I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.
And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?
I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.
And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."
I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.
I felt the same way at your age and in many ways still do at 32. 29 wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't biological maturing that happened. I became a father and now have a tenth of the free time I had before.
The perspective that changed is twofold: first is that a job does provide life (your kid's), and second is that life is LONG. If you don't get rich by 30, you can get rich by 40 and still have a long time to do whatever you think is impactful.
The thing I try to do now is to accept my situation and only think about what I can do to improve it. Play the hand you are dealt and don't think about what could have been. That is an endless loop of despair. It takes time to truly understand how to be grateful for what you have. I wasted all I had, including money, because I was not grateful. Now all I have to do is look at my beautiful baby to be grateful.
If the thing he is doing is not providing fulfillment, it's probably not the right thing. I'd advise not to wait. Search for what brings growth and contentment. Go for it.
Having a rich life full of new experiences can be done without chasing the dollar.
Go for what? That is not something you can answer by up and quitting. When you are grateful you can stop to smell the roses and find meaning in what you do.
This is not meant to be hippie talk. What it really is risk management. When you perceive that you are losing you psychologically want to increase risk to make up for it, leading you to make poor bets. It applies in trading (gambling), where I learned it, but happens in life as well.
Someone in his position needs to consider whether quitting is legitimately a better bet rather than letting emotions dictate.
Having kids is a great way to give yourself some perspective and curb existential angst.
This is going to be a touchy subject as people have children for many different reasons - I'll describe a few significant groups:
- Those who do it to pass on knowledge, teach kids to be inquisitive and enjoy making/learning. This kind of parent themselves love learning, and raising a child is a massive part of their life journey
- Those who figure it's the next logical progression in their life/relationship, who wind up so tired from the combination of work and raising a child/children that yes their existential angst has been effectively banished. Some may find perspective when they finally find the time to reflect. Most are ultimately happy that they had kids
- Those who seemingly have Stockholm syndrome, evangelizing the joys of having kids in one breath and telling their children to shut up in another. The kind who had kids because they're a status symbol, a Rubicon of the aspirational class
The first kind make the best parents. We shouldn't try to sell kids as a solution to life's problems - otherwise we'll just keep making the second and third kinds of parents with each generation.
I don't love my daughter because I'm sharing some lifelong journey of learning, whatever that means. I love her because my brain is wired to do so, to flood my blood stream with neurotransmitters that and hormones in response to her.
You're right that there are many different reasons people love their kids. But your overly intellectuallized and snobbish categorization misses the main reasons. Most people aren't on a journey of learning, and probably don't even like learning very much. But even dumb uninquisitive people can derive great joy from raising families. It's the ultimate equalizer.
Indeed, throughout history and still today in at least Asia, much of the Americas, and the U.S., most people get married and have kids because of reason 2. I assure you they make perfectly fine parents and most derive tremendous joy from parenthood.
> I don't love my daughter because I'm sharing some lifelong journey of learning, whatever that means. I love her because my brain is wired to do so, to flood my blood stream with neurotransmitters that and hormones in response to her.
Yes, but that's more-or-less the same reason you feel anyway about anything.
The difference is the amount of cognition involved in the process of eliciting that reaction. When my daughter was little I'd feed her a bottle and snuggle her to sleep. My wife noted that when I did that I looked stoned.
My first sentence professed that "This is going to be a touchy subject as people have children for many different reasons" - I don't pretend to know why anyone here had kids.
But your overly intellectuallized and snobbish categorization misses the main reasons.
Here's some big ones I missed: working the farm and supporting the parents or for dowry. Entirely valid reasons to have kids depending on circumstance.
My point was that kids shouldn't be sold as a solution to existential problems. My best friend did just that and his relationship with his partner has disintegrated because it wasn't a realistic way of dealing with the issues that he has. He'll make a good dad and partner when he figures out what's burning inside him.
Kids are great, but by my observation, the primary logical motivation to have them is so that one can make sense of their own existence.
It's a never ending cycle to figure out what this life is about by giving birth to life which then again must solve the same question themselves.
However, do we really understand this existential angst at its root? Or is this simply a never-ending passing of the torch?
I'm not questioning how much joy children can bring to a couple's life but I've been thinking about the non-evolutionary purpose of having children for a while and I'm not sure how to think about it.
> However, do we really understand this existential angst at its root?
Children are a great reminder that understanding existence is irrelevant. Children don't contemplate their own existence, they simply experience and relish that existence. You can't be sure that you have any sort of purpose or destiny, but you can be sure of the ground beneath your feet and the sand between your toes. Children get that intuitively, and for a long time they can't approach life any other way.
People have kids for all sorts of reasons, ranging from emotional to rational to accidental! Plus plenty of variation in parenting styles and the benefits thereof. I'm not sure there's much to say about a single purpose.
However, your ideas about the passing of the big questions to a new generation does strike a chord.
Speaking as a non-parent, the biggest mistake I see parents make is to live through their kids. I get that it's natural, partly because parents want the best for their kids and try to give them all they can, but in my opinion kids need role models more than almost anything else, and if their role models are martyrs is it any wonder that the cycle continues?
It takes wisdom to balance life as a parent with life as an adult, I'm sure it's not always easy, but I hope that if I'm ever a parent I'll remember to try, as it seems healthier for both kids and parents.
I know that sounds pithy, but the reality is most folks don't really hit their adult stride until their late twenties or early thirties. My peers and siblings all shared that same experience. To be honest, I wonder if it's actually bio/neurological.
Coincidentally, that's also about the timeframe when a lot of folks start having kids. So is it really the kids that gave you "perspective and curb existential angst"? Or was it just natural maturation, and the kids happened to be around at the time?
And let's suppose it isn't biological. That it's the kids themselves. I'd contend what you're actually doing is just distracting yourself... it's tough to care about the meaning of life when you're up at 2am changing another diaper. Is that perspective? Or is it just horse blinders?
You are in the top 0.0001% of history as far as what you have. Hell, anyone on this site is. Most people in the past or right now would kill to have what you are describing.
Yeah, you are working for money, so use that to your advantage. What is it that you really want or want to do? Start putting money aside so you can spend time doing that at a later date. Use your free time and when possible work time to work on skill sets and projects which will make that possible.
You are incredibly lucky, and you've got a great foundation to build off of. Don't discount how valuable that is, and don't waste that opportunity.
I really dislike this line of reasoning. There are always people better off and worse off than any particular one of us. Does that mean we are all wrong to feel any emotion? Of course not. The human experience is subjective.
Of course it isn't wrong to feel emotion. I'm the same age as the OP, I'm also well-off, I also get disillusioned and unsatisfied.
But a large part of that emotion is misplaced. You can change how you feel simply by changing your perspective. You can look at a situation like that and feel like you are doing unsatisfying work, or you can also realize the benefits that come from that and turn it into a positive. And based on what they are saying, there's a lot of good that can come out of it. Good that most people don't have any chance at. You've got to feel a little thankful or lucky to even have that opportunity.
Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc...
The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example.
There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
Basic income will probably result in even more antagonism towards immigrants. As Milton Friedman said, "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state".
I feel immigration to the US is too restrictive as it is, let alone what it would become if it meant giving everyone a paycheck. You basically have these options:
1. Restrict immigration (perhaps you are OK with this, I am not. I feel immigration is one of the fundamental things that helped this country succeed, and that we should be moving to make it MORE open, not less).
2. Allow immigration but not offer basic income until you are a citizen. Now you have a classist system. If you were born in the US you are part of the citizen caste, that is guaranteed income from taxes (a nobility if you will), if you were born outside the borders you must work for your income here. Sure, eventually you could be "admitted", but it seems weird that an 18 year old would be allowed to do whatever he wants but someone just entering the country with three kids would be forced to work.
3. Offer basic income to everyone that comes in, have no restriction, and default immediately.
If you think Americans are xenophobic now, just wait to see their attitudes if basic income ever passes.
