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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, that one’s on me guys, sorry. I just said we were all okay with it and honestly thought you’d all be fine with it…? Anyway, my bad.
I mean there’s a lot of wilderness and open space in the US. No one is stopping you from going out there and starting from scratch. Go ahead and do it
Yeah. Dunno about elsewhere but while you can totally set up camp and do whatever, the local government here in Sweden will come with machinery and tear it down if you don’t have sufficient permits or own the land.
Hell even if you own the land there may be codes preventing you from setting up shelter without the right permits.
Yeah, if that’s an option then I respect people who do that, but if you want the comforts of modern society then you need to contribute.
Imo anti work is about pushing back on the ridiculous expectations of companies, and ensuring that employees receive some of the benefits of automation to ease the load on them.
This tweet strikes me as the “but I want everything for freeee!!!” person who makes anti work look bad. Like that idiot Reddit mod who went on Fox News or whatever news station it was.
Yeah I don’t mind working honestly, but I’d love to be able to live as well. Everything revolves around work, and there’s this constant race for improvement and efficiency. There won’t ever be a enough, and that makes me sick.
At some point I’d like to live too. If we’ve gotten so fucking efficient why can’t we cut down the amount of hours of work needed?
No instead we build machines that can perform creative endeavours so all the writers, artists, and the like are freed up to do menial labour instead.
I don’t argue the benefits of society but I still hate it. It’s like an abusive relationship, codependent and toxic. Ugh.
Yeah, it’s just about pushing back on ridiculous expectations.
If you work and do your part you should get shelter, medical care and all the other necessities, as well as time to live your life. Then, if you work hard you get a bigger house and more luxury items etc.
But we’ve ended up in a situation where you have to work hard and you don’t even necessarily get the basics anymore. Home ownership is a pipe dream for a lot of people in my country.
Meanwhile, people like the one in the tweet just want stuff for free. They don’t actually want a society where people get what they deserve, really they just wish they were born to a rich family and don’t have to work.
If you are more efficient then you probably need to work at hiding that from your employer and finding a way to spend the hours you save doing something beneficial for yourself. You employer pays you for a certain amount of output per hour, if you can do 8 hours of expected output in 1 then that’s your business.
The original anti work community on Reddit was more about the abolition of work, before being co-opted by work reformists. It wasn’t about just “pushing back”, but about abolishing the modern concept of wage labor under capitalism.
Money doesn’t need to exist, so your complaint about them just wanting things for free is ludicrous and strikes me as capitalist apologia.
I recommend reading The Abolition of Work to better understand the concept. At the very least, it would allow you to form actually compelling arguments against the idea so that you don’t have to continue showing your ignorance.
Actually, the person in the tweet is saying they don’t want to work. If you go based off that, then they don’t want to be a part of any society, they just want everything for free.
If you want to be part of society, then you work and contribute. Otherwise, you’re just a leech. Whether you’re a billionaire or a poor one.
How? This is exactly the type of “arguments” this meme is making fun of.
Person A: Maybe we should improve society.
Person B: If you don’t like society why don’t you leave it and go live in the forest?
No there isn’t; it’s all claimed by various people or national parks or something.
The idea that one can go out to the woods and build a new society unhindered is pure fantasy.
You absolutely could try. It would be fine until the already established hierarchies feel you’re becoming a threat to their monopoly of power. Then they will come up with some reason to go out and shoot you or lock you up.
But I do think most of the people who say shit like they want to live in a wilderness commune would last two weeks before giving up and going back to running water, paved roads and grocery stores.
It made sense when working meant providing for families, and even in the industrial revolution where it meant making mass goods for large amounts of people to enjoy.
But what happens when we get the ability to produce more than we need with only a relatively small amount of humans to do it? If we have the resources where we can easily give everyone on the planet a cell phone, why not do it?
We are already there with some goods: for example, we currently produce enough food to feed 1.5x the world’s population. We may very well reach a point in the next 20-30 years where we can produce everything market wants with 50% or perhaps even 25% of adult humans actually working. Our solution so far is creating artificial scarcity, but that’s only going to patch the system for so long.
Already we’re eschewing traditional factory jobs for service industry jobs like meal delivery. But we’re not far off from autonomous delivery vehicles automating that away, too. With the rise of AI, we can expect a lot more jobs to be augmented or superseded by automation over time.
Capitalism rests on the premises that we can always produce more and that people’s value is tied to their labor. But in a post-scarcity, heavily automated world, these premises break down, and suddenly this system doesn’t really work anymore.
Short of a communist revolution, I think we are going to need to start trialing measures that divorce benefits from labor. Most of the world already has healthcare coverage separated from labor (USA is the glaring exception,) and the next step would likely be universal basic income.
Not sure which came first though - capitalism or human nature. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity but it also capitalizes on human nature, namely those who want to be ‘better’ than others.
