When anthropologists study people who still hunt and gather for their food (e.g., the Hadza), what they do more than anything is… nothing in particular. Not hunting, foraging, building, repairing weapons/clothing/housing, socializing, etc. just… chilling.
Their lives are incredibly hard and I wouldn’t trade places with them, but the idea that the natural state of people is hustling is false. People hustled for their food, then rested once they had it. Some days they hunt from dawn to dusk, other days they found a beehive and chilled.
I was forced to do this terrible thing in order to not starve. Instead of doing anything about it, I think that we should make anyone who didn’t suffer as much have to do that terrible thing in order to not starve. Otherwise they do not deserve it.
Exactly. I actually had a coworker say people didn’t deserve free college education because he had to pay. So I guess no one should be allowed anything he wasn’t allowed.
When hiking in a group of people travelling at unequal speeds, it is only reasonable to have everyone move at the pace of the fastest person. Otherwise it’s Not Efficient.
(sarcasm disclaimer: this is sarcastic)
They’ve been bred to believe this makes you a great person. NOT doing it makes you lazy.
Absolutely. It is a critical mechanism by which our culture encourages poor people to be angry at other poor people that they don’t have more instead of at the people with ALL THE STUFF.
Only if you are poor…
Can’t believe people actually allow people like this to have an audience. Have you ever tried to grow enough food to eliminate the need to go to the grocery store?
Gow much land and equipment from grants or my family do i get?
Equipment from grants? What grant money if no one is working to pay taxes? The root of the problem, I asked a question and your first response is how much free stuff will the government give me.
Me when I realize survival means constantly fighting against entropy.
the highly organized and artificial structures of capitalism aren’t entropy
People are like, “why is life so hard?!”. When by life they really mean the cost of living, the division of labor, the lopsided allocation of capital, the perverse incentives, and the law that in many cases makes it outright illegal to help others or share things.
Edit: “life is hard” because your boss wants it that way.
Isn’t it kind of the opposite though? The tendency towards increasing entropy kind of powers the stuff that lets us exist.
Especially when You realize, we are producing like twice what we need.
And that the majority of that output is being hoarded by those who already have far more than they can ever use.
Cries in 10+ hours a day, 6 days a week.
yeah, its this bad on the third world too for the majority of people.
Just read an article on the 996 work schedule.
Unpopular opinion: working ONE full time job for full time hours in exchange for getting paid a living wage with not a lot of absolutely absurd strings and conditions attached to it is actually a good situation to be in. The problem is they want us to work well beyond full time hours, at multiple jobs since the cost of living is price fixed, for less than a living wage while passing thc drug tests every 5 minutes. I want to use my tech degrees for ANYTHING besides primarily passing thc tests, the only goddamn thing they care about most of the time. I thought they needed SKILLS.
This is the worst and stupidest timeline and so is everyone who agrees this is how things should me.
I swear to fuck I’m going to learn 3d modelling and start pumping out bulk quantities of 3d porn for money if I have to but the world is a fucking joke right now.
Move to a legal state.
I understand that you’ll probably say that’s not possible, but there are more and more legal states, and plenty of cheap places in them.
I obviously don’t know what your situation is, but if THC drug tests are causing you this much angst, it’s worth considering.
Reject modernity, return to hunter-gatherer
Someone a long time ago estimated that in their future, automation will make us work much less. Guess what, it made us work more even tho the work that has to be done is less
There’s a percentage of jobs out there that even with layoffs, AI, and the rest, are not crucial to the operation and could be eliminated. Ask anyone who is the “main” worker while others do the minimum or less.
Marketing is a huge industry, doesn’t really benefit society, and isn’t really needed at all. Executives are mostly useless or even detrimental to their companies. A lot of the financial sector is just gambling.
People find ways to make more from less and then somehow optimize away the gained free time and then some. In that regard, farming was a pretty shit invention.
reject capitalism, return to communal societies?
Not far back enough
i’m pretty sure the monke we descended from also lived communally. don’t quote me on that though.
Move to remote island build your house by hand. Then live that lifestyle no electricity or running water. No modern technology or medicine. You can gather and hunt for food. Then you are only working to survive like the ancestors. This is easy to say but doing is entirely a different vibe.
/joke
Seriously, look at history. Villagers bonded together for survival. Then merchants/ trades started happening between tribes. Each person had an assigned task/job in the tribe. So everyday before sunrise hunters would hunt until sunset. The gathers would gather and prepare meals. They did to survive not for $$. So do you want to live the survival lifestyle or today’s posh lifestyle is real question.
