Good for you. I have met a few fairly successful ex-CSuites that wound up on the streets and then developed drug addictions before becoming sober, while attending some community events at the Castro Country Club (a sober space fyi). Anyone in the US can lose everything with the right combination of unfortunate events. People still declare medical bankruptcy.
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.
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 social safety net is required, but only in so far as the time it takes to get yourself another job (any job - not just a preferred job). One should not be on social safety net permanently.
However, on the side of medical care, i do believe that universal medical care is more efficient, and cuts out as much middleman as possible.
> A social safety net is required, but only in so far as the time it takes to get yourself another job (any job - not just a preferred job). One should not be on social safety net permanently
Oh you mean get a job now when employers are just collecting resumes for “talent pipelines” they can hire from at some future date, or just to improve morale of their current overworked employees?
And what if you’re an able bodied caretaker for a family member who is ill, disabled, or just elderly?
Unemployment is incredibly low - besides which you can always train to be an ironworker. Make it to journeyman and it's just a matter of not fucking it up.
>> A social safety net is required, but only in so far as the time it takes to get yourself another job
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.
I didn't understand the meaning of this sentence; does "means" here points to the expression of "requirement" or of "signification" ? (I am not a native speaker)
"These resources can no longer be foraged like in the days of old" - Why not?
The markets" and all that - it's artifice. Artifice to keep you busy. The scarcity is manufactured to keep you from realizing there is plenty and most people shouldn't be working.
If you're poor, the pregnancy healthcare in Austin, TX is pretty good. So the answer is: the rest of us.
That's probably for the best since you and your wife are going to spend the next two decades constructing another active labor force member - every one of whom is precious to us as a society.
"every one of whom is precious to us as a society."
This is demonstrably false - we have had how many school shootings this year? We have a "light truck exemption" that kills pedestrians and makes our vehicles an ever heavier competition (nobody wants to drive a small car if everyone else has a tank). We have the worst life expectancy of all rich nations - by a LONG shot. Our neonatal care is atrocious. We have no maternity leave. "Kids can work in meat packing plants at 14" is being honestly discussed.
Kids are a talisman, invoked to do anything except actually help them.
Do you think other cultures, who care less about work, care less about food and shelter? Or would you care to elaborate on why work is more necessary for food and shelter in America than in other cultures (bearing in mind that America is one of the more developed nations on earth)?
I'm guessing the family unit is more fragmented in America, and the social safety net is weaker due to rugged individualism that leads to everybody having to only worry about themselves. It's a spectrum of course, but it feels that in the US being poor is scarier than in other first world countries, which might lead to one working longer and harder to ensure a softer landing on the way down.
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, realizing one's social circle has shrank to professional acquaintances, and then finding true happiness in one of the aforementioned communities could be a net positive. Better than subsisting on a meager diet of water cooler smalltalk until retirement.
What do I do if I want to "go back" to church but I don't believe? Speaking personally, and without spilling a few paragraphs of text here, it seems like that's where I am today.
I grew up attending an explicitly irreligious "church" which provided stimulation, moral instruction, community - all the things about church that really matter to one's life, but minus dogma. Maybe you could find something similar?
(it was the Ethical Society in St. Louis, MO, in case you're curious)
I haven't gone there since I was a child; I'm 40 and live in another state now. I understand that they have a web site - maybe they have that info there!
Church isn't the only local activity by any means. As I noted in my other response[1], if you want to do charity there's volunteering groups. Or sports? We have a football team, bowls, ballet, pilates or general keep-fit. Or drinking? We have a pub meet up where they discuss philosophy (I'm not making this one up, promise!)
My take on this is that if your religion doesn’t make you do anything you’d be ashamed of if there was no God then there is no harm. Sometimes the rights and rituals help provide context for important life events regardless of any faith you might lack.
Yeah that was a strange claim. My local village paper (distributed for free on actual paper and supported by hyperlocal advertising) is full of volunteer groups, church news, the local football club, yoga lessons, pub meet ups.
> > "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...
My thought on this is it’s depressing we replaced the community with the office. That’s an emergent reality caused by the extremeness of office hours and commute times as people adjust to a new reality they will find each other again - this time in their neighborhood.
I very much agree with the author's thesis here. I think there is a kind of derangement especially among SV types about making every job about rescuing the world. And I think it comes from exactly this place of the human need for spirituality which is currently starved. But I had to screech the breaks for a second at this conjecture.
> 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.
>Their spiritual frameworks provided direction on ... whom to marry and how to raise children.
As a non-religious man (no, not atheist: non-religious), I can definitely say that the lack of an overbearing deity or otherwise some sort of Code of Divine Conduct(tm) prescribing such things has led me to put such frivolous matters as marriage and family aside and very likely never touched upon again.
