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A lot of people like having a schedule or routine. I've been on multi week vacations before and after about 8-10 days you get the feeling of "this is okay, but I just want to be back home (read: doing my normal routine)". It's also not just a "I want to be physically home" thing because I've done the "summer break playing video games/watching Netflix" thing before and it just tires me out. A lot of people like to feel productive in some way, and at the same time a lot of people are really bad at time management. A job offers both of those (at least in theory) and so a lot of people would still probably want to work instead of just laying around all day.
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Oct 18, 2014 16:18
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 18:10 |
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Reason posted:One thing that is curious question to me is how much work is actually necessary? On top of that how much work is actually meaningful? I am a process server and a legal courier, but the majority of my job could be and has been replaced by digital means. Morally that is also better because as the job becomes more digital less paper is used as mail between law firms. Your definition of necessary and meaningful seem to be the following: Necessary - is impossible to be carried out by anything but a human. Meaningful - advances the general cause of society, whatever that may be. I'm going to discuss being meaningful first. Most jobs under that definition are not meaningful, regardless of whether they are "necessary" or not. A social worker that only works in Chicago is not doing "meaningful" work because it doesn't effect people in LA, and likewise a state senator is not "meaningful" because they have little to no impact with things outside of their state. You could divide it down into different levels of meaningful (so national, regional, local, etc), but at a certain point every job becomes meaningful. A busy work type job is meaningful for a local community if the employer is the major one in town and supplies a well paying job to support the community, but it would not be meaningful from a national scale (but rarely anything is). You can also argue that "the general cause of society" is a vague term which could mean many things (for example, if "capitalism" is what society strives towards, then busy work jobs that still generate profit are themselves advancing the general cause of society). As for "necessary", that's usually a function of economics. If cost wasn't an issue you could get rid of lots of jobs. If cost wasn't an issue you could also keep all of those jobs and pay the workers a lot more. Or you could train everyone to get a college degree and still work those same menial jobs (we do this today). Just because a job *can* theoretically be automated doesn't mean it will be or that it should be, or that because it can be it's suddenly not necessary.
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Oct 18, 2014 18:03
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crack mayor posted:
Current productivity is often maintained with fewer costs. There's an entire branch of engineering dedicated to reducing queuing times (i.e., time spent in line) without increasing the number of jobs you output. And there's been *plenty* of technological advancements that have been making work unnecessary. The problem is that those people displaced by those jobs don't have any sort of safety net to fall back on. This is a noted and real phenomenon. For example: 
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Oct 22, 2014 03:41
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Mister Adequate posted:Same. It is really weird to me. There is SO MUCH STUFF to do. I could live to be ten thousand and not be half done, to say nothing of all the new stuff that would emerge. Because a lot of stuff requires significant setup time and materials (eg, "want to build a shed? Time to make sure you have all the tools and then spend an hour at Home Depot") and a lot of people are not in the mood for extended excursion into a project. Like, I enjoy cooking but I won't do some recipes because it will take a long time and I'll probably gently caress it up anyway because its the first time I've done it. Or take my uncle, who goes all out into a project, loses interest halfway through, and then dumps the half completed thing on anyone who'll take it.
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Oct 23, 2014 16:23
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crack mayor posted:Time and materials are the first problems to go in a post-scarcity world. Not in the way I describe. Sure, if Bob's Robot Delivery Service existed so that you didn't have to get all of the materials yourself that would help, but even then a lot of people start ambitious projects and then just stop because it's too much work. Sure, you could then hire up a bunch of robot laborers to finish it for you, but that's not the same thing as going out and doing a hobby yourself. I'm not talking about retiling a roof and being lazy about doing it, I'm talking about (e.g.) working a garden or building something because you want to build something. And often you lose interest because the final product is not worth all of the work.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:09
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crack mayor posted:
You've never said "I don't want to do x because it's too hard"? Never ever in your life? Not because you didn't have time or money to do it, but because it wouldn't be worth the effort you put in? sim posted:Not that I disagree, but do you think this might be because people have a certain capacity for "work" and maybe the effort required to sustain a job and sustain a hobby come from the same pool of energy? My uncle in my previous example was retired so he literally had all of the free time in the world. That same phenomenon still happened.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:27
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 18:10 |
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Paradoxish posted:You're basically saying there are things people don't do because they don't want to do them. Presumably, given unlimited time, you'd try to find stuff that you actually do want to accomplish, and failures wouldn't be the end of the world because you'd have enough time to try something else. Yeah, some people just really aren't cut out for managing their own projects and they'll never be any good at it, but that's not really an argument for why paid employment is inherently valuable to individuals or why more free time wouldn't be a good thing for everyone. More free time for most everyone (i.e., except the rich people) in the current status quo would be a good thing, I don't know where anyone's arguing that. I'm actually not arguing about whether paid employment is valuable either, despite me saying earlier how some people need structure in their life. What I'm saying right now is that the stereotype of "Dad starts a huge project, realizes he's in a big mess halfway through" is going to be true even if Dad didn't have to work for a living, and that it will be a factor in some non-trivial part of society (perhaps not a majority, but at least a significant minority). Actually, a good way to check this would be to look at retired people - they're currently capped by income but there's a lot of cheap hobbies you can do so you can check if failing to finish a project is common or not.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:50
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