I think option 2 is the obvious solution. You offer basic income to your citizens and provide a rational process for acquiring citizenship that allows the naturalization of individuals who have contributed value to the country. We already have many different rules and obligations for citizens and I don't see this as a problem. Our currently problematic means of allowing naturalization is much more of an issue.
I do think that basic income needs to introduced gradually and needs to be paired with reductions in the minimum wage.
This reduction in the bottom range of wages will make more jobs economically viable (Since they have to produce less value to make a profit beyond the cost of the wages). It makes immigration less attractive to people earning the bottom range of wages without leaving our working poor in the lurch. This combined with the provision of basic income to citizens makes citizens more able to compete for low income jobs since they are being subsidized.
I feel this is a bit too early for basic income. That change will come to pass naturally when society will be able to continue to exist and function normally even if almost nobody will work. That would require some pretty hefty advancements in AI and robotics.
Basically, I don't see struggle-free basic income without the robots doing all the work for us.
Basic Income won't come naturally, look at how difficult a 40 hour week / 8hr day was to bring into existence. Basically, widespread strikes were required. The baseline productivity of the world is already sufficient for basic income, and/or increased leisure vs work weeks - the only thing that advanced automation might to in the future is make the disconnect between historical economic assumptions and modern productivity unavoidable from a political standpoint.
Look, I think the robots are gonna take over, but you have to be REALLY ignorant to not realize that there are far too many jobs we need humans to do, going on right now, for us to subsidize even the highly technically skilled to go off and follow their whims without any sort of economic integration whatsoever. The value of the denomination of the "minimum income" will fall immediately, lowering that supposed minimum, because no one will want to produce the boring things everyone wants to consume on the other end. Therefore, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER agitate for a basic income in terms of whatever brand-name of money (dollar, euro, nyancoin or some abstract non-existent Platonic form of "money"), but instead say something like "Everyone will be given a X by Y square foot dwelling, allowed Z gallons of water a year, given 20 fresh tomatoes, etc." and THEN reason about how those can be provided (do we force [enslave] people to provide this to others? what do we do if no one coughs up the goods?). If you agitate for a minimum wage or minimum income, it will always be worthless at the whim of the currency's authority(ies).
More realistically, just reason instead what the least you need as an individual is, work to get it from within whatever economy you find yourself in, and then begin the REAL work of life, developing your happiness for and from what you have.
>you have to be REALLY ignorant to not realize that there are far too many jobs we need humans to do, going on right now, for us to subsidize even the highly technically skilled to go off and follow their whims without any sort of economic integration whatsoever.
Really?
First off, any basic income that is provided is not going to come close to what a 'highly technically skilled' individual makes.
Secondly, if those individuals do find some activity or undertaking valuable enough to trade the relative income for, it probably has unrecognized value. I would bet they these individuals will acquire expertise, develop new knowledge, and create new things that will be highly benificial to society.
This is very similar we what do with grants to scientists conducting general research. Following your logic, we have too many important problems to bother wasting scientists time on anything that isn't an immediate problem.
Thirdly, there is no way that these individuals would be operating 'without any sort of economic integration whatsoever'. They would still be consuming in our society and their non-consumptive actions would still have economic effects.
That said, I don't think we are at the point we can realistically provide a basic income capable of supporting a reasonable standard of living. I do think we can start providing a basic supplementary income and I think that if paired with reductions in the minimum wage, it could be very successful at stimulating economic growth during the next downturn or slow down.
The Swiss proposal is a very generous proposal that still comes at a time when saying "people can just get jobs" is not entirely laughable. You could say they're ahead of their time.
And yet, current government spending is 21% of GDP, and that amounts to $12,000 per man, woman and child. Remember, not everyone will hold on to their $12,000. Many will pay back a portion in taxes, and some will pay all of it back. And children will probably not receive the full amount, their parents instead getting a growing percentage until the child is 18. That's about 25% of the population. People in prison would not receive their basic income while serving their sentence, I'd assume. That's about 1% of the population, although I'd hope a basic income would decrease that.
The Swiss proposal would be $32,400 per person, for 74% of the US population, which would come to 7.7 trillion, or around 46% of the GDP.
Sounds outrageous, yes, but consider the fact that we are continually increasing the amount of wealth we create, while drastically reducing the labor necessary to create it.
GDP will continue to increase and wages will continue to stagnate and fall. And at some point, certain disruptive technologies (such as self-driving cars) will decimate whole industries almost overnight.
What that means is that the basic income amount won't be increasing nearly as quickly as the GDP, which means that balking at a current-day percentage of GDP will make less and less sense.
Especially when you're facing massive discontent and the prospect of a near freeze on consumer spending.
Ideally, ideally basic income would pay for basic needs and let people be creative, more realistically it would be impossible to get passed into law, if it was passed into law it would be turned into something unrecognizable relative to what proponents of basic income expect or want, and because it would be the largest social program in history, there would be a lot of unintended consequences. I don't see how you can look at how dysfunctional US politics is and think there is any way in hell that the two parties would work together on something like it. Democrats would get trashed for removing existing social programs and Republicans would get trashed for creating a new social program. Maybe in another country...
Basic income is a great idea, but something that is actually politically workable and a lot smaller in scope is needed. It is constantly advocated around here with no real evidence that it is workable at scale.
The key to a happy and successful life is to find meaningful ways to spend your time. Meaningful to you, of course. Because of the monetary system we live in, usually a large chunk of our time needs to be devoted towards earning money, or at least finding a way to eat, live comfortably, and reproduce (too scientific sounding?). Buddhist monks will be able to show you other ways to enjoy life outside that system, however. That's always an option.
Work is not misery as long as you believe in, and are constantly engaged with, your work. It becomes misery when it doesn't align with your needs and expectations.
The biggest question is, what would you rather do? What would you do with your free time if money wasn't an issue?
If you are happy with your product, then what is it about the work environment? Does simply managing people stress you out? Or, is it the expectation that "I should" enjoy what I do because it is successful?
The vast majority of the job postings I see are for companies optimizing the way other companies sell stuff to consumers. I don't find any meaning in that. Even the "great" jobs (ones where you can focus purely on a technical challenge) don't hold much allure: why optimize technology for the sake of optimizing technology?
Where am I to look for jobs where I have agency in the choice of technology and the direction of the product, a group of intelligent and supportive peers, and a product that directly improves the lives of others? These types of jobs seem to be a vanishingly small percentage of those that are available (not even accounting for the further filtering that happens: skill match, inteviewing, salary requirements, etc).
The problem isn't that there isn't any impactful work, its that impactful work is hard to identify at the outset. We've allowed narratives to shape our view of how "impact" gets made: the aha moment when a scientist discovers something in a movie. But the underlying connections between breakthroughs are much more subtle and actually impossibly difficult to predict.
Who would have guessed that the video game industry would push graphics cards to a point where they are now incredibly beneficial to scientific applications? You could say the makers of PC games were just optimizing things for consumers, but there is a direct connection between what they did and the computing power we have for worthwhile applications today.
Who would have guessed, in 1847, that Boole's philosophical papers on logic, would form the foundations of computing a hundred years later? George Boole died without every knowing any of this.
The most impactful changes in people's lives are rarely direct. Seeking "impactful" goals is a trap in my experience. Find something that excites you and if its creative, my money's on that being more useful than you think.
Biologically speaking we are wired to produce kids, as such many people find deep meaning and satisfaction by raising a family. Of course this isn't for everyone, but I put it down as a driver for why people behave they way they do.
Because it's more rewarding than what almost any of us do at work. And in some ways raising a child with your values is a vote for the future direction of the world.
I understand the sentiment but I think your conclusion is misguided. You're not trading your life/focus/attention/time for money, you're trading it for what you can do with that money. Money is just a temporary store of value. It's worthless unless you use it for something. That something is what you're working for. Whether that's worth trading your time for is the real question you need to answer.