Yeah but what about healthcare? Oh, wait. I can’t afford healthcare anyway.
I guess you are joking, but I see this argument often and it really doesn’t make any sense.
Not defending the multi billion dollars corporation and not denying that something seriously need to change on how we value our time, but hunters-gatherers would kill for an 8 hours job, probably sittinf down on a computer. They had to work the whole day, dawn to dusk, just to survive.
no they didn’t, hunter-gatherers had (and have) remarkably chill lives.
the thing is just that when things sucked they REALLY sucked, but it’s not like that’s not true in many places on earth right now despite all our technological advancements… People are currently starving to death and being bombed in gaza.
As we do more archaeology we’re realizing that people were building permanent settlements way way way way before the “dawn of civilization” in the middle east.
They were figuring out a really fucking sweet balance between a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the “modern” fixed farming lifestyle, where they had a bunch of settlements that they moved between depending on the seasons, and as they went along they planted things strategically so the entire environment around them would be what we’d call a “food forest” these days.They had to work the whole day, dawn to dusk, just to survive.
I don’t think that’s true. At least the stuff I’ve read seems to show that about ~40 hours a week was pretty normal.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s good reasons to not want to go back to hunter-gatherer societies (the linked article goes into that), but raw hours worked isn’t one of them.
Just some good ol’ healthy outdoors activity
Anyone who wants to deadass can if they really want to. Just fuckoff into the remote somewhere and you can try.
You say that but in the year of our lord. All of the land is “owned” and they’ll get you for the crime of existing.
Avoiding the notice of other groups is part of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, is it not?
Google “GPS technology” and you’ll see just how far we’ve come since pre-agrarian survival
It was a bit easier when the guys showing up to kick you out of your shelter were armed with sticks and rocks. Now they’ll show up vastly outnumbering you, out armoring you, and outgunning you.
Well if you want to resist violently:
They have sticks and rocks, you have sticks and rocks
They have guns and bulletproof vests, you have guns and a bulletproof vest. Nobody is gonna RPG a squatters shack.
The ability to take people with you hasn’t stopped with technology! (I am not advocating that)
In my country it is very difficult to get bullet proof armor and guns are significantly regulated. Law enforcement or military would easily outarm and out number a squater.
It’s ok if you can retire with benefits and a pension. Anything else is exploitation
It’s not because you have given the best of your health, and the best of your life to corporations. We retire with decaying bodies and minds.
Well that is still exploitation, just nicer exploitation.
But, being nice and even slightly generous while exploiting your employees is how you get them to stick around at best and how you get them to not rise up en masse and drag you and your friends down main street until the screaming stops.
No no no. We know. We also know that there’s SFA we can do about it because our government has long since been bought and paid for by the very same people who “generously” “give” us the opportunity to slave away generation profit for them and their shareholder friends, so they can be rich and get richer, while we barely scrape by with the scraps they convince us is from their generosity.
Government long since abandoned us, ever since the boomers stopped caring about unions, which is around the same time they were all making shitloads of money as senior management, and unions actually started to harm their ability to make more money.
Goodbye unions, goodbye decent working conditions and reasonable, transparent wage schedules. Goodbye to the middle class…
Shits fucked, we’re all to busy fighting amongst ourselves, trying not to starve, and screaming over the Epstein files to figure out that we need to band together to fix this shit.
I know why you all want to see the Epstein shit, but here’s a spoiler, pretty much everyone with any money, power, or influence, is on the fucking list, and if they’re not, they should be, because they’ve been raping the rest of us for a good long time now.
It’s funny to me how some think this is some hidden knowledge. Yeah plenty know it sucks but also know that without work they won’t eat
IMO, that’s the problem. You have to earn a living. As in, you don’t deserve one, you have to earn one.
It’s not that you’ll do without any nice-to-haves if you don’t work, you’ll do without everything if you don’t work. You will literally starve and die.
That’s what’s fucked up to me. If you’re just like, I don’t want to work for a while… Then GFL feeding yourself.
So anyways, I support UBI.
Thought u was gon say u started blasting
Before money existed you still had to earn your living. We had to hunt, build shelters, collect firewood, process animal skins and such. In modern times society as a whole could help each other out more but there are some issues with a ubi like corporations raising prices constantly to meet the new extra money supply.
I think a better solution would be state run essentials given out for free. Like food banks, free toiletries, social housing etc. You can work if you want better options than what is offered for free but you’ll be able to get food and shelter at the very least even if you dont work. Housing reform as well to bring the cost of living down would let people work positions/hours they want to work instead of what they need to work to afford to survive.
