11–20 of 68 posts
On the potential downsides of WFH triggering a drawback from workism: If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance? Bowling leagues, churches, meditation centers, hiking groups, tabletop game gatherings, music festivals, etc are alive and well! Becoming isolated from remote work,…
I really want to quit but then who's going to pay for my wife's pregnancy? Healthcare and mandatory expenses can destroy one's life in America.
> I really want to quit but then who's going to pay for my wife's pregnancy? Solution: don’t have kids. You already knew this beforehand.
Well with the savagely frayed state of the social safety net if you're not born rich, basically if you can't find work in California you're unlikely to get food stamps especially if you are able bodied and healthy otherwise than having the illness of having been born in the US past the date of 1965.
> especially if you are able bodied and healthy if you're abled bodied, and healthy, why should society bear a burden of giving you resources to live off long term? To exist means to locate the resources to live (such as food, shelter, etc). These resources can no longer be foraged like in the days of old, and thus, the allocation of these resources must come from a mechanism we call market and employment today. A so…
Or the time it takes to rehabilitate somebody with a fairly severe musculoskeletal disorder, especially when they’ve otherwise had $100k of various scholarship money invested in them.
However, absolutely nothing like that exists, ask how I know.
On the potential downsides of WFH triggering a drawback from workism: If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance? Bowling leagues, churches, meditation centers, hiking groups, tabletop game gatherings, music festivals, etc are alive and well! Becoming isolated from remote work,…
> > "What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues [...]
Reading it now I notice the local bowls club is having a "no experience needed" free coaching day in a few weeks, I might have to go! It's crown green bowling though, probably not what Americans think of as bowling. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crown+green+bowling&t=ffab&iar=ima...
Work has somehow become part of our identity
I really want to quit but then who's going to pay for my wife's pregnancy? Healthcare and mandatory expenses can destroy one's life in America.
> I really want to quit but then who's going to pay for my wife's pregnancy? Solution: don’t have kids. You already knew this beforehand.
Hope you have a better weekend than this and that you maybe spend some time working on yourself.
> Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning.
As far as I can tell, this cannot be farther from the truth. Pre-industrial people explicitly found existential meaning in their labor.
Their culture, religion and traditions enveloped every aspect of life. Their spiritual frameworks provided direction on everything like how to milk a cow, how to prepare meals, whom to marry and how to raise children.
Milking a cow and raising a child were responsibilities conveyed by a celestial benefactor. The proper execution of both paid praise and showed thankfulness to that benefactor. In this way labor was suffused with meaning.
Humans lost this for sure. This is partly why labor strife was so intense during the industrial era. People were not just stripped of their standard of living but also of a huge part of their ability to structure the world around them. Without a labor environment suffused with meaning they became desperate. It took their agency and dignity. The Luddites for example were driven more by disdain for the subservience the factory system creates than by a fear of total displacement.
This kind of modernist/progressive thinking towards history is probably the worst thing people take away from high school and undergrad history courses. It's so misleading and it creates this psychic barrier that most people never break down.
It's hardly surprising that work plays an increasingly central role in everyone's lives when the alternatives are ersatz forms of sociality where people who share no common interest whatsoever get together under the pretence of 'having fun'. Anecdotally a lot of people I know who lived through long lockdowns realised that they didn't really miss having to make small-talk with strangers at parties. It might look like lockdowns greatly impaired their social life, but their social life was mostly a chore anyway. The weekend life of meeting people for drinks or hobbies etc. is failing not because people don't put in enough effort, but because that's not how humans bond, and they've in fact put in a lot of effort in an approach which hasn't paid dividends.
I'm 100% sure that I hate working in the current economy because the best time in my life was when I didn't have to work for 2 years, even though I was earning very little (just enough for basic needs). There's nothing better than having nothing to do and being able to choose what to do. Watching paint dry is second place, working is the worst.
On the potential downsides of WFH triggering a drawback from workism: If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance? Bowling leagues, churches, meditation centers, hiking groups, tabletop game gatherings, music festivals, etc are alive and well! Becoming isolated from remote work,…
Plenty of us still go to church every week!