171–180 of 192 posts
Significant research has gone into evaluation actual productivity. Sure people tend to go into the office for 40 hours but the amount of time where they actually work is more like 15 hours or less.
If we drop to say 30 hour weeks. How's that work/life balance going? Easy peasy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Work is generally a proxy for survival. Do you agree that you need to eat in order to survive?
Everyone agrees that people need to do certain things to survive. What complicates this line of thinking are the social facts that are assumed when we conceptualize work. The way that work is conceptualized is culturally specific across space and time. The construction "eating implies survival implies work" doesn't imply that our culturally specific conceptualization of work is implied. There are many interesting way…
I think it's good to be critical, we can always improve the system. But I also personally believe our society is actually incredible at self-optimizing, and we are pretty darn close to an ideal system in practice. It's easy to focus on the bad, but our society has produced truly immeasurable good (very little relative violence, hunger, boredom, etc.) Of course it can be improved, and there are some real problems, particularly around wealth inequality. But I can't help but think that we're doing pretty damn good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's take away the modern economy - what would you have to do for survival?
Jon Jandai did a TED talk about this, he was from rual Thailand, he tried to get qualifications and a big city job and then couldn't. He describes his life after returning to his village as spending a few weeks planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house with no downpayment or mortgage, and having most months of the year free, do…
These are all things that I can't do. On top of that, even if I could build a house from clay bricks that I made myself, I would be sleeping outside until the bricks and house were complete.
This doesn't sound like a very good counterpoint to me. I never said that working in a big city is the _only_ way to live. My point is only that the modern economy allows us to provide goods and services to other people and businesses, which in turn allows a small subset of workers to provide the necessary food and goods for survival of the entire society.
So, from that angle, working is not useless, it is just a proxy for what you would be doing if you had to provide food and shelter for yourself.
Some people find this idea of living off the land and growing your own food to be romantic. I don't, I enjoy modern society, and I feel like 40 hours a week is a ridiculously small investment to put in for what I get in return.
In the example you gave, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of current people would actually starve and die if they tried it. This TED talk speaker _grew up in rural Thailand_ and apparently had all of the tools to live this way. Most of us do not have that experience.
Very uninteresting counterpoint.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's take away the modern economy - what would you have to do for survival?
Survival is easy. I mean not easy-easy but I mean survival is a pretty low bar. There are ton of places on the planet that don't benefit from the 'modern economy'. Hell, there are places that are actually getting screwed over the by the 'modern economy' and there are war torn anarchy-ridden places (for real anarchy, not the Fox News take on Seattle) and people still survive, procreate, etc.. if you actually want to t…
Work is good for the worker. Because humans need a purpose in life. We don't even need to experiment to see what society would be like if no one worked and a few robots produced our food. It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking this would be a utopia - no, it would be a worse dystopia than you could possibly imagine.
Take away people's purpose, and you will be left with a bunch of morally bankrupt people with lots of time on their hands. Pretty clear recipe for constant depression and war.
I'll read the book before I comment on it directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone agrees that people need to do certain things to survive. What complicates this line of thinking are the social facts that are assumed when we conceptualize work. The way that work is conceptualized is culturally specific across space and time. The construction "eating implies survival implies work" doesn't imply that our culturally specific conceptualization of work is implied. There are many interesting way…
I buy this. Maybe this is what people mean when they are anti work - they're just anti modern work? I think it's good to be critical, we can always improve the system. But I also personally believe our society is actually incredible at self-optimizing, and we are pretty darn close to an ideal system in practice. It's easy to focus on the bad, but our society has produced truly immeasurable good (very little relative…
It's not "modern work" but work-the-social-institution. Which is the primary definition of "work."
What they don't mean is productive activity. Every productive activity that takes place within the social institution of work also takes place outside of that social institution. For example, farming, building construction, cooking, cleaning, education -- all of these take place both inside and outside of work.
> We need work. Not sure I follow. It's amazing how these little bits of social knowledge ferment the flavor of the story. It's a lot like learning to taste beer or wine. Once you take the time to sit down and learn to pay attention to your senses, you can identify things like acetaldehyde, diacetyl, and mercaptans. It's fun teaching people how to sense things they weren't aware of before. The author seems to have do…
It’s not a social fact, it’s a fact of thermodynamics. Every system breaks down, unless it is maintained through energy/work. At the most basic level, we need food to maintain our system. How will you get it without work?
This is a stupid take. Work life balance could be easy if we didn't live in a system that forced you to sell your life to wealthy sociopaths in exchange for the right to exist.
I’ll argue this in good faith. Let’s take your preconditions as fact for the purposes of this discussion - employers are either “wealthy sociopaths” or agents of the same. You may find the options they offer to be unacceptable, but what if they didn’t exist? What options available to you if that were the case are not available to you because they do exist? As far as I can see our current system is beneficial, if only…
The option to share resources in an egalitarian way so that people can meet their basic needs without subordination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "We need work" is a social fact, nothing more, and it's only true as much as it's believed to be true. Having gone through a handful of periods of a few months where I wasn’t working and was also not engaged in an existential struggle for survival, I have to disagree here. Personally, I know that I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. I can spend…
> I need a focus for my intellectual life. It needn’t be employment, but “work” is a fair way to describe it. Intellectual life and work are completely orthogonal. People have been taught to confuse them because it benefits the ruling class.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're also doing a trick here. While it's not necessary that everyone works, some work is necessary. If people stopped showing up to the farms, or the water treatment plants, everyone would die. So, someone has to work. Labeling "we need work" as only a social fact is a misguided kind of relativism. "Society has created arbitrary weights and values on which work gets rewards, therefore we only need work if w…
I've always wondered why we don't switch to a 20-30 hour work week or 4 work days a week... And not in some bs "part time vs full time" but that we have enough humans on this freakin planet that you should only need to work 30 hours a week to live a healthy, balanced life.