Generally speaking I agree with you, but there's another element to discuss, and that's in flexibility.
Imagine you have two jobs to choose from, both in the same field. One is part-time and pays a low wage, but a wage that is just about high enough to live on. One is full-time and pays a much higher wage, enough that you can spend without worrying about overspending.
How many people have the luxury of choosing between these options? What many people end up with is a situation where they're working full-time just to make ends meet. For these people, both time and security are hard to come by, and the competitive nature of the job market means people get trapped working hard in jobs they don't enjoy because they don't want to lose what little they already have.
Whilst I believe that you're right to point to personal choice and responsibility, it's worth acknowledging that some of the problems are systemic. Why can't we change the way we work together, so that doing what you enjoy isn't so much an act of bravery but is just the norm? What might those changes look like?
As for the article, thought it was great. I'm very much in favour of a communal creativity future, though I'm sure we'd find all sorts of ways to keep ourselves amused. I thought this section was particularly insightful...
'Hunnicutt told me that if a cashier’s work were a video game—grab an item, find the bar code, scan it, slide the item onward, and repeat—critics of video games might call it mindless. But when it’s a job, politicians praise its intrinsic dignity.'
Good thoughts. The hard nosed capitalist in me is saying that those more unfortunate people aren't trapped but are choosing to keep what (little) they have instead of choosing the (often riskier and very often unsuccessful) ways of moving up. Good thing that part of me is small ;)
> I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Money is unavoidable, so if you're going to be unhappy about earning it, you're going to have an unhappy life no matter what.
I kind of doubt money is the issue...you might just be looking for inspiration.
Maybe look into the nonprofit world. These are organizations that stand for something, and most are in desperate need of technical talent. You won't make as much money but if you can work for a cause you believe in, you might feel your work is more worthwhile.
There are some nonprofit job search engines (just search something like "nonprofit jobs"), but another way is to pick an issue you feel strongly about, and then do some web searching to find orgs that are working on that issue. Then check their job listings to see what they're looking for.
Nonprofits tend to not grow very fast, so there might not be a job that's exactly what you want to do. If you can find one or two orgs you like, you can get your foot in the door through volunteering first.
There is also a healthy ecosystem of companies that provide support to nonprofits. Nonprofits often outsource parts of their technology, so another way to get into the nonprofit world is through a digital agency. I would try looking for tech jobs in the DC area--a lot of the companies in DC that support nonprofits will happily hire remote developers, project managers, etc.
I think it is because in college you pursued your passion that was liberal arts. Couldn't find a job in that area, so you learned programming. You did well as a programmer, but it isn't were your passion is at.
I studied computer science and information systems. I also studied business management. These are areas I had a passion in and when I worked as a programmer I felt good enough it because I was passionate about it.
In 2001 I developed a mental illness from too much stress, ended up on disability in 2003. I lost my passion because I was no longer able to work. I became broken as it were. All of the technology changed around me, new programming languages got invented and the old ones I knew ere obsolete.
I got into writing and self-published a short story. I botched some of the grammar so it got some bad reviews. I couldn't afford an editor to fix it.
I've tried writing code on Github, but haven't got noticed by anyone yet. It isn't easy for me to get into a group of people and try to help out. I got into the debates with the Opal CoC, and connected with at least one other person. I am trying to rebuild my career one step at a time.
Work isn't supposed to make you happy, work is there to earn money to afford the things in life that make you happy. You have to invest time and money in other people to form relationships. Sometimes those relationships pay off and you are happy, other times they don't and you are sad. Sometimes you work too many hours and don't have the time to do anything that makes you happy.
It uses a new type of management where employees make their own decisions instead of being micromanaged. Where employees are empowered instead of having a tyrant boss. Where employees have fun working and make a game out of throwing fish to each other and singing. It really does make a difference.
As work becomes more and more abstract, probably fewer and fewer people will find satisfaction in it. Some will, but the majority will not. We're just not built for doing this sort of thing for extended periods of time. We've evolved operating in the real, physical world, and our reward mechanisms are fine tuned for it.
Our reward mechanisms are not tuned finely enough to prevent video games and porn from hijacking them
They're not hijacking the reward center so much as they've found that people like sex and winning (you could argue they're intertwined or one and the same). They are our primary motivators.
The problem is that what we call "work" these days is so abstract that we never actually complete a task and thus never get that juicy hit of AH, job well done. Nailed it! It's just Well there's more of that shit on its way... There's no winning - it's a race that drags on until you retire or die.
Many of us eventually figure out that the rewards are false. Then video games stop being enjoyable, so they start to rely on our social ties e.g. farmville.
I have an alternate philosophy that doesn't make you quit your job to find yourself. See if it resonates with you.
You can't be too emotionally attached to your job. Jobs have value but they come and go. You change jobs throughout life. Some jobs that used to pay really well are now becoming extinct etc.
Eventually you retire. My dad has been retired for ~15 years. My mum has been retired for ~10 years. (He lectured in music and she taught primary school.) Even if your job is awesome, you can't do it forever. Circumstance forces you out. Life moves on. I've been kinda retired for 1 year.
Most people have different jobs throughout their working life. I've been through a few as have my parents. The grass always looks greener from the other side.
You chase each dream and when/if you get it, you realize you probably had some unrealistic expectations of how great it should have been. Even the jobs that seemed super important at the time turn out to be not that mind blowingly significant over time.
In whatever work you do, you have to detach yourself a bit from the triumphs and tragedies. If it all goes bad, you don't take it personally. If things go really well, you don't get a swelled head about it. That's the nature of true professionalism.
Maybe if you cure cancer or something, you can take the time to do a quiet double fist pump. But then you move on! :)
Essentially, you should perform your work like a machine. Or like breathing. There's no emotions necessary, good or bad. You act how you believe another professional should act without bringing your personality into it. In engineering jobs, people want you to be the engineer. They don't need the other parts of you. Outside of work you can be yourself.
In Australia, we tend to say, "Work to live" rather than "Live to work". It means do your work then enjoy living.
"Essentially, you should perform your work like a machine."
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I can't agree with that. Yes, if dull work was a necessary part of life then there's some sense in just getting through it, but I don't agree that it is. Take away people's need to work and you can free them up to do what they want to do instead.
Your advice is pragmatic, and there is wisdom in what you say about taking the rough with the smooth, but there is a better way of living than being slave to a wage, even if it's only part of the time. Why sell ourselves short when we don't have to?
I prefer to change the term being "slave to wage" to "I worked for a living". But everyone has different circumstances financially. If you are truly stuck in a miserable position then moving to another job is fine by my philosophy.
The future of "no need to work" for everyone sounds pretty awesome. I hope it happens. I am actually living that way now. After a couple of decades of working and some big redundancy payouts, I have savings to fall back on.
I'm sure I could've given it a more generous reading, my apologies. Is current work really that dull? Certainly not for everybody. However, if it's best to switch off your emotional capacity to get through it then yes, perhaps the work is dull.
"The future of "no need to work" for everyone sounds pretty awesome. I hope it happens. I am actually living that way now. After a couple of decades of working and some big redundancy payouts, I have savings to fall back on."
Sounds good. What's the best part of living without paid work for you?
No commuting in traffic!
(That's a joke for the Sydney-siders on HN)
I essentially see myself as an early retiree so I live like a retired person. My parents became a bit of a template.
The 8 or so hours of the day that I had to work are now gone. I just replaced it with more of what I did in my leisure time. My life wasn't bad while I had the job so the only drastic change was to not go to work!
That's quite enlightened and Buddhist, and certainly helps to cope with the unpleasant reality of work.
We are still trading our time and lives for money working on things that don't resonate with our values.
When fighting for survival we never questioned whether our actions fit with our values; there were no vegan cavemen. We are fortunate, but struggle with this new understanding.
