996

996 means devoting your life to your work.

If you work 996 without either:

  a. The opportunity to make millions of dollars

  b. Ownership of the means of production

  c. No other more dignified employment opportunities

It sincerely appears to me that you are throwing your life away. If you're in this boat, I hope you have a long-term plan.

If you want to work 996 and that is what makes you feel self-actualized - by all means, go for it, nobody is stopping you. May even allow you to get ahead of the pack (or maybe the quality of your work will suffer in your overworked state - big gamble!).

For me, the big problem in your post is the "996 culture". That means the expectation is that everyone is pushing forward with a similar intensity. Now, perhaps you were talking specifically about individual efforts given your examples of artist and self-employed, but when I think about culture, I think about groups of people, and in that context 996 is problematic.

It only provides work-life balance if there is not much of a "life" to balance, where taking a break once in a while is fulfilling enough. Maaaaaybe this can work in your early 20s, but it basically removes anyone with kids, hobbies, outside interests and responsibilities, and really, anyone with life experience out of the equation. It is a highly exploitative culture, sold under the guise of camaraderie, when anyone who has gone through one or more hype cycles can tell that the majority of these startups will fold with nothing to show for them other than overworked, cynical individuals and another level of normalization of exploitative practices.

Fuck that shit.

[dead]

To educate people you just need the internet (communication infrastructure). We can also house and feed everyone if we wanted to. The concept of work has been overblown to the point where it’s everything. I can’t even say war will solve it because war puts everyone to work, which is no different than the status quo.

Things are not in place for people to spiritually feel what is actually a good life and world.

It may take a generation of people, who think technology and science will allow them to have many lifetimes over and over, to meet their timely end. We will only reevaluate as we see the most well endowed generation (everyone alive today) return to dust in a timely manner, that there was no magical human power that could have saved any of us, and we ought to have just focused on a better world that we’re proud of leaving behind.

Living life like it’s a roguelike with infinite levels makes it the most unfulfilling thing ever. The world our generation will leave behind is our product, and a quality product is everything, so much so that you’d be proud to leave it in someone’s hand at the end (in fact, you’d want to). The women’s movement that left us a type of America with those fixes (labors rights, human rights) was such a thing to leave behind, they should fear nothing in death.