Objectively, I simply can't justify all the problems that come with associating with women in any capacity beyond that of simple friendship or professional relations (as in co-worker, etc.). I also see no need for myself to contribute another spawn to humanity, since humanity is clearly more than adequately providing for itself.
>This kind of modernist/progressive thinking towards history is probably the worst thing people take away from high school and undergrad history courses.
Whitewashing of history in general is abhorrent and patently worthless, we need to consider moments in history within the contexts of the time in order to derive anything of value to us in the present.
Maybe I'm indoctrinated and you're not but please reply to this comment if you end up falling in love down the line, it'd be funny and make me happy <3
I think the object, ideally, is to meet a person you like so much that the problems and sacrifices that a (active, committed) relationship entails are worth it.
To be suckered into soul-draining bad relationships on the pretenses of imaginary friends in the sky that told you to do it sounds hellish.
As another non-religious but not atheist person, your worldview has nothing to do with your take on religion. I don't share that position on women or family at all and it sounds like a really depressing way to view life.
I can't think of anything more rewarding in my life.
Human sociality was, in our evolutionary environment, built on reciprocity. Tribes were complex webs of interdependence and mutual aid. The closest to that today is inside firms, where transactions are not mediated through markets but instead depend on relationships, personal favours, power hierarchies etc.
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.
Regardless of how people feel about work, no government agency should ever aim for job creation as a goal. The irony of modern life is that it's often people who don't need to work who enjoy work the most... The game is fun to them mostly because it's rigged in their favor. On the other side, when the game is rigged against you, it's hard to think of anything worse. If I could get the same salary as I do now to literally stare at a wall and watch paint dry, I would do it and I'm not even joking. At least that would free up my my mind to wander, plan, reflect - Something which I'm desperate to do more of but don't have the time; can't afford it.
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.
I was very optimistic in the first 5 years of my career, but for the last 7 years, whenever I started anything, I've had a feeling deep down that it wasn't going to work out financially. I still pushed through and produced some high quality projects but almost nobody uses them. My projects just cannot get any attention, no matter how good they are and how much positive feedback I get from those few people who do try them. Some of them do the exact same thing as some existing, proven multi-million dollar projects, yet I cannot even get a tiny sliver of their market share. I'm at a point where I'm paralyzed and afraid to start anything, afraid to even try to raise funding (I've been rejected hundreds of times). I know I will be rejected as soon as I start applying for funding; I feel that these funding application forms are designed intentionally to waste my time (and the time of people like me) and that there is 0 chance I will get funding no matter what I put there. The feeling is visceral. It's not about the projects, it's all about me. The elite don't want me to succeed.
I feel like if someone else who is elite-approved had launched my projects and did everything exactly as I did, they would have been wildly successful just because they're not me.
I'm now behaving similarly as these people who just procrastinate, complain and never try anything except in my case, I have so many failed multi-year projects under my belt. I look at any successful person with suspicion. They must have special connections; they must be elite-approved.
> If I could get the same salary as I do now to literally stare at a wall and watch paint dry, I would do it and I'm not even joking.
Same. I would do it even if it came with a pay cut. It might be burnout for me, it might be a job that doesn't fit anymore (or, hell, maybe the whole career), I don't know — but I know I just had 2 weeks of vacation and am absolutely dreading Monday.
If workism is indeed a replacement for organized religion, this looks like a massive win-win to me.
I don’t know how many people died in the epic IBM vs Microsoft wars of the 90s, but I suspect the total was a fraction of the number of people who died in a single day fighting the crusades.
And last I checked, no one from Google’s Android department has ever flown a plane into 1 infinite loop.
The religion isn't new, its name is Protestantism and I find it supremely odd that the name 'Max Weber' does not show up in the article once.[1] This attitude towards work as something that is sacred isn't the invention of CEOs or managers, it's spiritual in nature and existed long before modern tech companies.
This is also important if one wants to deal with 'workism', because the fundamental issue is cultural. The religious values underpinning the American work ethic have been absorbed into secular culture to the point where most Americans probably aren't consciously aware where their attitude towards work comes from.
Another similar manifestation of religious ideas seeping into 'secular' culture is the millenarial AI hysteria. If you don't see where this stuff psychologically originates, make that explicit, and then deal with it you're never going to effectively change culture.
Bro, it's not workism. It's called enjoying your craft. My dad's running a trauma department. My mum's operating in a different department. Why? They're drawing from their pension fund in their late 60s and their two sons are successful. Why do this thing called work and not instead enjoy their lives?
It's because this definition of work as this thing you do so you can do other things is some people's view. In other people's view it's fun. You are a vocateur. Why deny yourself this?
