Yeah, it's like 99% of people didn't grow up dreaming to file TPS reports or do landscaping for 8 hours a day, but rent has to be paid somehow and landlords don't accept payment in unrealistic hopes and dreams. It would be much cooler for al of us to be writers, musicians, painters, astronauts and F1 drivers.
I remember talking to my grandad who went from WW2 trenches, to famine, to working on the farm for 16+ hours/day and raising 10 kids, about purpose and fulfilment through work, whether all that hard work made him depressed, and he said that thought never occurred to him, that he never had any time to feel depressed or unfulfilled, he just did whatever had to be done to survive without thinking about fulfillment or purpose, but that he never really felt unhappy from any kind of work.
IMHO, looking at what's happening globally and what my grandad went through, it's a sign of incredible prosperity to have the luxury to think about fulfillment needing to come from work.
How do you know we wouldn't be off even better with less alienation and exploitation? What makes you think those generate prosperity, rather than destroying it?
> It would be much cooler for al of us to be musicians, painters, astronauts and F1 drivers.
No, it would be cool if we were fully fledged human beings and shared some of the shitty work that needs doing more fairly, and stopped exploiting each other. Between those two things you'd quell a lot of "complaints". It's not about doing grand things, anything can be grand if you have the heart for it, and put your heart in it.
> Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
-- Noam Chomsky
But you can't put your heart into being a cog. I don't even think you can put any real heart into being powerful and using people as cogs, that's both a failure state of how to human IMO.
>How do you know we wouldn't be off even better with less alienation and exploitation?
Depends who is the "we" here. Much of the lifestyle and perks of living in the developed west are dependent on other less fortunate people being exploited: cheap cocoa and cheap coffee grown in the poorest African nations, cheap bananas, asparagus and other fruits and vegs in your supermarket, cheap electronics made in China with mineral mined by kids in Africa, cheap clothes made in the poorest SE Asian countries, cheap semiconductors etched in Taiwan, etc.
Entire industries and supply chains we take for granted in the west as being commodities now, depend on what is basically modern slavery and environmental destruction we intentionally turn a blind eye on.
So if all those exploited people were to be be less exploited and have the prosperity to choose other careers than to work in mines, farms or sweatshops to supply the wealthy west, then those "we" would be much better off, but then the westerners "we" would be less well off as now we wouldn't be able to afford those commodities we take for granted at the new non-slavery prices.
>No, it would be cool if we were fully fledged human beings and shared some of the shitty work that needs doing more fairly, and stopped exploiting each other.
And who gets to fairly decide the global sharing of that shitty work? Because I don't know anyone who would like to scrub toilets for a living, or collect minerals form piles of scrap, mine uranium and lithium, etc. Do we draw straws? Or the more likely scenario for humanity, have a world war, and the victors get the nice comfy work and the losers the shitty work.
Yes, it would be cool if the human race would give up on the greed driven self enrichment and exploitation of others, and reach a utopic enlightenment where all the shitty work would be done by robots instead of the desperate people of the poorest countries, but we're very far away from that.
A good first step, let's start properly taxing our 1% wealth hoarding corporate elite who thrive on the human and environmental exploitation (cough Saudi Aramco, Nestle, Exxon, cough) while amassing more wealth than the 99% could spend in a lifetime, tax free in offshore heavens.
But since we can't even collectively crack down on that simple thing, I don't have any hopes we'll be able to solve the rest of humanity's issues without any major world conflict and decimation resetting the monopoly board.
> So if all those exploited people were to be be less exploited and have the prosperity to choose other careers than to work in farms or sweatshops to supply the wealthy west, then those "we" would be much better off, but then the westerners "we" would be less well off as now we wouldn't be able to afford those commodities we take for granted at non-slavery prices.
The key thing is: we can redistribute where all the wealth generation goes to. At the moment, the lion's share goes to a very few very rich people - obviously people can't afford good quality, fairly priced food any more.
There used to be a time where one middle-class income was enough to feed a family of four, live in a decent house in the suburbs, have a car and go to vacation once or twice a year. We need these times, this wealth distribution back.
>The key thing is: we can redistribute where all the wealth generation goes to.
But that goes back to the taxation issue I already mentioned. We can't redistribute wealth if we aren't taxing that wealth the top 1% hoard.
Curent redistribution just means robbing the ever shrinking middle class to give to the lower class and pitting them ageist each other for votes, while the like of Bezos are laughing all the way to their islands on their platinum Yacht.
>There used to be a time where one middle-class income was enough to feed a family of four, live in a decent house in the suburbs, have a car and go to vacation once or twice a year. We need these times, this wealth distribution back.
Those times are not coming back unless you undo globalization to the post-WW2 boom levels when offshoring middle class work abroad was not yet a thing.
> Those times are not coming back unless you undo globalization to the post-WW2 boom levels when offshoring middle class work abroad was not yet a thing.
Today's middle class is doing office work instead, at often enough pretty high productivity (i.e. corporate profit per work hour) rate. There's nothing preventing the world's largest employers to pay their employees an actual living wage.
>Today's middle class is doing office work instead, at often enough pretty high productivity (i.e. corporate profit per work hour) rate.
Only if you work for some of the wealthiest companies in the world does your individual productivity scale that well, but unless you work somewhere like Luxembourg, the Mittlestand most likely works for averge companies.
>There's nothing preventing the world's largest employers to pay their employees an actual living wage.
There is: Lack of wage legislation and/or poor market competition so you're forced to accept any wage or starve.
> How do you know we wouldn't be off even better with less alienation and exploitation?
