“Imagine if we worked less. Imagine if we walked around our communities, talked to our neighbors, spent time in nature, played. Imagine if we could read, write, fall in love, without that nagging feeling of ‘needing to do something’; imagine if your life was your own.”
My neighbour is an Australian Trump Enthusiast. Do I have to talk to them?
Nah, I’ll be your honorary neighbour. I’m about as opposite to that as possible. Though still Australian.
Ok. Let’s walk and talk.
Imagine if society gave intrinsic value to life and didn’t judge people solely on how useful they are to ourselves.
“Oh you’re an unemployed homeless person? Guess your life isn’t worth much then because you’re not working in a way that I can benefit from. You don’t deserve food, or shelter, or decency.”
Hey at least reality has trains.
I like trains.
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Imagine if I didn’t need to work to afford a comfortable life, I’d be a shut in and probably never go out for months at a time.
You’d rediscover the feeling of doing things for fun
I feel I’d waste all my time in fun things like reading, gaming, browsing the Internet, maybe travel a bit if the income allowed it, and end up feeling empty after a year.
Probably would adopt a hobby, and devote so much to it it would be like work. I’m not great at self control, maybe I would start by taking self control classes, ha ha.
I feel like I’d waste all my time
But this is the beautiful thing about the world this person is imagining: there is no such thing as wasting time once the compulsion to work to earn is removed. Spending your whole life doing fun things like reading, gaming, learning, travelling etc. sounds like a life very well spent to me. Finding hobby after hobby to throw yourself into also sounds like a fantastic way to spend your time here on earth.
There’s a reason why we invented the concept of ‘retirement’.
Not necessary. For example, if you sink a week on a game, did you do it because it was enjoyable, because you’re OCDing about completing everything, because it’s a grindy game and you’re in full sunken costs fallacy, or because it’s gambling disguised as a game and it’s pushing your buttons?
Only one of those outcomes will leave you satisfied.
I have only ever played a game because I was enjoying it, the moment I stop enjoying a game is when I quit. You seem to be arguing against the concept of enjoying your life outside of work
It’s called mental illness. It sounds to me like he’s depressed and doesn’t know it yet.
one that’s induced by modern society – corporations want you to be obsessive about what you do, the things you buy – and their bought politicians will keep framing mental health as a moral issue rather than a societal or medical issue to ensure the stigma around seeking mental health care remains the status quo
I think you need to evaluate why you play video games. Because I didn’t experience the same.
I play to enjoy my time. I spent last four days playing battle bits running around playing medic. I tried to see if I could outrun the snipers by playing sonic music.
Before that I spent god of war on easy to enjoy story. Then the quit and watch on YouTube in case you was hidden cutscenes for completing more of the game.
I am on my way home to enjoy oxenfree or nightshift because of storytelling.
If you have no reason to interact with the world outside of work… that’s sad. I hope that changes for you.
I’m lucky enough to do that currently. By having cut out consumerism completely, producing a lot of my own food, not wanting to go travel much and enjoying my surroundings instead. I guess it’s not for everyone but works for me. I feed three humans and a few animals with an online job and work only two days a week, when I want. I still wish I didn’t have to do that, as most of what I do doesn’t add to a better world for anyone, but really useful work doesn’t pay as well. My neighbors are a bit rough around the edges but they are very friendly. I choose to not mention politics, just live practical solidarity with them - they’ve given me plenty of food when we moved in, and we’ve helped them out whenever needed. I wish we could build more of that, but most people are too shy or too arrogant, or both. I know I’m a bit of both sometimes.
If it’s not too personal can I ask what your job is that lets you work online only 2 days a week / how much it pays?
I work as a freelance translator. The pay is between 0.5 and 0.20EUR per word depending on language. If ChatGPT steals my job I’ll have to do real work again. (Translation can be real and valuable work but within the confines of capitalism most of what I translate is bullshit that never needed typing out.)
as most of what I do doesn’t add to a better world for anyone
that was the whole premise behind David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018) – when something like 40% of workers consider their own jobs to be useless, pointless, meaningless, unnecessary …
That book really made me understand why I felt so depressed living well within the mainstream parameters of success.
What is this fantasy land I’m too poor to understand?
What is this expectation that I either need or want to talk to the people that live within a particular proximity to me? No thanks.
Almost certainly you feel this way because you have to interact with people you didn’t chose to interact with on terms that aren’t your own. In the nice version of reality you get to chose your community, one that fits you and one that you fit in
humans evolved tribes and it is detrimental to most people’s mental health to not feel included in a community, and sadly most people’s 9-5 doesn’t fill that instinctive void. I think that’s what the OP was getting at
I live in Texas. Walking around outside right now is a borderline death sentence. Thanks global warming. But ya, could use some more free time.
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Nice sentiment, not a meme.
Only if you live in phantasy world … Where do you think food and other stuff that you need comes from?
This is just “I wish I was rich” but expressed in some stupid socialist way.
It says work ‘less,’ not don’t work at all. Not every fucking healthy work life attitude is socialist.
If you cut out consumerism, this is entirly possible with modern technology. Even better, if you are from a rich country, it is possible to do this today, if you are willing to be unconventional. The key to this is to lower your expenses drasticly and have or had a well paying skill(you can do it with investments as well). This works as we did have pretty good economic growth in terms of efficency since decades. So if you are fine with a US 1960s lifestyle the average US-American could lower their spednign by 2/3s. Obviously most of the growth went to the upper class, but it showswhat is possible. Even crazier GDP and primary energy consumption are fairly closely linked. Currently 19% of US primary energy come from low carbon sources. So if you would lower US GDP by 2/3 you end up with a third of energy consumption. If you are able to keep all low energy sources running and are reduce energy consumption by 2/3 you end up lowering fossil fuels cosnumption by over 80%. This is more or less true for all high income economies, but obviously requires a lot of planning on a national scale. On a personal scale it is certainly possible to have more free time, if you go for it.
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But today on a personal scale? You need to be rich compared to society for the initial investment, and you’ll live exploiting the work of other people. This way of life doesn’t scale.
Building up and investment and living of it, is basicly retirment and it is done all over the place. Government run retirment schemes are pretty common around the world and basicly work with the promise of everybody getting some of it, once they reach a certain age. Hence there is a fairness factor in it as well.
Other then that the 40h per week is a somewhat recent change as well and it could be lowered to say a 24h per week. Obviously you need to be able to renegotiate contracts for that and earn enough, to be able to live from less work.
@cerement
For anyone who’s interested in building such a world, I’m leaving this here - https://www.tromsite.com/documentaries/trom2/I forgot where I was for a second
I would rather just play video games!
That’s how it was before the Industrial Revolution.
Production used to be the end game, not your lords making sure you clock in properly and stetting your piss breaks at certain times.
Before the Industrial Revolution we were too busy working in the fields trying not to starve to death to think about being bored or being productive
Yeah and in that free time you had all the time in world to think about not starving to death, it’s not like you had too many things to do other than work in your farm
Psst don’t pass the Pre and Post Industrial schedule information to the slaves! Reptilian anti-whistleblowing unit stop this person plzzzz!
Generally people don’t want to do any of that lol
