I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
There are many ways that societies can work. Criticising the way society currently works is not criticising all possible societies. The options are not “accept things the way they are” and “bugger off into the wilderness”.
What’s a society that isn’t premised on cooperation? Capitalism, communism, and essentially every other form of society are simply differences in how the money is divided up. They’re not differences in the belief that members of society have to work.
I mean, OP can move to a different society. OP could also stay and vote but I suspect that type of cooperative government might not be what they’re after. So yeah, in general, acceptance and fucking off are the only two real, immediate, choices OP can make. And in the context of this thread, asking OP this question is a great way to get to the point of their complaint.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Because nowhere has anyone said they oppose cooperation.
Boy howdy that seems like an ENORMOUS difference.
That is what OP is saying. They want to know what we’d do if we weren’t forced to sell most of our time.
I agree. But again, that’s not what OP is talking about. As we’ve established, any society requires cooperative work. Neither you or OP has argued that another system wouldn’t require OP to “sell most of their time.” If you’d like to make this argument you might be interested to start here.
No it isn’t. That’s something you have hallucinated.
There’s a lot of options between having to spend the majority of our time dedicated to work, and not cooperating at all.
Not to mention most of the work we do isn’t for the benefit of our communities, but for the benefit of a tiny handful of already-incredibly rich assholes.
That would be convenient for your argument, but actually, you do not get to decide what other people are talking about based on what is most convenient for you to argue against.
I read OPs post. I quoted it back to you. Both you, and OP, are implicitly arguing that you should be able to both fuck off AND have the benefits of society. That’s actually one of the perks of a functioning society where a member who is to old, sick, or otherwise unable to contribute can be taken care of. Do one of these apply to you or OP? If not, you’re no different than the “already rich assholes” except that you’re takers who are bad at capitalism.
Anyway. Have a nice day.
No. I’m not. I’m telling you I’m not. Despite whatever nonsense you are hallucinating, that isn’t the argument I’m making.
Society can be structured differently. So resources can be distributed more fairly. So everyone can enjoy more of their time. Instead of a greedy few getting most of the benefit at the expense of the rest of us.
Bite me, asshole.
No, they’re not.
It should be, but this is becoming less and less the case as welfare, social security and pension plans keep getting cut and gutted.