I think a better solution would be state run essentials given out for free. Like food banks, free toiletries, social housing etc.
The problem with that without a UBI is that it dictates what people can economically access to whatever services are already provided. That said, I’m in favor of us getting essentials (Particularly inelastic demand things like Housing and Healthcare) and a UBI.
like corporations raising prices constantly to meet the new extra money supply.
People always bring up this point but the idea that prices are an arbitrary number selected by sellers isn’t actually how the economy works. Wealth confers actual agency and leverage. If you have a UBI which functions somehow as redistribution of wealth (ie. funded by taxes on the rich or collective ownership of natural resources rather than by printing more dollars), that is an actual increase in people’s negotiating power on the market, companies can’t just unilaterally undo it or make buyer’s choices for them.
state run essentials given out for free
While this would be much better than nothing and is the better option in specific cases like healthcare where markets are non-functional, something like state housing for the poor is more subject to political backlash. Someone who isn’t in state housing and doesn’t want to be will likely see it as a drain on their resources going to the “other” and seek to chip away or put degrading restrictions on it, while with a UBI a majority of people would be directly made more financially secure in a more efficient and flexible way, so ongoing political support for it could come from all of them.
The 2nd argument you made is also true for people who want to work vs people who don’t. Someone working may feel like their taxes are going to “lazy” people and that hes being robbed of his money.
I’m assuming a form of UBI that is actually “universal” and not means tested, so the majority of working people would be getting more than they pay towards the program in taxes, and thus personally benefit.
Thats how a lot of carbon taxs work too, and people fought against them cause they don’t do the math
I feel like if there was a carbon tax that was directly putting extra money in everyone’s bank account on a regular basis, and it actually got to the point where that was happening, at that stage nobody would fail to understand the math.
I don’t dislike the idea of state/government subsidies for essentials. Most of that is already in place for many first world countries, in some way, shape, or form.
The problem I have with it is that you need to qualify for the assistance. So you need this whole complicated application and approval system, oversight to ensure that it’s not being taken advantage of, either by the would-be clients, nor the administrative staff managing it, and then that needs to go into paying for housing and whatnot for eligible people, and yatta yatta.
All of that overhead goes away with UBI. Everyone gets it. There’s no disability, no employment insurance, no disability benefits, nothing. If you have citizenship, you get UBI. The amount of UBI deducts from your regular work earnings, so businesses, and the rich are paying the majority of the ubi payouts, and the system is both simplified and streamlined. If you lose your job, or you need to be out of work for a while due to sickness, injury or other issue, no problem, you still get UBI, and nothing changes. You don’t need to apply for disability or short term medical benefits because you now can’t work, because that amount is your UBI.
Additionally, UBI should be tied to the cost of living and/or inflation, as costs rise, so does UBI.
In this way, you dramatically lower the administrative costs and overhead from running such a program, and citizens have peace of mind that they will always be able to afford the basics. Mainly rent, and food.
The market provides all of that to them, rather than needing a complex and approval based benefit system to provide it instead.
It’s so hard to describe how many government services would end up getting folded into UBI. The obvious ones are unemployment services and/or welfare, disability benefits, both for long term and short term disabilities any bursaries or grants given to people for short duration assistance. A huge segment of government work would no longer be needed. And yeah, some of those people will end up unemployed, some will shift over to UBI work… To their benefit, all those freshly unemployed workers have UBI now, so they don’t need to worry about applying for unemployment benefits, they just need to focus on finding new employment if they choose to.
I could rant about it all day. I’ll stop here.
I know how to eat without money. Problem is shelter. Then if I am paying for shelter anyway it’s only an extra hour of work a week to pay for food.
It’s absolutely wild that these anti work types actually believe that food just magically spawns in your fridge.
Electricity? Magic lightning from a wall socket! You don’t have to pay for anything, you don’t have to work, nobody has to do anything productive, everything just magically gets done because we live in heaven and God provides plentiful. Break a bone? You don’t need hospitals where humans have to gasp work as a doctor and be all responsible and shit, that just heals with magic!
We don’t need anyone to do real jobs, we don’t need anyone to be responsible or care, we don’t need anyone to even try, because in this awesome world everything is resolved automatically with magic!
Get your collective heads out of your asses
No shit, sick of this lunacy. I figure it’s mostly kids with shit jobs who have these takes.
