago
Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- byutifu 3mo ago
  I hate being a contrarian for my first comment, but not everyone is lucky enough or afforded parents and opportunity like Hawking.
- gymbeaux 3mo ago
  He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.
GeoAtreides 3mo ago
At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.
birksherty 3mo ago
3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.
onraglanroad 3mo ago
I know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.
trial3 3mo ago
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  The people getting paid by the other time I spend productively.
didibus 3mo ago
The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go. If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
AngryData 3mo ago
There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.
- tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
  You could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you. The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
george916a 3mo ago
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xhkkffbf 3mo ago
Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others. Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.

trescenzi 3mo ago

The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need. This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.

roenxi 3mo ago

"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there. Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.

Telaneo 3mo ago
> Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
- hallole 3mo ago
  Because one's value to society doesn't determine their wage (an economic matter) or status (a social matter). The parent comment is right. What you've pointed out is a separate "injustice" of a kind: that we generally under-appreciate others.
wasfgwp 3mo ago
> then your worth is very much linked to your productivity Also coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious… The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck.. > the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions. It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.

AnimalMuppet 3mo ago

Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15). Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships. As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.

giov4 3mo ago

could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint? I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.

giov4 3mo ago
also the comment "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?" was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint? > I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment. I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words. People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity. Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth. My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that. > also the comment > "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?" > was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends? The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).

swed420 3mo ago

Relevant: In Praise of Idleness https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.458601/2015.458601.In-Praise-Of-Idleness-And-Other-Essays_text.pdf https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...

bko 3mo ago

> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive? This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health" Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exercise-charity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...

Telaneo 3mo ago
> Is playing Candy Crush productive? If you enjoy it, then yes. > Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense. Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
- bko 3mo ago
  If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing. I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.

swat535 3mo ago

> the protestant work ethic, I can't speak for Protestants because the denominations vary (though I doubt they would differ greatly on this point) but for Catholics "works of mercy" is defined as caring for the vulnerable, the elderly and tending the sick. It's not meant to shame those people into guilt. Additionally, there are many other facets such as the spiritual works of mercy such as comforting the sorrowful or counseling the doubtful. I think you are perhaps better off putting the blame on the Capitalism hustle culture that forces people to work day and night to be "productive" than Christianity.

wasfgwp 3mo ago
Most Catholics also don’t believe in double predestination and think that (more or less but that’s the gist) god has pre-picked people who are destined to be successful and those which are destined to be lazy and worthless or even outright evil. That’s one of the core tenets of Calvinism and similar religions.

dubeye 3mo ago

Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers? As someone who spent four years reading 'the' Classics at uni, I doubt it's very true you comment wouldn't read quite so well if you swapped classics for posting cat tiktoks and hanging out with strangers you bump into in the street. But what makes that inferior?

hallole 3mo ago
Yes, it is more productive. Becoming more familiar with the English language and skillfully written prose is good. The notion that modern prose is of lesser quality is widespread. This comment reads as snarky post-modernism.
- dubeye 3mo ago
  I think you missed my point. But you think the bounds of every field of research and technology has expanded, except language? To learn how to read and write well, then you would do just as well, if not better, to read modern authors at the top of their fields. I wouldn't exclude thrillers. Reading Chaucer in old English, to stretch the point to breaking, is not going to give you any kind of edge. Maybe it will teach you a bit of French, but again, you are better off reading modern French literature for that. I suspect you were not forced to read the classics as I was. Much of it is stuffed with overly flowery prose and immature ideas. It's mostly tradition that keeps them alive. There is much personal satisfaction in literature, but I would place it much closer to leisure than work.
Telaneo 3mo ago
> Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers? No. You can play Candy Crush for all I care if that's what gets you more enjoyment. The classic were just what were on my mind when I wrote that comment.
- dubeye 3mo ago

Henchman21 3mo ago

The Protestant Work Ethic is just learned slavery by another name

surgical_fire 3mo ago

I am not from the US, so this "protestant work ethics" sound foreign to me. And to be honest, very harmful. Measuring someone's worth by their productivity sounds incredibly misanthropic, to a cartoonish degree. It's part of the same societal illness that only considers something worthy when it has a monetary value. Looking at some responses to your post (that should be very uncontroversial) is an interesting experience in that regard. Luckily I don't have any disabilities, but I pity those that do. I think that society has a duty to help the less fortunate. That should be an uncontroversial stance too, but oh well

jumpinjack710 3mo ago

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george916a 3mo ago

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