If your job is completely misaligned with your values, I think making a job change is a good idea. Don't do something that isn't you.
Maybe it's my particularly uninteresting values but no job resonates that much. Even if it did, you eventually have to retire. Then you are going to really be depressed.
Better to not be so attached to the job and be retired happily. Or in my case get fired happily!
Free money and any job you like does sound good though.
The science is quite clear that sitting is incredibly bad for our health; yet many of us are sacrificing both our time and health to do something we don't want to.
If life feels awful, what makes you continue on the same path?
I was feeling like that a few years ago. I stopped, thought about what was wrong, and took a different path. Now I'm making much less money, I'm not working in things I don't believe in and I interact with people I like. Much better than before.
I did web and app development. Years of PHP + MySql + CSS + JavaScript. At some point it felt overwhelming to choose a PHP framework and I switched to ActionScript, which I enjoyed a lot. I worked in a startup, got paid well, but noticed their only plan was to sell and retire. They did not care about their impact on the world or their employees, nor about doing things properly. I quit and worked in an FOSS Android project with a positive impact on people.
Then I could not do than anymore. I started finding databases, forms and interfaces unbearable. First I thought I did not like coding anymore. Then I realized it was not coding, but doing it alone, and focusing on things so detached from color, movement, space and sound.
I decided to focus on art and creativity. To teach creative coding, and play with code. Create beautiful interactive things without thinking so much about the performance, about the usability, about the correctness. Basically experimenting and playing as I had done as a kid. Apparently there's some demand for teaching, generative art and design, and helping other creative people with their projects.
I am 29 and I also feel uneasy about my life. I have no real interests. I make a pretty good salary as a pharmacist and I've been saving and investing 80% of my income (up to 90% this past year) the past five years. I plan to do this for another few years.
But then what? I already designed my minimalist life to be filled with free time (no possessions, no obligations). No mortgage, no loans whatsoever, and getting a vasectomy next month. Literally all the time I have not at work is free time.
This may sound like humblebrag, but because my expenses are so low I can quit working right now. But it's nothing to brag about. Because I'm scared. I'm addicted to a salary and the reason I keep working (I don't like my job - it's repetitive and tedious and stressful) is because I don't want to make less money than I'm currently making.
I don't want kids, I don't want to travel. I don't want to commit to a relationship. What will happen in five years when my passive income comes close to what I make at work? What will I do with myself? I really don't know. I'm learning how to code but lose motivation every two weeks.
It'll be interesting to see what people actually do when there's no work left to do. I don't picture a good outcome, mainly from my perspective of having too much freedom. Yes, there is such a thing.
Can I ask you a personal question: why the vasectomy? I get that you're not looking to have kids now, but why make that a permanent decision now when you're not sure what you want in the future? I don't know you that well, but you don't strike me as the sort of person who is likely to get someone pregnant accidentally. What does getting the vasectomy mean to you?
So what I tend to do with my free time is overplan. I guess I'm trying to maximize my freedom even more by guaranteeing zero kids. I can be quite impulsive, and I don't want to get trapped by my own poor decisions. Plus there's always adoption, IVF, etc.
"I can be quite impulsive, and I don't want to get trapped by my own poor decisions."
All the more reason to delay having a vasectomy. Give yourself time to think, there's no rush. Unless you're tired of wearing condoms there's not much to gain here, other than making it some kind of statement of intent.
I hope you will take some time to consider whether the vasectomy is an impulsive decision, but ultimately I know it's none of my business. It's your body, it's up to you.
Best of luck with finding enjoyable ways to spend your free time.
While I broadly feel the same as you do about wage-labor, you're not going to be able to do anything positive for your situation in life if you're clinically depressed. Have you started seeing a therapist?
To emphasize: I'm not implying something's wrong with you. In fact, I sought therapy for work-related depression only ~4 years ago, and had the bad luck to find a therapist who told me, just after graduating university, that adult life just is careerism. That wasn't helping! But, again, unhappiness is a part of life, whereas clinical depression is a crippling illness that prevents you from being able to work on your situation or even experience your unhappiness as meaningful.
Clearly, happiness does not seem to correlate entirely with how well off you are.
Perhaps happiness relates mostly to social relationships, and spending your most productive hours with colleagues with whom you generally have relatively weak bonds depletes your 'social happiness' reserves.
Or perhaps the kinds of jobs many of us do in modern life, especially those involving computer screens and office buildings, are just not well-suited to us.
Or maybe it's just an inherent human property to be unhappy much of the time, and perhaps some people suffer more from this than others (a happiness 'baseline').
I could go on, of course, but fortunately a lot of research has been conducted on this, and many very wise people throughout the ages have written extensively about this.
One thing that could help is to start researching 'happiness' or what you could call 'the good life', whether through philosophy or religion or psychology, if you haven't done so already. And I don't mean 'google for happiness and click through few articles', but rather really dive in. Treat it as a proper project. Take a particular philosophy/approach that appeals to you, and actually apply it. Properly. At least for a while. A lot of it might be crap, or just not for you, but some of it will resonate. For me, it was Alan Watts (and zen buddhism), Seligman/positive psychology, and just the act of reading 'denser' philosophical stuff in itself that somehow tickled my happy bone (hmm, poor choice of words).
Also consider what you've tried, and most importantly, if you've actually tried these things. It took me until my thirties to realize that I had not, in fact, experimented with different ways/perspectives/philosophies of life in my twenties, but rather I had mostly half-heartedly flirted with all these things from a safe distance, and mostly let things happen to me. And all that generally just confirmed what already was while making me feel like I'd explored.
Or, to make an analogy: if you want to find a partner to be happy with long-term, this usually requires a degree of 'experimentation', as few people are lucky enough to find such a partner right away. Common mistakes in this regard are to 1) keep dating the same essential person, and then wondering why it keeps going wrong, or 2) be too shy to take initiative, and wait for things to 'happen'. I've noticed that 2 often ends up leading to 1, as you tend to attract and feel attracted to the same types of people if you remain the same kind of person.
Basically: break your patterns, and break them properly. Our natural instinct is not to, and cling to safety and the familiar. And if breaking patters becomes a pattern, well, then break that and go do the same thing with full abandon for a while.
If quitting your job seems like too much, and perhaps it is, then start with other stuff. Perhaps that will be enough. But just make sure that you really did try other things, because I think the illusion of doing or having done so is an easy trap to fall into. I personally did quit my job, because it was the only way for me to actually try different stuff, but then I'm perhaps just generally too inclined to get sucked up in what I do for work. You might not need this.
And finally, with my rather biased current perspective: give up on trying altogether. Just let yourself be 'now'. Perhaps read some of Alan Watts' material before you do this, so you have an idea as to why this might be effective.
For me the major breakthroughs and a more consistent sense of happiness came as a direct result of giving up (mostly) on all that finding. I can strongly recommend Alan Watts' 'The Book', as well as 'The Wisdom of Insecurity'. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he's an entertaining writer, and the approach he suggests is (relatively) unusual, perhaps especially to many of us HN types (ambitious, stuck in the 'virtual', analytic).
Stop blaming work, which for thousands of years has been endurable and honorable for humans. Study philosophy seriously, and avoid philosophical paths that manifestly cause depression.
For thousands of years, work was something the peasants and the poor people did. An excellent trick pulled recently was to convince many of them that there was such a thing as a "work ethic" and that it was good and right and honourable.
Work may have been around for thousands of years in one form or another, but I don't think it'd be unfair to say the nature of work has changed with the industrial revolution.
Further, just because something's been "endurable" for thousands of years doesn't necessarily make it good, or invalidate attempts to change it. And "honorable" is all about cultural values.
I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine.
When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.
A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s
But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans.
I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.
Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages.
In the 1800s Western nations conquered the world, and were thus able to export their unemployment to other countries, thus creating what we now call The Third World. As late as 1820, India was still producing more steel than Europe, but all such industries were eventually closed in India and moved to Europe, leaving India in a bad situation from which it is yet to fully recover.
