this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Antiwork
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We're trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
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We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
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Pretty sure in the old days, when there were fewer people, you could just fuck off into the forest and build yourself a cottage. If your feudal lord found out you’d be in trouble, but they didn’t have satellites or whatnot to track you down.
We have this weird unwritten assumption that the cost of technological advancement (esp medical) was our own domestication. That we sacrificed freedom and privacy for health and safety. I wonder if that’s really the case, or if it’s some bullshit post hoc justification
You'd still have to work for your living in said scenario.
Nobody is gonna bring you chicken tendies three times a day in your hidden cottage.
Uncontacted hunter gathered tribes work, it's right there in the description. Not 40 hours a week, sure, but you can live a much simpler lifestyle in the wilderness on a similar work ethic.
Labor is an intrinsic requirement of human life.
Working for your own reasons is fundamentally different than laboring and having part of what you produce taken from you by an employer
You can work for your own reasons right now. But you don't have the right to just grab any piece of land and confiscate it for your own use. There are too many of us for that.
Thats why we should adhere to the principles of public ownership of land. Which used to be the case dating back to prehistoric mines shared between different factions and groups.
Examples of this are all over in the past and some rural communities but all because some powerful duts decided that human kind is inherently selfish and everyone would automatically overuse the land breaking the system. The example given is a farmer who increasingly claims a bigger part of a field to get a bigger flock of sheep or orchards.
All of it completely ignores that companies sucking the planets resources dry to the bone for profit while a farmer in a rural community has no need to increase flock if not to make profit. Proper use of public land is in the interest of everyone.
Not saying you're wrong, I'm just pointing out that private ownership of farmland was probably encouraged as a way to incentivize farmers - work the land yourself, do it for your self as number one beneficiary, you're more likely to work better, and not clock out (as much as possible for something like farming). Whereas people working state owned land might just say 'feck it, not my problem', picking the path of least resistance as it were. It's entirely possible that companies exploiting this came about as an unintended (initially) consequence.
There's also a situation currently where multiple small land owners rent out their land to be worked by a single well-equipped group of farmers and get paid on the yield minus whatever labour costs. This is in order to combat the inefficiency of working your own small plot of land with less powerful machinery or avoiding to invest too much in your own equipment (farm machinery is very expensive). Now the fairness of that trade-off is still questionable, but probably more than the current overall exploitation, if you have trustworthy folk.
Back to your point, human beings are incredibly selfish. You either do it for yourself and yours, or are taken advantage of by somebody doing just that. It's always the interest of everyone, it's just the definition of 'everyone' that differs
Ideally, I think public land should not be owned by anyone, not even the state. Land belongs to whomever makes use of it (and no, making use of it does not mean fencing it up and letting weeds grow because it's not profitable) and that may very well change from year to year.
But then you're gonna have to pay taxes to fund the military industry regardless. But at least you get more than the crumbs of your work
Maybe not just any piece of land, but there are enormous swaths of empty land in this world that OP can fuck off to, if they’re that determined to not be a member of a society. Of course, they’re not interested in that because pioneering is to much work. 🙄
It’s the kind of work that makes you feel fulfilled and accomplished though. I bet OP would be better off mentally in 2 years if he fucked off to alaska and built himself a cabin. Hell, I bet I would too.
This corporate wage slavery is so fucking detrimental to my well-being. I want to solve challenges and make decisions of consequence. I want to have agency in my life.
Go ahead then. What’s stopping you?
Land is expensive and you still have to pay taxes on it.
There are co-op/commune options but that's probably not what OP is looking for either. Unfortunately or not "no man is an island" really is true and we're all inherently interconnected. We all share the same resources and space, and should all have input into how those resources and spaces are used.
TBH if someone wants to go out into the wilderness and survive with little/no creature comforts I think that should be perfectly fine and they should be allowed space to do that; I also think healthcare and some sort of UBI/food allowance should exist so that a person won't starve or die of an easily prevented disease, or to make sure the person really wants to go be alone and isn't just experiencing an untreated illness.
By all means if you want a Corvette or that lifted F150 you should have to work for it but if you're happy eating squirrel and beans and reading books from the public library? You should be allowed to do that.
I’m already too dead inside to muster up the energy
I hate the corporate grind too. So I only work for businesses small enough that I'm on a first name basis with the owner.
It's all very romantic living in a cabin in the wilderniss but there's a reason no one that has a choice lives that way.
Those are both subcategories of work. You still work in either, it’s just in one case you get everything but you must do everything and in the other case you don’t get what you worked for but you instead get luxuries from society.
What was invented was unemployment and underemployment, both of which are unnecessary.
Wrong, people do bring me whatever sort of food I ask for, and I don’t have to work for it. That’s because I’m a successful landlord and business owner, so maybe you should stop complaining about having to work and just become successful like me and then you will realize the truth, nobody has to work if they don’t want to. Just be a success and you can enjoy a life of leisure.
You could try. But there's 2 problems with that. Firstly surviving on your own is extremely difficult. Subsistence farming is hell and without a community often ends in death after a single drought or bad crop.
And secondly the medieval era didn't have that much empty, unclaimed land that could support either farming or hunting. There were farming communities everywhere there was open space. And old forests in Europe are pretty much entirely man controlled by this point. Poaching was a serious crime because of population control and logging was also controlled.
What I'm saying is, no man is an island and very few could survive as one. There's a reason we developed society.
It's a good point, perhaps we were freer before. Then again, 90% of the European population were basically slaves during the dark and middle ages, and I also enjoy not dying from dysentery.
Have you ever died from dysentery to compare? Maybe you'd enjoy it more than you think.
I’d like to try some death, please.
I'd like my death on the side please, I'll have it later at home.
It’s not just bullshit.
Soon after we invented agriculture we began to lose survival skills, and it got progressively worse until we reached the point of grocery stores.
This was our choice. We stopped roaming to stop and grow, harvest, and store grain to be sure we had food stocks in reserve for low yield months. This gave us time to create and learn which led to civilisation.
Before agriculture, we were no more than bands of maybe 50, probably territorially killing each other on discovery much like Chimps do.