Why do people waste so much time at work?

I had a bit of breakdown towards the end of my university days, due to setting some unrealistic requirements for myself. I wasn't allowing myself time off because I had 'quotas' to meet, and that took a toll and I had to basically hide away for a few months, while it dawned on me that the quotas didn't come from anywhere and I needed to calm the fuck down and get my priorities in order.

Now I have a regular job and I'm doing OK. But I don't let my time estimates rule me, I make time for breaks, and I don't stay after hours unless there's a deadline. And honestly even now I hope to knock a few hours off my weekly contract soon, because I feel like I'm spending too much time at a desk working on other people's projects (for money) when I could be, you know, baking bread or reading Wikipedia or hanging out with friends (if they weren't all at work, that is). In contrast, I have a co-worker who seems to love staying till 8 in the evening closing Jira tasks being "productive". Hatever. That's not where I want my wrinkles to come from.

edit -- I suppose maybe you're right, though. What I mean is maybe more that "what looks like laziness from one perspective can be called prioritizing from another". Less sound bite-y, though.

People also like to fantasize about what others would do within a Basic Income situation. Not themselves, of course, they're better than that. But all of the unwashed masses, why, they'd waste all they were given, and demand more!

> People should think about how things work in the real world.

People should also do a little research into what happens when people try it in the real world before spouting their mouth off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Pilot_Programmes ...but why ruin their own perfectly good superiority complex?

I find that people "get" this a lot easier when you start talking about coupons and IOU instead of gold and dollars. Nobody believes that the guy who is moving coupons back and forth between various piles with specific timing has truly earned the load of goods he gains. Instead, they rightly feel like he is cheating the system and taking without giving back.

But in the real world, tons of people do tricks with money and get filthy rich from it, and that's just them "working smart". Meanwhile, somebody had to grow that potato, the actual tangible good, that he ate for dinner. What did he give back in return?

With industrial agriculture, 2% of our population is producing the vast majority of our food. With experimental ecology based agricultures, we could see a form of agriculture that takes even less work (it's based on perennials, so you don't have to plant every year) to produce just as much or more. If we can sort out automated recycling we will reach a place where we no longer need to mine. Mass transit on rails just begs for automation and provides people an easy way to get around.

We are shockingly close to a post-scarcity society. Not quite true post-scarcity, where no one needs to work and automation produces all we need, but a society where we very small handful of people can produce enough for the rest of the world.

We'll still need a system that rewards those people, yes, by why punish everyone else? Why force everyone else in working increasingly pointless jobs just because we need to reward the few people actually working necessary jobs? And interestingly enough, we aren't currently rewarding the people working the necessary jobs. If the economy rewarded people according to the importance of their work, farmers would be paid like financial executives.

The other part of this coin is that, while there are absolutely lazy people in the world, there are just as many people who will naturally gravitate towards doing some sort of "work". I would argue that most people would get bored and dissatisfied just sitting on the couch watching television all day. Instead they'll spend their time pursuing their passions. For a lot of people this would probably be "useless" art -- music, theater, fiction, etc. But, hey, if we already have enough people doing the useful things, then why not?

But for others it will be things like science, engineering, invention, and so on. The first several generations of scientists were men and women of leisure. They were wealthy aristocrats who didn't have to work if they didn't want to. But they did work. They choose to work. They choose to do often incredibly monotonous data collection because they were fascinated by the natural world.

There's no reason we couldn't have a world where the vast majority of us are free to pursue whatever we wish. And I'm willing to bet that, in that world, we'd see an explosion of innovation and discovery.