It's unlikely that Western nations will have an easy time exporting their unemployment in the 2020s or 2030s. Among other things, they lack the military power that is necessary to do so.
The labour force participation rates look rather different if you adjust them for the changing age profiles of the population, to account for there being a lot more old people and a lot more scope for them to afford to retire.
If you look at this example, it'll show overall labour force participation actually rose between 1960 and 2000 for employees of every age under 60
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf
Admittedly that trend is unlikely to have continued through the last recession, but it's pretty hard evidence against the doom-mongers of the 1960s at least. And it's remained resilient against a number of trends other than automation, not least a marked tendency to export jobs rather than unemployment to the developing world.
Manchester cotton might not have been welcomed by India's textile manufacturers, but I'm baffled by the suggestion that the British decimated the Indian steel industry (I mean, quite apart from everything I've ever read on the subject suggesting Indian steel production vastly increased in the 19th century - railways being more steel-intensive than ceremonial sword production - an Indian family conglomerate now owns the British steel industry!)
On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we've long hit the point where we could apply our productivity to reducing working hours with little appreciable end effect in output of stuff (and a huge increase in quality of life).
"But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff."
Mere coincidence combined with survivorship bias. Ask the Easter Islanders or Mayans about how people always find new employment. By definition a developed economy is a country that was historically lucky, therefore its members hold very strange beliefs about cause and effect, like the collapse of employment in one industry magically results in employment in another industry because if it hadn't coincidentally happened, our ancestors economy would have collapsed and we'd be dead or owned by some other economy.
Bad car analogy is I've crossed many a street on foot, and I've never been hit, therefore there is a magic dead hand of social science that pushes cars out of my way, and I'll never get hit and nobody ever gets hit and its going to be eternally safe into the future. After all, if someone had run over my g-g-g-g-grandfather with an ox cart in the street, I wouldn't be here, therefore fatal car-pedestrian accidents don't happen.
Hell, modern theory has it that the pyramids were in essence a type of stimulus program to keep folks busy and fed (and no, they were not in fact slaves)!
I would love to see a return to investing in and updating some of the physical infrastructure that has degraded over time.
In the USA there are a huge amounts of bridges that need updating/repairing, dams needing repair (or removal), roads needing repair, dilapidated school buildings needing updating (as well as energy efficiency updates), etc. There seems like TONS of work to be done to refresh our aging physical infrastructure.
Not just the US. And not just maintenance. Creating good infrastructure is one of the best of all possible investments.
The problem isn't that there's no useful work; it's that the genius of the current economic system - the one where it's every individual for themselves, and there's no such thing as society - is incredibly bad at deciding what needs to be done to make the future better for everyone.
So education at all levels is mediocre, infrastructure is deliberately crippled for profit, there's no systematic planning for the future at all - and people in work are still spending huge amounts of time on essentially pointless activities.
It's an organisational and political problem, not a technological one.
Actually it's more of a psychological problem. Getting humans to learn deferred gratification as a species turns out to be exceptionally hard.
Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands.
We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.
Hi Falcolas, this is Derek Thompson, the author of the piece.
1. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive, because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies. How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work?
That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress! -- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said in the piece:
"The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.”"
2. The fact that unemployed men seem to be less social overall suggests to me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away.
3. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs and crime is very complicated.
4. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly.
5. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at least this question as I understand it) head on.
2. I know this is anecdotal, but when I was unemployed I often didn't socialize because I simply couldn't afford the luxury. Many social activities are fairly expensive, depending on your area, friends, and preferences.
Great point. This gets at the impossible endogeneity of the subject. Are the jobless miserable because they're poor, lonely, bored, or distraught? Well, perhaps they are lonely and bored because they can't afford to socialize. And perhaps they're distraught because they're failing to live up to a cultural expectation that, with more wealth and more redistribution, wouldn't exist. Etc etc.
One last thing, apropos of nothing except my stream-of-consciousness typing and the feeling that somebody might bring it up here, is that some people have pointed out to me on Twitter that I should have studied students or retired people, who both seem pretty happy and don't work. I don't accept the comparison. Students essentially have a job with school and a camaraderie on campus that the unemployed have lost when they lose the water cooler. (It is, perhaps, important to note that people choose to go to school in order to find a job, and what happens to college attendance if the expectation of full-time work takes a hit?) Retirees, for their part, do seem happy overall, but those with comfortable retirements are living on savings that they earned through work and they have the pride of having worked to earn their retirement. This is one of the hardest things about imagining the demise of a full-time workforce: Where else could this sort of pride come from?
You're still focused on a person only being able to gain value to society by working.
You're also conflating working to survive (our day jobs) with doing tasks or that you would can choose to do (the student attending a class, the retiree building sawhorses, the 20 something contributing to OSS, the full time homemaker). Not being required to do the first doesn't mean you're suddenly not doing the second as well.
Yeah, this came to mind as well. A night at the pub can easily run even a conservative drinker $20+, doing this every night (even when working) would be hard. And those costs appear in other activites as well - renting a field/equipment to play ball, renting a bowling lane, green fees for golf, tickets for events...
hiking, biking/rollerscating, enjoying a picnic, having friends over for card/board games, having a lan party are also valid and cheap/free alternatives :)
I regularly practice each of them and barely spend any money
hiking: I just do light hiking, and all I need is a couple of sandwiches, a backpack and my boots. And plenty of water. Plenty of hills/mountains around helps, that's true
biking/rollerscating: you can get a decent used bike for about $100
picnic: just the food, and you need to eat anyway
board games: unless you need to switch the game every week I'd say you're covered with about $50 per year. We mainly play Settlers of Catan and Chess
lan party: I guess it depends on the games, we don't do this much anymore, but we're pretty old school when we do (CS, Starcraft 1, Worms World Party)
There's probably lots of other activities like that, for example we play soccer/foot tennis on a public field, and all it costs us is the price of the ball
I'm unemployed right now and I won't do any of those. Here's why:
Hiking: Buy boots and suitable clothes. Fuel to get to suitable location.
Biking/Rollerskating: Buy equipment. Fuel to get to suitable location.
Picnic: transportation supplies. Fuel to get to suitable location.
Board games: Expensive. Fuel to get to suitable location.
Lan party: Buy games. Fuel to get to suitable location.
All it costs is fuel, utilities, rent, and food. For someone with no income, that is all I can spend money on, and it has to be justifiable. Not "Oh, I play board games every once in a while", because I don't want to have to pass up on a job interview because I stupidly spent my transportation money on board games. Or whatever else.
I hear what you're saying and I guess it applies for large cities (somewhat), but in our smaller city (~100k people) we just walk places. 15-25 minutes is just fun, especially in the warm season.
Picnics, games, sports, lan parties, we just do them at home or on the public domain
hiking and other stuff needs some transportation, we either go with public transport or carpooling
I'm not saying I understand your situation, just that you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money (or any) to have some fun with friends.
Why doesn't a bike save you a lot of money on fuel? Keeping a car on the road is expensive, you can save on insurance too. Also you can take the bus. I know, it's a pain.
My biggest expense of a night at the pub is the cab ride to and from the pub since if I am going to drink I can't drive myself there. We don't have public transport.
1. > This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis.
Only if you attribute raising children, maintaining your house, or other activities as equivalent going to a desk job every day. I don't believe this is the case - I believe there is a pretty significant difference in doing things because you want to (raise children, beautify your house), and because it's required to put a roof over your head and food in your cupboard.
Given that, you can see if the guilt will fade just by looking at stay-at-home mothers and fathers, or by looking at retirees. Being a retiree is not much different from being unemployed, other than society (and consequently the retirees themselves) viewing them as having "earned it".
