Children spend ~ 35 hours a week, essentially preparing to be efficient workers. That is, if you ask them, usually what they will tell you they are at school to

Children spend ~ 35 hours a week, essentially preparing to be efficient workers. That is, if you ask them, usually what they will tell you they are at school to do. They will phrase it 'score high in exams, in order to get a good job'. The fact is that they have to be there. They have to do as they are told. If they do not, the punishment lasts a lifetime. There are other schooling systems, such as Stiener schools, which focus more on personal development. They form children who want to explore, then allow them to self direct what they explore. (That particular system also has many, many faults). This is rather like 'work'. Your grandfather had to be in a factory many hours a day. You have to be in an office. Society says so. If you are the sort of person who is bad at knowledge work, you may well wish society told you to do something more physical. But the point is that you lack freedom. The demographic of this message board is people working on, or thinking about, startups. Essentially, when you do a startup, you choose what you are spending your time doing. You trade in your job security for freedom. I have known people 'drop out' of society, go on the dole, and work 14 hour days developing computer games that later sold for good money. Less admirably, I've known them to go on the dole, and spend all day playing computer games. They trade their place in society for freedom. This shows that in truth, modern society does give us the freedom. (in my country). So why do people work? Or more pressingly, why do people work in jobs that do not meet their psychological needs for respect, autonomy, and purpose, and pay badly? Because they do, regardless of what you read in the papers, keep working at those jobs. My local supermarket is full of people who derive little identity from their work - I was one of them as a child and I know how the adult staff there think. The answer, I think, is fear of what other people would think of them for scrounging. People like the post I am replying to. I think most people think like him. He should, rationally, hate startup founders consuming someone elses money to mess about on a project that probably won't make a dime. And that contradiction is the problem. Societies attitude to work is not rational, and it forces people to keep doing jobs they don't want to that could be automated, instead of being free. Eventually, economics will destroy those jobs. A new role will be created that didn't exist before, adding even less value than the last (but the labour is there so why not use it). Those workers desperately take the work to avoid seeing themselves as scroungers, as the enemy. And their children will grow up desperate not to be free.