Meaning comes from many places. An objective for oneself that I think might yield joy is to find the path you prefer and to lean into it hard. Just be yourself. If it is work, then give it to yourself. If it is family, then give that to yourself. If it is gardening, do what you must so you can garden.
Of course, happiness isn't monocausal and achievement isn't solely personal so there's many views into this multidimensional problem of meaning.
It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization.
In the US, a lot of benefits, like healthcare coverage and retirement benefits, are tied to employment. This is not equally true in all countries and helps fuel an obsession with work.
Later in the piece, it mentions work as rating above traditional values like patriotism and marriage.
Historically, marriage was largely about survival. It was an economic arrangement and people were much less romantic about it than today.
Nationalism has also been blamed as a root cause of wars Historically. With regional governing bodies emerging, such as the EU and ASEAN, we may be on our way towards a world government, but emergent rather than in a top down fashion.
IMO, anyone who thinks that Americans care too much about work need to check their perspective. The Chinese workers in American Factory care a lot about work. I suspect that Americans a century ago were the same, but I think we lost that drive for a while now.
Working hours has been consistent over the last couple decades, which is significantly less than that of the 50s [1]. People are idolizing Office Space and George Costanza types. What people are worshiping is not work, but consumption. If people worked less, they're more likely to waste more time consuming media, than they will spend it on church and community service. Of course, nobody is going to admit to prioritizing weed TikTok, despite both exploding in popularity, so they'll say that they that the most important thing is what enables their consumption, which is work.
It’s hard to read something about American work ethic without a reference to puritans and Protestant work ethics, which emphasized self improvement and productivity as a means of being closer to God and Gods aspiration for man. This belief system suffuses American ethos top to bottom, from the stories children are told to traditions like working over the summer in high school, having a paper route, etc. Add to it a strong influence the Great Depression had on families, leading into the war, leading into obsessive work habits of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
I lost a bit of the thread but I think the author is trying to get at - what does the American work ethic mean in a post scarcity economy - I think is important to deal with as I think it’s a lot closer than we think. Will we create artificial hamster wheels for everyone? To what extent is the hamster wheel artificial already? Sans health care, many folks could more than satisfy their needs and wants with much less. Will the “system” as it were hold our basic needs like health care as extortion to keep the hamster wheels occupied? Or will a fundamental shift in priorities occur where basic needs are met with the plenty and people of ambition labor for the premium? What about a day when work that is today premium, thought labor, is automated with the steam engine of the mind? What labor would be the premium labor then? Ultimately I wonder if American society, particularly with its highly aggressive conservatism, can survive post scarcity.
67 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadBut I've been homeless and today I don't think I could ever experience homelessness again.
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 social safety net is required, but only in so far as the time it takes to get yourself another job (any job - not just a preferred job). One should not be on social safety net permanently.
However, on the side of medical care, i do believe that universal medical care is more efficient, and cuts out as much middleman as possible.
Oh you mean get a job now when employers are just collecting resumes for “talent pipelines” they can hire from at some future date, or just to improve morale of their current overworked employees?
And what if you’re an able bodied caretaker for a family member who is ill, disabled, or just elderly?
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.
I didn't understand the meaning of this sentence; does "means" here points to the expression of "requirement" or of "signification" ? (I am not a native speaker)
The markets" and all that - it's artifice. Artifice to keep you busy. The scarcity is manufactured to keep you from realizing there is plenty and most people shouldn't be working.
For folks like myself, who migrated to California in previous decades, the truism here is so absurd that it hurts.
Healthcare and mandatory expenses can destroy one's life in America.
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.
Of course it isn't as simple as just not having kids.
That's probably for the best since you and your wife are going to spend the next two decades constructing another active labor force member - every one of whom is precious to us as a society.
This is demonstrably false - we have had how many school shootings this year? We have a "light truck exemption" that kills pedestrians and makes our vehicles an ever heavier competition (nobody wants to drive a small car if everyone else has a tank). We have the worst life expectancy of all rich nations - by a LONG shot. Our neonatal care is atrocious. We have no maternity leave. "Kids can work in meat packing plants at 14" is being honestly discussed.
Kids are a talisman, invoked to do anything except actually help them.
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, realizing one's social circle has shrank to professional acquaintances, and then finding true happiness in one of the aforementioned communities could be a net positive. Better than subsisting on a meager diet of water cooler smalltalk until retirement.
(it was the Ethical Society in St. Louis, MO, in case you're curious)
Religious people say “there’s a god sized hole in your soul” maybe, but there’s defined a “church sized hole” in American society.
This becomes huge once you have kids. Churches run child care, schools, family activities.
They also service as hubs for ethnic groups.
They’re really important, but so far no secular group has filled the gap.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35397479
Be polite. Be respectful. Don't wear your lack of belief on your sleeve.
No big, really.
Just hang out for a few weeks, then bring any questions you have up.