Just because somebody is doing something that you personally can't imagine doing doesn't mean that they're exploited. "Exploitation" is how Asia was able to lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. A country of 99% subsidence farmers doesn't get antibiotics and electricity by tugging at their own bootstraps. They get it because they made their countries attractive places for capitalists to make a profit. Even leftists will suddenly acknowledge this when they blame socialists countries' lack of economic development solely on trade embargos.
> > It would be much cooler for al of us to be writers, musicians, painters, astronauts and F1 drivers.
It's not about that, work should yield some result and it should do so within a timeframe that doesn't make you lose yourself and your mind in a multi decade process, and also while team work is amazing beyond a certain treshold the less people necessary to yield the result the better.
Modern day jobs are all about ass kissing on a massive scale and massive projects that require 5-10 years to yield what was laid out in the first meeting, and by the time you get there you fail to extract any satisfaction from it because you are a completely different person and so much water has passed under the bridge that it feels very anticlimatic.
Cutting wood or hunting with 2 or 3 guys trumps 99% of desk jobs and I also suspect driving an F1 car considering that you see those guys now but they started practicing for that when they were 8 year old.
The pinnacle of work was when we discovered fire for the first time, or discovering that pointy stones would hurt wild animals when thrown at them. Whatever you do you'll never reach the same level of work satisfaction as our ancestors when they first discovered the fundamental physical realities of our world.
>Cutting wood or hunting with 2 or 3 guys trumps 99% of desk jobs
As a hobby or as job? Because 99% of desk workers wouldn't survive if their livelihood would depend on chopping wood and hunting to survive, keep warm and feed themselves.
That's why the office work life is so luxurious and desired despite the lack of fulfillment. You're safe and comfy and use money to pay people to do the uncomfortable and dangerous jobs and you have the free time to chop wood and hunt as a hobby not as if your life would depend on it.
There's companies in my area offering wilderness survival retreats for office corporate workers where you get "kidnapped" in a black van, have your smartphone taken, and dropped in the middle of a unknow forest with some basic tools and supplies and have to survive the weekend. Most come out destroyed and appreciating their depressing office jobs.
That's the problem, any self respecting man needs some danger in the form of physical harm or the potential of physical harm from the Natural envioronment around.
That's so that the brain can produce those delicious juices once you manage to evade or avoid such harm. If you stay so far away from the harm that you don't even feel it or see it (as a matter of fact you don't even know that it exists), then you don't get the brain juices, hence the crisis of depression, loss of meaning etc.
> > not as if your life would depend on it
The brain isn't stupid, when you put it in a controlled environment AKA a petting zoo it won't release the brain juices and you are back to square one.
> > Most come out destroyed and appreciating their depressing office jobs.
Maybe because there is a disconnect or a significant time delay between when they sign the contract and when they experience the actual pretend kidnapping. Anyway it's not something that would last because the 2nd or 3rd time around the brain realizes pretty quickly that it's in a petting zoo. Anyway the fact that they are seeking such experiences means that they are at least aware of the office domestication problem and the WFH domestication problem is even more serious!!
I wouldn't be surprised if his fulfillment came through providing for and raising 10 kids, in which case the work is just a means to an end, not the end itself like it can be for us. Also, I imagine farm work is fairly varied, and while not necessarily exciting, requires attention so you don't have time to get bored. It's also strongly connected to whether one eats, which is both motivation and also fulfilling.
>I wouldn't be surprised if his fulfillment came through providing for and raising 10 kids
Unlikely. Kids for him and everyone back then, were just cheap labor for the farm and someone to take care of you at old age, according to my dad. It's mostly in the last 60+ years that people mostly have kids for fulfilment.
I agree with your upstream point, but dont think you can generalize your dad's perspective on family to the generation. I dont think most people viewed family and children in such a transactional way.
I think rather that family and children were a cultural expectation, and people derived purpose and satisfaction from fulfilling that expectation. This goes back basically to the dawn of history.
In that sense, is/was a matter of personal goalsetting and meeting those goals. That is to say, people have always have had goals an motivations, even if they werent very explicit. Thats why they keep going through the motions instead of sitting down and starving to death.
15 of 16 uncles were in the military. There is a lot of great philosophy from that era but I think those writers were the only people who had the luxury of giving their internal monologue more than a few minutes.
In one job there was a window overlooking a grass field. Every week the guy would be riding the mower for a couple hours rocking out on his headphones.
There’d always be one or two guys staring out the window, enviously watching him.
Honestly, landscapers seem pretty happy to me. Generally I think manual labor provides a much greater degree of feeling accomplished/fulfilled - Your work is physically apparent in the real world. You make things functional for people, or prettier for people. You interact with all your customers regularly so you get direct and immediate feedback for your work.
Filing TPS reports? Idk what that is, but I'd imagine that feels a lot less satisfying than mowing a lawn or trimming some hedges.
are you kidding me? landscaping companies make bank. I know a lot of people that support their families by trimming hedges, planting flowers, mowing lawns, etc.
But hey here's a novel Idea - Any average Joe can run his/her own company and then he doesn't have to be an hourly employee.
This is true of many trades : garbage disposal, painting, electrical work, carpentry, etc.
The challenge is that in America, it's hard to find fulfillment elsewhere when the middle class is disappearing, you're working so hard to make up for it, and constantly stressed about staying afloat (most Americans are not even floating). It's not some inherent "American mindset". It's the situation American is in.
I agree. My gut would be that we are able to hear of more folks that are not "fulfilled" by their job. But it is really hard to hold some thoughts in my head about how this is really new.
Worse, I think, is that it sells to tell people how bad off things are. Which seems to be driving even worse moods and outlooks along the way.