In some places, people keep telling their kids ‘go to college so you’ll have a good life and be educated, not like those laborers’. As a consequence, today there might be less skilled electricians, plumbers and the like. And those jobs pay better, and are arguably less boring than, say, working in a bank with a college diploma. Point being, just like a college diploma is a sign of status, so is the iphone and some random brand-name knick-knack or eating caviar.
For society to advance to the stage you’re proposing, we first have to get over our inflated egos and our need to be better than the rest, in whatever random field we manage to, be it food, clothes, tech, cars or diplomas. I’d want a world in which the garbage man has it as good as the university professor. Not sure the university professor would, though? But they both provide valuable services to society at large.
https://youtu.be/zZSLFlAbycE?si=-vC3tldC5jFP-IP0
“Human nature” is just a meaningless buzzword.
A good listen and all, if a bit overly optimistic. Let me explain. The video concludes basically that humans aren’t intrinsically bad or good, but that human nature is shaped by social conditions. Agreed. But those social conditions didn’t just manifest themselves. They were willed into existence and shaped to become what they currently are.
The Empire in the video? Humans and human nature. One does not build what can be described as an evil system purely by accident. Fascism and slavery didn’t happen as whoopsies. Slaver ships didn’t accidentally discover some stowaways and decided to roll with it. Decisions were made and actions were taken with clear intent.
And responsibility for evil in society extends far beyond those that are the face of evil. Everyone who is OK with it happening is to blame. The person who views the iphone as a status symbol couldn’t care less about suicides in Apple factories. If you were to give everyone an iphone, there’s a pretty high chance that person would oppose it - what about their status symbol? Sure, they’d mask it as ‘what about those that worked for the money to buy it?’ - see the whole student debt forgiveness debate.
I am probably emphasising evil here, but given a room with a bouquet of lillies in it and a pile of shit, which would you turn your attention to first?
Is there potential for good as well as for evil in humans? Sure. People come together when there are natural disasters. Localized. Small groups of people in the grand scheme of things.
What did it in for me was the covid pandemic. A truly global scale phenomenon. At the start I really thought we could do this. Isolate for a month ish. Stay indoors was all we had to do to limit spread. We couldn’t even do that proper because people were worried about their freedom. If that’s not selfishness, I don’t know what is.
Then remember the toilet paper panic buying? No making sure everyone has some. Fuck you, got mine. Then the vaccines came out and we got a significant amount of people questioning them and actively pushing against them.
The video is a nice story and has a very nice speaking voice attached to it, but it’s way too optimistic in my view. And I feel it does a disservice by shifting blame to the conditions imposed by society as a separate entity from the members of said society. People watch it and say ‘hey, we’re inherently good. we help each other in times of floods’ so they’re less prone to reflection (which the video, to its credit, does state as a source of good).
Honestly, there aren’t that many changes we’d need to get there. For example, instead of working one person 60 hours we can work two people 30 hours. If we divorce benefits from full time status, companies won’t have to pay all that much to make the system work.
With universal income, people could opt to work part of the year, or work for a few years and take time off, or however else they want to do it. There would still be an incentive to work, just not to work to death.
I think the alternative is living out in the wild, fending for yourself. As much as I hate the inequality and mediocrity of modern life, it’s something of a step up from living like that. I love watching Primitive Technology, but I probably couldn’t handle that life. Imagine spending hours collecting fire wood, spending hours/days turning it into charcoal and building a clay oven just to fire up some shit you picked up from the river in hopes of getting a few globules of iron, to make like a small shank or a spear tip or something (after maybe weeks of effort). Oh, and you’re having to get your own food and maybe bathe yourself every so often. Super interesting to watch, but holy shit is that alot of work for so little (compared to what we’re used to seeing). Life is work.
It’s not, actually. The majority of human history is neither humans fending for themselves, nor submitting to wage slavery. Humans are collaborative, social beings. Even the nuclear family is an aberration on our otherwise multi generational and communal shared history.
Yeah, all human societies worked together on large communal projects and would make things and exchange it with others through barter. We still do those things fairly regularly.
Sure, it wouldn’t work for a large an complex project like going to the moon, but that wasn’t done by a capitalist company either.
Barter, as was taught to me at least, is mostly a myth. Barter certainly existed, but we have no evidence to support barter as the primary method of trade in any period of history. It primarily existed, where it did exist, as a way for people from disparate cultures to trade, within communities barter was nearly non existent, and most things were done in a sort of social credit system for much of history.
https://youtu.be/hTREU-xVeY0?si=qRTOs6AuK0Z2jWGs
Here’s a source for you. It will help your argument. As someone who has actually studied it, I agree with your hypothesis.
https://youtu.be/hTREU-xVeY0?si=qRTOs6AuK0Z2jWGs
The VAST majority of human history disagrees. Humans are collaborative not competitive naturally.
I don’t think he mentioned competition in his comment, rather he’s stating the bare minimum for survival
