The big "job" scam

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Well until we have enough resource abundance and automation life requires work. I too have had essentially mirrored thoughts. It is depressing, that most of life is spent working in a job you hate, sleeping and wasting time. However you have the ability to do something you enjoy. It is still work, but there must be something you enjoy doing that will pay you. For example my goal is to be a software engineer. I love computers and love tinkering with complexity and abstraction. And it pays well.

False.

You believe it requires work because it's the only economic system you've ever known.

Life requires food & water, maybe shelter and clothing, that's about it. How we go about getting those things is entirely up to us. Some cultures are hunter/gatherers still. Someone else may choose to do a little bartering for essentials and then spend the rest of their time meditating on a mountain peak somewhere.

The whole concept of having to have money that's earned from a job is just one way of going about things - and in many ways it's a ridiculous system vs. people being free to think, and dream, and invent, or write, or paint or ______.

Solid point. This is a realization many people are not ready or able to see.

It?s easy to be all philosophical and see work as a scam or a form of slavery, but how many of those who pose questions like this, really think it through.

Like already stated, what if we all stopped from working? Where would your food come? Where would you get medical care? Would we let children grow without any communal intervention, meaning education? Would there be e.g. medical science and how would it be made available for everyone? Would there be electricity? Would there be housing?

These things don?t happen without human intervention. This is the reason we work. Whether money runs it or not, work can't be excluded from the equation. Private or communal subsistence economy isn't but hard work - in fact a lot harder and time consuming than the ones we hold today.

But what bothers me the most is this twisted thinking that doing ?art? has in some way a higher value than putting that paint to a wall or picking berries for nourishment. I see no more value in me drawing a picture than in me offering communal services at work. And what is this public, established art that we call art but people craving attention and fame like money and competing in who is the most special and ?out there? among the other special ones? It?s a power thing, just like money.

And what is this ?rich man?s freedom?? Aside having the ability to buy better healthcare at the end there is no such thing. Yeah, you can buy whatever you want, but at the end that is just junk. There is no true separation in whether you drink the same coffee everyone in the neighbourhood or some special, expensive coffee that only the ?very few?, you psychologically need to belong to, drink. Having seen some rich people I feel like a freed man among slaves. People who lack inner power desperately need the outer.

Try to get yourself into a kind of work that you like.

Yes go ahead and act like you're right and everyone else is wrong. Of course you and only you see something everyone else is missing. No matter how you spin it work is required. Either you are hunting, farming, gathering, or flipping burgers in McDonald. There is no other option. You did not think this through, idealism is nice. But you're wrong. Would you have this opinion if you were born into wealth? No because the opinion is founded in your anger with your position in society. There is a truth to the notion of "wage slave" but the alternative is working to produce food itself. Which is still work. The other option is as I mentioned mass automation.

As I said, do you have a better idea? No, because their is no better way to accommodate hundreds of millions of people at least not yet. Simply because you can't see the big picture and get past your animosity towards working and society doesn't mean you can claim I am "false". You're wrong, haven't thought this through and have nothing to hold onto but a false idealism.

Work is wonderful when you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. For thousands of years, people have lived with very little in terms of resources. food and water.. basic shelter... they were able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor... we are forced to give our fruits away to people and to support causes (voted in by the NT "majority") that do very little for us.

I was born in a upper-middle class family. My parents did not have asperger's and with hard work they achieved a moderate level of success in their lifetime. They also lived in different times... black and white TV's... no cell phones.. no internet.. months of paid maternal leave and pensions, vacation days, only half-day of work on wednesdays... and no work on weekends... all of that is gone.... traded off for the sake of progress...

you can keep your progress and your man-made hell... I'd rather be left at the mercy of nature than the mercy of man.

Jacob, you are right, not all progress is good.

But why can?t you enjoy the fruits of your own hands? There you have them, the fruits, in your two hands. Pick them. The meaning comes from your own mind.

If you want to paint, paint. If you want to grow food, grow. I?ve done it even in the city, in my balcony. If you want to build your own shelter, build.

I work. I grow food. I pick berries. But I also paint. I write. I play. Not to make "art", but to bear the fruits the nature has seeded into me. They sprout as naturally as the force that makes the flower grow and blossom. The fruits, they are there, not for money, not for ?art? or not for fame, they aren?t but fruits in the garden. There you have them, in your hands.

You are free to live as you please in a general sense. If you want to go out and live in nature in a log cabin with no plumbing electricity or other modern ammonites you are allowed to do that. You don't want any of that, you want to feel as if you've separated yourself from the rest of society in some way. You are free and able to go live in a cabin out in the woods. Why don't you? Because it is unpleasant and pointless. Maybe to you this is slavery but to millions or billions of people it is a quality of life that 99 percent of humanity did not get to experience. You will now live longer, healthier, better fed and smarter because of people working. You too have the potential to do something to advance society. Yet here you are claiming that thousands of years of agricultural and scinetifc work is all in vain, because you have to do something you don't want to.

I agree working, spending a majority of your time doing something you hate is awful. But alas, life is not fair. You must work in some way so that when you do have time to do what you enjoy, you can afford to do so. Whether that is a societal construct is another discussion.

ah.. you make it sound so nice!