Then make this line stop dropping past the plenty level:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248837/church-membership-down-s...
> > "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...
> 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.
As a non-religious man (no, not atheist: non-religious), I can definitely say that the lack of an overbearing deity or otherwise some sort of Code of Divine Conduct(tm) prescribing such things has led me to put such frivolous matters as marriage and family aside and very likely never touched upon again.
Objectively, I simply can't justify all the problems that come with associating with women in any capacity beyond that of simple friendship or professional relations (as in co-worker, etc.). I also see no need for myself to contribute another spawn to humanity, since humanity is clearly more than adequately providing for itself.
>This kind of modernist/progressive thinking towards history is probably the worst thing people take away from high school and undergrad history courses.
Whitewashing of history in general is abhorrent and patently worthless, we need to consider moments in history within the contexts of the time in order to derive anything of value to us in the present.
Maybe I'm indoctrinated and you're not but please reply to this comment if you end up falling in love down the line, it'd be funny and make me happy <3
To be suckered into soul-draining bad relationships on the pretenses of imaginary friends in the sky that told you to do it sounds hellish.
I can't think of anything more rewarding in my life.
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.
I feel like if someone else who is elite-approved had launched my projects and did everything exactly as I did, they would have been wildly successful just because they're not me.
I'm now behaving similarly as these people who just procrastinate, complain and never try anything except in my case, I have so many failed multi-year projects under my belt. I look at any successful person with suspicion. They must have special connections; they must be elite-approved.
Same. I would do it even if it came with a pay cut. It might be burnout for me, it might be a job that doesn't fit anymore (or, hell, maybe the whole career), I don't know — but I know I just had 2 weeks of vacation and am absolutely dreading Monday.
I don’t know how many people died in the epic IBM vs Microsoft wars of the 90s, but I suspect the total was a fraction of the number of people who died in a single day fighting the crusades.
And last I checked, no one from Google’s Android department has ever flown a plane into 1 infinite loop.
The religion isn't new, its name is Protestantism and I find it supremely odd that the name 'Max Weber' does not show up in the article once.[1] This attitude towards work as something that is sacred isn't the invention of CEOs or managers, it's spiritual in nature and existed long before modern tech companies.
This is also important if one wants to deal with 'workism', because the fundamental issue is cultural. The religious values underpinning the American work ethic have been absorbed into secular culture to the point where most Americans probably aren't consciously aware where their attitude towards work comes from.
Another similar manifestation of religious ideas seeping into 'secular' culture is the millenarial AI hysteria. If you don't see where this stuff psychologically originates, make that explicit, and then deal with it you're never going to effectively change culture.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
It's because this definition of work as this thing you do so you can do other things is some people's view. In other people's view it's fun. You are a vocateur. Why deny yourself this?
Meaning comes from many places. An objective for oneself that I think might yield joy is to find the path you prefer and to lean into it hard. Just be yourself. If it is work, then give it to yourself. If it is family, then give that to yourself. If it is gardening, do what you must so you can garden.
Of course, happiness isn't monocausal and achievement isn't solely personal so there's many views into this multidimensional problem of meaning.
In the US, a lot of benefits, like healthcare coverage and retirement benefits, are tied to employment. This is not equally true in all countries and helps fuel an obsession with work.
Later in the piece, it mentions work as rating above traditional values like patriotism and marriage.
Historically, marriage was largely about survival. It was an economic arrangement and people were much less romantic about it than today.
Nationalism has also been blamed as a root cause of wars Historically. With regional governing bodies emerging, such as the EU and ASEAN, we may be on our way towards a world government, but emergent rather than in a top down fashion.
Working hours has been consistent over the last couple decades, which is significantly less than that of the 50s [1]. People are idolizing Office Space and George Costanza types. What people are worshiping is not work, but consumption. If people worked less, they're more likely to waste more time consuming media, than they will spend it on church and community service. Of course, nobody is going to admit to prioritizing weed TikTok, despite both exploding in popularity, so they'll say that they that the most important thing is what enables their consumption, which is work.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
I lost a bit of the thread but I think the author is trying to get at - what does the American work ethic mean in a post scarcity economy - I think is important to deal with as I think it’s a lot closer than we think. Will we create artificial hamster wheels for everyone? To what extent is the hamster wheel artificial already? Sans health care, many folks could more than satisfy their needs and wants with much less. Will the “system” as it were hold our basic needs like health care as extortion to keep the hamster wheels occupied? Or will a fundamental shift in priorities occur where basic needs are met with the plenty and people of ambition labor for the premium? What about a day when work that is today premium, thought labor, is automated with the steam engine of the mind? What labor would be the premium labor then? Ultimately I wonder if American society, particularly with its highly aggressive conservatism, can survive post scarcity.