2. I agree with benaiah here - "drinking with buddies every night" would get damned expensive, even when you have a job.
3. I won't disagree with you, but it's something which needs to be investigated and addressed.
5. My reading of that section revealed a viewpoint which seems to only view the role of the government as a job creator/maintainer, which doesn't strike me as sustainable. At least, no more sustainable than just paying people directly.
For example, the government created quite a few jobs as part of "the new deal" - but where are those jobs today? Where are the workforces to maintain our bridges, our roadways, and the other parts of our failing public infrastructure? Those jobs disappeared, those workers retired or had to find another job (or were disabled by the hard labor and became wards of the state in another way).
Forcing people to work to survive seems old fashioned, and completely incompatible with the coming future of automation. We can forestall the day of 80%+ unemployment, but that will only make the drop-off that much more steep when it actually arrives. I'd personally rather we try and do something about it now, while the overall unemployment numbers are still below 50%.
EDIT: Sorry, forgot to put this in earlier, but I do appreciate you taking the time to stop by and answer questions like these!
"The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing."
This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished by society on many levels.
But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status, well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in misery and lazing around doing nothing.
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty.
If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
Sorry I didn't mean to suggest that at all. When I wrote "the ills of unemployment go well beyond the loss of income" that was my way of saying loss of income is the first-order outcome of losing a job, but there are more complicated effects to consider.
The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, flow, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.
The article flat out assumes that "If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions.", and that "Most people want to work, and are miserable when they cannot."
Put succinctly, the article poses as its fundamental thesis that unemployment itself leads to social degradation. But I could find no actual supporting evidence for that claim.
The Youngstown example is just as likely a posterchild for the alternative theory: the dangers of unmitigated poverty.
Now, I grant you, social pressures likely lead people to feel shame and so forth in the face of unemployment. But that just means a cultural shift away from the idolization of work is necessary, not that we must find some way to employ those folks who might truly be unemployable.
Unemployment clearly leads to degradation, both of cities (Youngstown) and of individuals.
The question I think we're debating is whether the flow of causality goes unemployment->poverty->social degradation (this is your case, I think) or whether unemployment leads to social degradation more directly, even among people who don't currently need money (so, removing the variable of poverty) because it's a terrible blow to esteem, purpose, and community. I think there is a lot of evidence for this claim; see the section Paradox of Leisure.
I think there is a lot of evidence for this claim; see the section Paradox of Leisure.
I totally disagree.
The problem is that society, as it's structured today, does little to support the unemployed to provide the kind of social contact and meaningful activity that would offset depression and isolation.
In addition, there is a social expectation foisted upon the unemployed that they must become employed, and that expectation creates pressure, depression, and further isolation.
The fundamental issue is that we, as a society, have decided that unless you're working you're idle, and if you're idle you're useless.
Consider, there are many many retirees who manage just fine. Why? Because there's a social network put in place to support retirees... activity centers, social groups, travel clubs, etc. And a social expectation that retirees will specifically be idle!
Similar support mechanisms do not exist for the unemployed today because the unemployed are viewed as failures. Unemployment is not a valid life choice, and therefore society does nothing to support them.
This fundamentally comes down to the western idolization of work. Address that and I believe you'll address many of the psychological harms supposedly caused by a lack of employment.
If you think we should provide support mechanisms like activity centers for the unemployed, I think you'll love the fifth section of the piece where I say we should provide support mechanisms like activity centers for the unemployed!
I'm okay with disagreeing over the centrality of work. Some very smart people think that maintaining structured busy-ness is very important psychologically. Some people disagree. But it seems to me that we agree on many of the solutions, including a basic income and activity centers.
The issue IMO is mixing active and inactive yet potential population. There will be a pressure toward the inactive to contribute back. Those who accept to 'suffer' work (because you have to deal with unknowns and undesired workloads, so you may suffer) will rarely have the generosity to give to those who don't. And 'normally' inactives will feel bad about that too, unless they're cornered by society (bad access to learning and or new jobs).
>The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.
It is also about actually accomplishing something that needed doing. This is precisely why we want it to disappear: unfilled needs are bad.
Does having a mincome stop you from stressing over the guy across the street who has a bigger one and a better looking wife? Maybe it does, but I don't think the mincome or quality of life is the biggest driver for that. The biggest driver is freedom (Do I truly believe I have every opportunity to become what/WHO I want to be?)
Can we really achieve that freedom for everyone in the real world? Is getting close good enough? Will virtual worlds and simulation provide us that freedom?
I've been of the opinion that that kind of "freedom" is a sad illusion at best, and a crippling sense of entitlement at worst. Consider your first question:
>Does having a mincome stop you from stressing over the guy across the street who has a bigger [house] and a better looking wife?
Well, no, however neither does almost anything else. It seems cultural, and is almost certainly psychological. The classic idiom, "the grass is always greener on the other side" illustrates this pretty well. Even with the wealth, whatever form it may take, to get the bigger house, the better looking wife, the whatever problems still arise. The neighbor with the smaller house, with more time for xyz, with a car they don't need to fret over because it cost 1/50 as much as yours.
Those aren't notions of freedom, their ideas of competition. Why can't I be /happier/ than the other guy? Freedom comes as much from being able to have a bad day as having a good one.
I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I do not belive humans can handle significant idle time in a socially productive way. Look at the disaster zones that are most public housing projects.
Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.
Public housing projects are almost by definition some of the most impoverished areas. To attribute the problems of slums to boredom seems misguided.
Additionally, I don't think the idea here is to encourage idleness. It's about people not needing to either beg an existing profitable business to take them in or create one ex nihilo in order to survive.
Just the idea that the alternative to jobs is idleness shows a strange conflation of ideas. We define "work" as that which we hope will earn us money — we know an activity is work because of a totally extrinsic factor. There are people in our society who are paid a king's ransom to literally play games, and there are people who do back-breaking labor without anywhere close to fair compensation, and this is all work because they make their living doing it. But if somebody (say, a painter) doesn't have customers or an employer, that's not work, and thus it looks like idleness, no matter how engaged they are in the activity.
With mincome, if the basic needs are paid, then people could do other non-economic activities, such as more dedication to arts and culture, develop studies, etc...
For example, I believe a lot of people would increase participation on open-source projects in internet
Cultural observations: Lots of people currently believe in the idea of go to school, get degree, get great job, and work hard, get ahead or at least don't get downsized. Today we laugh at people in my grandfather's generation who had weird employment ideas like lifetime employment at one firm, college isn't necessary, and no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc).
Cultural analysis and conclusion: Generation AJSKGJ, or whatever the marketing people will call tomorrows kids, are highly likely to laugh at our ideas like the previously mentioned "school/degree/job" or "work hard get reward or at least not punished" axis of evil.
We have other weird cultural hangups that'll likely look weird in the future, its hard for us to understand how nationalistic foreign cultures (nazis, communists, etc) in the early 20th century were all into promoting the nation ahead of their citizens, yet today we see corporations as the only important members of our culture and we're mere resources to be thrown away at their whim, this is likely to look equally weird in the future. Or how about endlessly describing boring old corruption as holy capitalism, thats going to look totally weird to people in the future.
What if the new capital is creativity? The new model for "work" is OSS? Replace money with creativity in the definitions of capitalism. Material possessions are socially discounted; creating new designs, new originals the new currency to excel.
If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus, art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.
This still doesn't sound fair. It's still an economy based on luck (those fortunate enough to be creative types) in a land of abundance. In a land of scarcity, prioritizing efficiency and rewarding based on getting things done (even or especially creative things) makes sense, but not if robots are producing all the necessities of life.
It makes sense that creative work will continue to be rewarded, but something more fair (in terms of human dignity, not in terms of meritocracy) will be needed.