I’m sure the guy at the tire shop isn’t loving every second of work, but I need tires. I didn’t like working in a reprographics shop, but builders need blueprints. Ever bought a used car in America? My last job likely had a hand in getting that car to you.
Yes, we work more than we need to and don’t get a fair share of our labor. I get that. There are gross injustices. I get that. But this notion that we shouldn’t have to work is immature at best.
Survival is not easy no matter how you slice it. Without modern technology our life spans would be 30-50 years old if that. Today is the much easier to survive than back in the early settler days. People just don’t realize how great we have it compared to our ancestors. I get that some have it harder than others in today’s society. They will never have it as hard as 1600s living conditions.
Wow what a lazy argument with no point.
Have you ever actually thought about how much your existence incurs?
I have.
It would take less than 16hrs of labor per week to make sure everyone has access to all human needs and a reasonable amount of human wants.
The other 24hrs a week I waste at work are just to make sure my employer makes 10,000x what I do for not working.
If you cared about people being lazy you would support redistributing the excess wealth of the lazy rich
Bro they’re a troll. They literally did not make a single point in that entire post, it’s just rage bait. No one has made even a single one of the “claims” that theyre attempting to parrot.
It would take less than 16hrs of labor per week to make sure everyone has access to all human needs and a reasonable amount of human wants.
Er, based on what? Because infrastructure is difficult, complex, and fantastically expensive.
What level of medical care does this estimate involve? Modern hospitals require massive amounts of labor to keep operational, especially if you account for all the external inputs (e.g. consumables like IV bags and exam gloves and lab analysis equipment).
Are you capable of reading? There was a very clear point there.
Then; if your employer makes 10,000 times what you make, find another fucking employer.
That, too, is based on me assuming that your numbers aren’t just pulled out of your ass btw. This entire "we can work only 16 hours and humanity will be fine requires a huge Wikipedia style <citation needed>
I’m not talking about abusive companies and bosses. I’m talking about people thinking they don’t have to work at all. Wr all have to work, period. Could we work less? Maybe, could be, sure, let’s look into that. Could we all flat out stop working? When were all dead we can, sure! Until then though, someone has to put bread on the table, LITERALLY. Without bakers there won’t be bread. Without supermarket employees, and farm hands and truck drivers doing their shitty jobs, guess what? Go into the forest and forage your own damn food (and starve in the process).
If you’re incapable of understanding that basic point then you should go touch some grass before responding. We live in a real world that has a lot of sucky problems that still need to be resolved and you have no fucking clue as to how good we have it compared to 100 years ago. Hell, I grew up 40 years ago and I know how much better many things are now compared to then, work wise too.
Grow up, all of you
“Then; if your employer makes 10,000 times what you make, find another fucking employer.”
and you say others should grow up, lmao
There’s not a single person who thinks no work is required for society to function, grow up yourself.
If you think antiwork is about never doing any kind of work ever again, you are misunderstanding the movement.
Besides the improvements in medicine and the calorie density of food, people 100 years ago had more free time and propotional money than we do today. They would have lived better lives than us if they didn’t die of preventable sickness.
Pretending like any of this has to do with Capitalism is deepthroating capitalist propaganda, human tech has always progressed, even before Capitalism, and it will still happen after Capitalism
LoL, everyone realizes, but saddly, I need food to operate.
What else do you suggest people do 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 50 odd years?
If one spends less time working, they might figure out something
No work and all play something something
Whatever the fuck they want. Not being exploited all the time, for example.
Exploited? NOW That’s What I Call a Strong Word, vol. 73
Some people do volunteering. They work for free, on their own free time. No one’s forcing them to work. Even at paid work, they are free to leave, innit? Pretty sure plenty of people over history had to work and had no option. But these folks can even choose where they’d like to work? And can then try their luck, trying to match with the employer. Make it Tinder, and I’m sold. Employers and employees swiping left and right on each other. Gamify it as well. People love games. Working will be a breeze when they unlock achievements. Give 'em a sick soundtrack as well. And when they “retire”, give 'em more of the same, but mirrored. New mode unlocked upon completion. Maybe that’s afterlife. Life all over again, but everything is mirrored. Also, LinkedIn Shorts. Short 1m videos. On your feed. All of it. Replace the feed. LinkTok. And one in every three to five posts, an ad. Gotta watch 5-10s at least before continuing. Unless premium+, in which you can skip immediately. Free users gotta watch the whole ad, though. Regular premium gets the ad skip. Ads are also limited to a minute, though. And make LinkedIn mandatory for work