I can't enjoy the fruits of my labor because I am forced to give them away. Nearly half of my income goes to rent a tiny place from a landlord... I get the "right" to sleep here at night as long as I pay him a nice profit every month... then about a third of it goes straight to taxes (federal, state, and local taxes that go to help a lot of people, but hardly any aspies, and certainly not helping me.)... I am left with about 25% of the income I earn to spend on things that used to be free but society makes you pay for like water and food (can't hunt where I live, all the natural edible vegetation has been removed).. and don't even get me started on utilities like electric, gas, and internet... companies are making huge profits upcharging you about 5 times what it costs them to make it.

So I grew plenty a fruit.. 10 hour days, 6 sometimes 7 days a week... and master comes by, takes most of my fruit, and gives me a tiny slice of one of the apples... slavery is very much alive today... it just goes by different names now

Reminds me of a passage from the book "Might is Right," written in 1896 by a Chicago area doctor that describes the stock market as legalized slave trade - simply shifting it from buying & selling actual people, to buying and selling the fruits of their labour, essentially. Slavery has and always will be alive and well in one form or another. There will be rulers & the ruled, masters & slaves etc.

Wasn?t this your question: We spend our entire adult lives working every day doing things with our bodies, time, and minds that we DO NOT WANT TO DO just for the sake of having a little something to eat and a place to sleep at night... how has it come to this?

So you want to do just whatever you want to do. But I tried to say that human life is of gathering and making food, creating shelter, taking care of the younger ones, creating communities and sustaining them. In its basic nature the life hasn?t changed a bit during the human history. From the beginning of human life we had to do work that we necessarily didn't like. That is what it is to live.

I also understood you wrong, for you apparently meant with the fruits of your hands money, where as I meant something completely else. I misunderstood you probably because you said that for thousands of years people were able to enjoy the fruit of their hands.

So if you?d had more money, how exactly will this ability to enjoy the fruits of your hands increase? What are those fruits you have to give away, in case you didn't mean money? In case you meant money, how it is prohibiting you from doing art?

Water is still free. The only water you have to pay for is that which comes out of a tap. You are paying for the convenience of having it cleaned and delivered. But if you are willing to forego those services and collect it yourself in a rainbarrel, it is free. There will be considerable work involved in doing that (I do it for plant irrigation) but I think that's the point of a couple of the other posters. There is no getting around work. Either you do everything yourself- and that means everything or you pay somebody else to do it for you. When you pay taxes, you are paying somebody else to do the work of preventing marauders from swooping in and killing you.

Admittedly, it's very difficult to opt out of that system because there are few places on the planet not controlled by a government. Some people have escaped government control by taking a boat out into international waters. But that requires both a boat and the skill to stay alive which is no easy feat. Others go deep into public lands and live where the government doesn't even notice them so long as they do nothing to attract any attention. Again, it takes skills and an incredible amount of work.

Your best bet is probably to google the Freegan lifestyle (if you haven't already). Those people have put a lot of thought (and work) into ways to live by the fruits of your own labor.

Here is a freegan resource:

http://freegan.info/what-is-a-freegan/f ... practices/



It has been many years since I've eaten a freegan scavenged meal (I dabbled in freeganism back in the day) but if you are truly disgruntled, this could help.

I had to look up the passage & share it, because it really did help put the stock market & modern day slavery into perspective for me even though the quote is circa 1886:



The racial stuff aside, this passage is one of many that shows the massive economic inequality between social classes. It's also a pretty eye opening point of view on stock markets as modern day slave trade.

Let's not put the racial stuff aside because I think it's valuable to look at what is hyperbole and what is actual.



I want to take a closer look:

"more despised"- yes, the KKK was ascendant when he wrote that passage. But that does not equate to black people being more enslaved than they had been previously while actually enslaved. They were "more despised" because of their freedom.

"of less money value to his proprietors now"- this makes a case against wage slavery, not for it.

"more degraded"- did he consult any black people before assuming that living in slums and being harrassed by the Klan was more degrading than being a slave? I suspect that being an employee who is free to marry at will, choose a job or not, and merely fired rather than whipped if the employer doesn't like the work is less degrading than slavery.

The reason I linked to a Freegan website in my post is that Freeganism makes it clear that many of the things we call "wage slavery" are simply a choice to work for an employer in order to be able to afford amenities that we want. The Freegans make a choice not to do that. However, when you opt out of the system, you also opt out of the amenities, such as food that isn't stale or moldy and furniture that isn't rickety and broken. The freegans show that unlike slaves, we actually have a choice. But most (inlcuding me) don't want to live the free way. I dabbled in freeganism in my youth but no longer do it. I decided I don't want my food to be stale and moldy. I don't want my clothes to be ill-fitting and frequently dirty. I want to live in a place with locks and secure windows. But that is a choice. Slaves have literally no choice. They are tortured killed if they don't do what their owners demand. We are merely fired if we don't do what employers demand. That isn't slavery. But the alternative is a low standard of living which is more in line with what humanity has mostly had throughout history: rickety furniture, moldy food, no locks.

I agree 100%
and yes I have had a LOT of time to think it through very carefully and reverse engineer the entire system.
There's nothing wrong with work, or working extra in order to catch up or get ahead, BUT our system is designed so that you cannot get ahead. Default is built into the system because the system is debt based and driven by inflation.

If you invest 40 years of your life to hard work and save "money", at the end your 40 years of life will be of little to no value due to inflation. The goalpost continuously moves ahead of your efforts, and forces default.

For more information on this look up "fractional reserve banking".