Read Veale's The Creativity Myth. What you call "creativity" can be automated much like anything else. Emphasizing creativity would work for an extra couple of decades at most, so there's no sense in building, say, brand new educational institutions around it. Check out the N.Y. Times article announcing the creation of the Camp Fire Girls (co-invented by Gulick, a co-inventor of basketball) - there was a panic then about automation and the problem was not solved, it has just been continually deferred as the pace of change increasingly wreaks havoc on our ability to prepare children for adulthood. When the buzzwords of today's companies are "innovation" and "disruption", you may translate them to "unpredictability", "chaos", and "social insecurity". No one even tries to design to rightfully earn a place in a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley designers often enough end up making dopamine squirrels for poor toddlers on touch screens. The designers then heed warnings against giving their own children screens, ban TV's in the home, and send the kids to an unplugged school. Fewer are able to escape the swathe of the indefatigueable machine. Have we made some thing more clever than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks.
Perhaps instead some could follow Kant's idea of treating humans solely as ends, never as means, a sort of human-centered chauvinism or "humanism". Or one can conclude that if machines lack human flaws, and out perform homo sapiens at their supposed virtues, they deserve the future.
New genders, new sexualities, new body images, these might get some attention economy for a few, but they must be rewarded by a mass of bored, a creativity economy is the fame and long tail economy we already have. The assimilation of new distinctiveness will approach instantaneousness. And computers can be reformatted much more easily because they have no "self" to worry about or reinforce.
Edit since edit feature fails:
Read Veale's The Creativity Myth. What you call "creativity" can be automated much like anything else. Emphasizing creativity would work for an extra couple of decades at most, so there's no sense in building, say, brand new educational institutions around it. Check out the N.Y. Times article announcing the creation of the Camp Fire Girls (co-invented by Gulick, a co-inventor of basketball) - there was a panic then about automation and the problem was not solved, it has just been continually deferred as the pace of change increasingly wreaks havoc on our ability to prepare children for adulthood. When the buzzwords of today's companies are "innovation" and "disruption", you may translate them to "unpredictability", "chaos", and "social insecurity". No one even tries to design in order to righteously earn a place in a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley designers often enough end up making dopamine squirters for poor toddlers on touch screens. The designers may heed warnings against giving their own children screens, ban TV's in the home, and send the kids to an unplugged school, but fewer are able to escape the swathe of the indefatigueable machine, or have any coherent and ever-presebt religion or philosophy. Have we made some thing more clever than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks, not only as the machine gets stronger, but as it weakens us.
Some instead some could follow Kant's idea of treating humans solely as ends, never as means, a sort of human-centered chauvinism or "humanism". Or one can conclude that if machines lack human flaws, and out perform homo sapiens at their supposed virtues, they deserve the future.
New genders, new sexualities, new body images, these might get some of the attention economy for a few, but they must be rewarded inequally is a mass of the bored; a creativity economy is the fame / long tail economy we already have. The production and assimilation of new distinctiveness will approach instantaneousness. And computers can be reformatted much more easily because they have no "self" to worry about or reinforce. People just won't learn fast enough.
Creativity can be automated? Yes, you could automate parts of it if you wanted.
However, you're missing a couple of points. Firstly, creativity is enjoyable. Not because of some grand need to push culture forward and/or keep people entertained, just because it's fun to create.
Secondly, you're implying that culture will move in a unified direction, or that we'll all consume the same culture. We won't. There's too much of it to take it all in, and there's no reason to suggest that all tastes will align. Culture will grow chaotically just like it always has, the main difference is that we'll have more time to explore it.
This is what happens in the post scarcity society of Iain M. Banks's Culture series. No one has to work, but the ones that do devote themselves to intricate creative pursuits or the study of some highly obscure field. Attention and social capital is the currency of success.
Creativity may be good for human satisfaction and happiness, but it, too, will likely fall to automation.
More and more I'm convinced that computational creativity will be able to better and more finely translate resonant emotion into consumable art than humans.
What if you could live without paying rent? What if all your basic needs were met without needing to earn money? What would you do with your time then?
While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human population.
In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need for workers. So as machines displace workers, one might expect human population to gradually decrease, perhaps back to neolithic levels.
The challenge, then, would be to have that occur as humanely as possible.
Also increase in comfort and development is correlated with smaller children number, so an hyper modern world may have smaller population "momentum". There's a statistician with a TED talk about that. Maybe that one http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y... I cant recall.
You may be a niche though. Some people did want kids as part of the family tradition, but not too much so they could play the career game. In a world without work, people wouldn't have that dream so how would they fill the void. Maybe a little bit more children (goes against my previous argument), or art, social bonding, travel.
I am concerned that the human population may crash after nuking too many ecosystem services. However, I'm not a biodiversity freak, but rather take a broader evolutionary perspective.
Your admission of being a transhumanist and social darwininst should dissipate any fears I have after reading your comment. The good thing you are not one of those Gaia nutjobs still better than nothing.
"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this.
Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system.
Who owns the machines? Who owns the land?
Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land?
Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled?
Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian worldviews to rationalize the inequality.
The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right psychological adjustments.
Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common operational data exchange.
I'm interested in your view concerning one of the axioms that I infer underlies your political thinking. What do you consider equality, and what do you consider the reasoning behind considering it a desirable goal?
A human has a natural right to the minimum necessities of life. Owning a small plot of land to provide for oneself should be one option.
Owning a huge plot of land or controlling access to another person's minimum necessities is unequal.
The alternative is the default, primitive, animal that must fight to survive. Until this supposition that we must prove our right to exist falls from popularity, civilization is a myth.
The underlying assumption is the understanding that human is greater than base animal, starting with comprehension of the noosphere and what that entails.
Machines create value, if we socialized that value, we could easily implement a minimum income for everyone and have work be strictly a part time or hobbyist thing. Or "work" will become a strange mix of fighting for social or knowledge capital and other non-monetary value while machines do all the crap work we used to do before. I'd rather be judged at a co-op poetry slam where my social capital gets hurt if I lose than losing my home/car/savings/income if I lose at my job.
Capitalism has a built-in end game: extremely efficient automation. We're walking this path now and have been since steam power. Smart, cheap, and general purpose robots are probably where this all ends.
Never forget Balkanization or fragmentation. For example 90% of the population has been permanently kicked out of big city coastal real estate and will never, ever, live there or own property there via hyperinflation in real estate prices.
Yet, the sun still rises in the east and 90% of the countries population lives on, under different goals and interests.
Its highly likely crony capitalism as we know it will never end and income wealth inequality will increase until almost no one owns everything, but as long as everyone else is alive, they'll just play a different game. Getting ahead of that trend is likely to be very useful. This gets into weird sci fi alt-future world "whuffie", etc, but when the game gets weird, the results get weird.
You can see echos of this in historical academic studies during economic depressions, here and otherwise. Once the economic system fragments, people figure out other things, in the old days, barter, for example. Or crime. In the future the NYSE and NASDAQ will likely continue to operate, yet be utterly irrelevant to maybe 99.999% of the population, who will consider craigslist, uber, or some new startup that doesn't exist to be the real "the market".
(edited to add, I really screwed up the above paragraph by failing to mention the NYSE will never go away, much like the once universal giants of the past, gold trade still goes on, fur trade, spice trade, virtually everything but the slave trade keeps right on running, just no longer important to much of anyone anymore)
Anyway the point is a good long term place for a startup to be is post-business as usual. As per the famous gawker article, startups trying to replace "mom" for rich coastal yuppies are very popular, but the future is likely owned by a startup that replaces the existing commodity trading system for most people, or replaces retail, or replaces package delivery or ...
It went away years ago, after a merger with Euronext and a few more mergers. The parent company, ICE, is in Atlanta and owns 23 exchanges. The NYSE trading floor is a stage set now. There are still some people there, but they're using computers. The webcam feed is no longer available.
Here's a picture of the NYSE trading floor from June 2015:[1] It's now a quiet co-working space for traders. One guy on a tablet, a few on desktops, two people talking, one walking, many empty seats. That's the NYSE today.
