I used to monitor systems remotely from my home. On night shift I had an alarm going every 12 minutes to check the screens and emails. Shitty sleep, but slightly better than no sleep.
No one said that, wanting to do something on a daily basis is normal. But if I didn’t have to pay rent, for food, etc. I would certainly not be doing what I’m doing now on the daily, and if I did I wouldn’t be able to afford to live.
Working for our own benefit or for the benefit of those we love is a natural inclination. Working for others, often harder and at a detriment to our own personal joy, without a comparable benefit to us and our family is not natural.
Agreed. Thats why I never made the claim that people have a natural urge to get yelled at by a shitty manager in an exploitative fast food gig. No one is saying that here.
The situation you describe is an illustration of alienation in the workplace, and this happens when workers lose the means of production. All of the comments in this thread tiptoe around this idea - for which there have been volumes of thought written btw.
My issue with the meme is that it is ahistorical and can distract people away from the concept of alienation. The capitalist class pays us not because we are “naturally opposed to working” (which is the thesis of the meme), but because it is unbearable to work in an alienating environment, which, as you perfectly explained, abstracts us away from the products we create, compartmentalizes our work, and violently separated us from working for our families or communities.
I think your point makes sense if the meme defines “work” as broadly as you do: “any labor.”. However, i read the meme to refer to “work for others.”. So i think your criticism of it is on shaky ground because that criticism assumes and requires the existence of an intent that was not present.
Work has a broad reach. Putting effort into something is work, be it something you enjoy, like building a chair or a table for example, or into a company project.
Sure, but in the context of the meme, “work” means “doing labor for someone else in exchange for payment”. Broadening the scope of the word “work” is valid, sure, but bound to cause confusion given the context.
The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive. What improvements were made were developed to keep starvation at bay. If you gave a medieval peasant modern farming equipment, they’d be jazzed about how little time they’d have to spend plowing and milling and threshing and harvesting and how much more time they could spend getting piss drunk with their family and friends.
A babylonian farmer didn’t “just want to work.” They wanted to live, and that meant they spent their life in back-breaking labour in the fields.
The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive.
Yes, the majority of people who ever lived, but for most of the time we’ve existed we didn’t need to do much labor at all. The reason it’s the most people who ever lived is because the agricultural revolution trapped us into having to grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food to feed a growing population that could grow more food.
I don’t see how you could see my original claim of
“Humans are laboring creatures”
Respond to it with
“Humans need to labor in order to make food to survive”
And still come from a place of disagreement.
Never did I claim “people work just to work”. We don’t see people spending every waking hour outside making mud pies. We don’t see people spending entire days moving 100-ton blocks from one side of town to the other just for the hell of it.
People worked to have a calorie surplus so they could not work the next day, or they could make sure their shelter wasn’t leaking, or they could do something they found entertaining.
So you’re saying people labor in order to entertain, love, create, do art, and do philosophy?
Sounds very human to me.
Never did i claim that people “work for the sake of work”. My argument is that humans can be characterized as working creatures who use labor to change their environment - be it geographically, politically, socially, etc…
It’s that at some point someone realized they could use their momentary surplus to exploit someone else’s dire need and thus use other people’s labor to generate an even larger surplus for themselves.
The rationale to justify this exploitation has changed through the ages, as well as how much has to be spent to coax others - going from slavery all the way to whatever is on the other end, which I guess would be the shared ownership of the means of production.
The question is whether an individual’s right to be housed and a corporation’s right to have employees are the same, and what kind of society do we want to build.
Not to undermine but plenty of people do actually like the work they do, that doesn’t change that they deserve to be paid for agreeing to do that work for you specifically.
A major issue is that a lot of jobs people do out of passion for the work are underpaid, if not outright looked down on, in contemporary society. Teachers, caretakers, artists and many other classes of professionals are exploited to work for severely suppressed wages due to their passion for what they do.
Yup, just my random tangential anecdote here, but I consider myself very lucky to have a decently paid job that allows me to work from home. I started fostering kittens a few years ago and have found myself quite passionate about it. The problem is that it takes lots of time and a good bit of money and is unpaid. The organization I volunteer for covers medical expenses, but everything else is coming out of my own pocket. I guess they technically offer to cover food, but it’s a lot of hassle (and frequent upset tummies and/or cats refusing to eat) to actually utilize their food supplies.
People have suggested that I get a job at the shelter or as a vet, so I could get paid to work with animals, but the work is totally different, likely pays less than my current job, and the in person nature of those jobs would severely limit my ability to continue fostering.
Thank you for fostering, that’s hard work. For what it’s worth the only people making good money in veterinary medicine are management and the veterinarians (and that can vary). Vet techs, assistants, receptionists, and kennel techs generally all make shit.
I love learning about programmation, and it is definitely one of my passion. I still get paid a buttload more than teachers. The argument is fucking bullshit.
That is one factor, but there is another factor and I can tell you this as someone not working- it’s really boring having very little to do on a day-to-day basis.
Not that I’d ever work without being paid and I would much rather do WFH because I don’t really give a shit about the social aspect, but giving me shit to do every day would at least keep my mind occupied.
Tbh there are people who are never bored, because they have a strong intrinsic motivation to try new things or improve. Usually in things that arent jobs, like hobbies or volunteer work/clubs.
For example I would love to improve my programming, switch to linux, set up home server, learn how to lockpick, go climbing or pick up bodybuilding and build cardio, redecorate my home, maybe dive into streaming game-speedruns…
There are always more things. Once learning how to setup a server, there come more servers to learn about. After learning to program in one language, there come other languages and interesting programming projects etc. And along the way, you’ll hear about and discover other interesting hobbies to check out. Maybe learning how to lockpick and learning how to program combine to learning about hacking, or cyber security. It goes in and on. There are always more interesting things to learn if you’re curious.
Well maybe you never get bored, but I certainly do. And I’m far from alone there. Sure, there are always more interesting things to learn if you’re curious. There’s also only so much energy you can put into them. And if you devote a lot of your energy to one of them, it’s basically an unpaid job. Which is fine if that’s what makes you happy, but it’s still a job.
Boredom is good for someone. The brain hates it so it forces itself to be creative or do something. You have more energy if so much of it wasn’t dedicated to trying to work and suckle off of capitalism teat so you can survive. That is the thing when so much energy is focused on work you miss community/hobby work that is a healthier thing to build for one’s self for one’s overall happiness. If it costs less to live the more you can spend on hobbies which allows more hobbies to be livable jobs in your community
Also nurse to patient ratios. The one thing that’s been proven over and over and over to keep people alive and well but the c suite will never do it because your grandma falling out of bed and cracking her head because she was too scared of pissing herself to wait for help (then living the remainder of her life with a tbi and possibly incontinent anyway) is an acceptable rate of systems failure for a hospital admin (also they can just blame it on the nurse and hang us out to dry to cover their own ass).
I don’t disagree. I worked for an asshole for 20 years and am now self employed, and it’s vastly superior being on your own. But it’s like the difference between throwing and catching one ball versus juggling 5 balls. And sometimes a chainsaw gets thrown in.
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