All the real action happens inside several data centers in New Jersey.
A general purpose AI/Robot will just do what it does here, there, and much cheaper and better than some guy stuffed into a pressurized suit who can only work x amount of hours per day and is easily injured and in constant need of food/air/medical. If space migration happens it will be with an army or robots per person because of how hostile conditions are for delicate mammals outside of earth. I don't think the futurist visions we imagine happen without a general robotics revolution, the same way we couldn't get to the moon without computers.
"hostile conditions ... for delicate mammals ... outside of earth"
Lets try a test of the general principle. Cross off the last three words and see if Canada, Australia, the western half of the USA, are all uninhabited. If they are, then no one will live in space. If people live in the desert in Nevada, then its highly likely people will (eventually) live in space.
It seems like the mass amount of money dumped into alternative advertising models is increasingly pushing the 'Attention Economy'[1]. Video games designed by behavioral psychologists to be addicting, compulsive, and time consuming [2].
Advertising IS attention economics, but now it's being said we're reaching peak advertising and that the attention of the masses is saturated.
Amazon recently begin experimenting with paying writers based upon feedback of single pages being viewed long enough. [4]
I could only hope for the money previously allocated to garner everyone's attention for brand recognition may now be channeled into further product development and research, as it's becoming harder to rely solely on brand name identity with easier access to information on alternative products and review websites like anandtech or thewirecutter. Although I have a hunch much of that development will be into building more invasive advertising and attention economy games - [5]
Nicely written[1] and not as hyperbolic as others but to buy in you have to get past this:
The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end.
This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal relationship between work and spending.
People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a specific "job" there is only money and goods.
Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened? People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services related to horses or wagons.
Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same "number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed.
They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone, changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't but the number of jobs stays about the same.
The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1 person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have the 80% you are not spending on those goods available for still other goods and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be applied toward.
The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you could do.
So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence.
[1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic
[2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"
Weird how the article keeps reusing the word "paradox". I don't think it means what they want it to mean.
The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. - if you haven't found out how to live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw ingredients you chose.
Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. - this is still not a paradox. You could insert "ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s
When I was a kid, I instinctively felt (did not have any kind of intellectual ability at that age) that I was in a trap. I can NOW supply language to my instincts. That instinct gradually grew into a concept - or a non-concept - and at 35 while still not sure what IT was - started saving, saving and more saving. In a country with high interest rates - that helped. I finally quit in 2010 at 50 - exactly 50. I spent the last 5 years doing absolutely no work for money. I never felt that I was missing out on anything at all. And I am sure I will never ever have to ask for help outside my family - unless of course any one of us is struck by an expensive disease. But then what that mostly would mean is physical pain. So we are now getting mentally ready for pain. Preparing to endure unendurable physical pain, which I personally have never experienced before. I do not feel like I am prostituting myself. That takes a lot of misery out of my system. I never ever switch on the TV, but spend a lot of time reading random stuff off the net.
Only read very small part but author talks about Youngtown and says that when the local steel industry went bust suicide and assumingly criminal behavior increased.
To me this is because of loss of income not so much the loss of having to report to work. Does the article talk about why loss of income was not pointed to as the reason for the problems?
The best kind of work is flow: immersed in an activity with energized focus and involvement, seeing progress, learning and achieving goals. That just isn't a concept that machines or automation can take away. But, yes, it does seem like virtual reality will step in to offer this if actual reality has no more to offer.
I honestly don't think this will be much of a problem because frankly most of the work we do today is not essential for living. We busy ourselves with busy work. Ideas have become the product. And since we are so unhappy when we're not working towards something, we'll simply invent something new.
Can the author expound upon his encounters with universal basic income and his decisions on how to include it in the piece? I see that it's mentioned in the piece as something that can assuage the financial loss of work, but not the loss of civic cohesion or meaning in people's lives. However I feel that this idea was not an alternative the author seriously investigated, if you're still commenting can you confirm?
Did you encounter any deep exploration of what even a basic $1000/mo. guaranteed income might mean for people lacking work? What guided your thinking in how to approach this aspect of dealing with a post-work future, did it just feel too different, or another topic entirely?
Thanks for commenting here and thanks for the great piece!
I strongly believe in universal basic income and that being forced to work is a form of slavery. I also believe that if you let people do whatever they want, sure you'll have 90% or more just doing nothing all day, but you'll have those 10% doing something great. Also, capitalism is really not that great! Builds societies that nurture exclusion, self-interest and survival of the fittest. In 100 years, when robotics has automated pretty much everything (this is inevitable), we'll look back at these days and laugh about how we used to build societies where people worked most of the day, rather than just lived most of the day.
For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work. However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true.
We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will always find more ways to spend our energy to reward those willing to do so.
Has little to do with work and a lot to do with sociology and economics. If you are paying someone, make them do shit. That's what good managers do. And then when this happens the expectations go way up alongside that... and now everyone is a whiny baby that wants things RIGHT NOW!
Parkinson's law doesn't apply to this situation. We are in a situation where the same amount (or more) work is being done, just with fewer humans. This might lead to bigger rewards to people who work harder and smarter but that will be an ever smaller group.
Here's an interesting counterpoint, arguing from economic evidence that at least in the last decade or two, downward pressure on wages doesn't appear to be primarily the result of automation: http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-that...
When I worked I would automate reports using Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports. I would create an MS-Access database at first to prototype the app, and then migrate it to MS-SQL Server later on when it went to production. I even made an ASP 3.0 based web app that could export the report to RTF, PDF, or TXT format for review on a mobile device.
That was 1997, and people who did the reports by hand ended up being fired. I felt sorry that I wrote a series of apps that cost people their jobs. My coworkers struggled with Crystal Reports because all they knew was Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports has a scripting language based on Ada. Something I learned in college as I attempted to learn as many programming languages as possible.
None of the apps I wrote used AI or were using robots, but they got the job done faster and more accurate than a human being would get them done. At most I called it business intelligence because I used accounting and statistics and other things a business would use to make decisions.
But I worked too hard and the stress was too much and developed a mental illness in 2001. Ended up on disability in 2003. Been in a hole and trying to get out of it so I can one day go back to work.
I'm in my 40s now, have a huge gap in my resume, and basically I am unemployable because I am old and mentally ill. Over the Opal CoC debate I got contacted by a woman who seems to be in the same area but she is a former sex slave that was trafficked at a young age and escaped and fought to clear her record so she could work and now she is in her 40s and learned how to program and freelances to earn money to keep a roof over her head. When managers and HR pull resumes, they throw away the ones with gaps in them, they want to hire people in their 20s, they don't want a person with a mental illness or in her case was part of some past human trafficking in the sex slave market. There are some people who are unemployable until the IT market is reformed.
When most of the jobs are gone, I expect there to be some sort of social program like a basic income that is paid for by taxing the companies who use robots and AI and automation instead of people to do work.
There are a class of poor people who cannot afford a used PC and an Internet connection to learn how to program to be able to apply for the jobs. They cannot even afford good clothes for an interview.
I wanted to form my own company that helps out people who are unemployable and see what they can do. Provide on the job training and mentorship to get them up to date with modern technology and programming. I think there is a key need to provide jobs for people who normally wouldn't get hired due to gaps in their resume, their age, a mental illness, exploited in human trafficking and overcame it, etc.
it may be way in the future or it may not ... but combination of advance robotic, AI, nano-Tech and BioTech can easily eliminate the need of 99.9% of the workforce. But, the journey and social unrest may be so bumpy that could push the human race backward ... or it may reach to 99.9% point in which there is really nothing for billions of people to do. In that case either a small number of people will rule the world and the rest will be in poverty and misery and pain; or it will be a golden age and all will focus more on science and spirituality - not religion but true spirituality to expand human consciousness ... for sure until then the road will be very bumpy.
I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.
And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?
I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.
And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."
I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.