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"No one wants to work anymore" (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 61 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

No one wants to toil.

Work is unavoidable. And if I have a chance to work on my projects and my communities I am left feeling alive, valuable, and fulfilled.

What these bosses and corporations want is for me to do their projects and work on their communities for as little as possible while being dehumanized.

That is toil.

And no one wants to fucking toil anymore. That much, I say, is true.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

Yeah, just wanted to say this. In almost all experiments with Universal Basic Income it turns out people don't wanna scroll Tiktok 24/7 or whatever. Most people want to do thinks that we would call "work". We just don't wanna do them in this capitalist hellscape full of meaningless bullshit jobs.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There are a lot of meaningful but awful jobs out there, like picking crops and scrubbing public toilets, that nobody in their right mind wants to do. Perhaps they can be automated, but we'd have to automate them and institute UBI at the same time in order to avoid mass starvation and/or civilization collapsing. Seems tricky…

[-] Devorlon 4 points 10 months ago

I don't think that people don't like doing those jobs. I believe that it comes back to the toil aspect, since those jobs are undervalued the pay is low and the hours are long. The two solutions I see are:

  1. People who would enjoy that kind of work, but don't want to work the grueling hours will do it.

  2. For things like harvesting, there was already a good (If inhumane) option, Serfs. You only need o harvest a couple times a year, so if you're on UBI then a couple times a year everyone goes and harvests the fields.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I'd love to scrap toilets for the right pay.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I feel like we are already beginning to see an inversion in wages, where education is less valued and skilled labor is more valued.

Either UBI will include compulsory labor in low supply jobs or those jobs will earn a premium.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Succinctly well said. Cheers.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

If you adjust the definitions in your mind slightly, and use "work" in place of "toil" and "labor" in place of "work", then do I ever have a theory of value to talk to you about.

[-] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago

Newspapers, owned by rich people, have been regurgitating the same conservative talking points.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think you could broaden that out and call them capitalist talking points.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

Nobody wants to work, they just have to in order to survive.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

Any idea on any of these sources? It'd be great to be able to point to actual articles dating back more than a century when having a conversation/debate/argument about the "nobody wants to work" narrative

[-] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

It's telling how the old quote includes "for wages"

Our society has been dragged so far right that we harldy discuss abolition of the wage system these days.

It's not an issue about working. Its an issue about working for wages (as opposed to workers owning the means of production and distributing the profits democratically and equally)

[-] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

tl;dr: nobody ever wanted to work

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

it's almost like humans were designed to live together rather than for each other

[-] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

take it from me, I've worked before and it sucks.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Nobody wants to work ... for the peanuts we're offering.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Nobody on this Com wants to work anymore, they just keep posting the same stuff. This is image is recycled fodder that keeps showing up in my feed. Work on your posts at least people!

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Nobody wants to post anymore. We used to have big posters. Huge posters—the biggest posters, many people are saying it!

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

work is important for society to function but it shouldn't be maximized at the expense of quality of life

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

As we gain productivity, we force people out of if the workforce and get the remaining to do more than they did before using the new capabilities. What we should be doing is letting people work less.

Instead we make the "best" people work more and force "the worst" out entirely. This, then leads to the gig economy where people are working all the time just trying to get by and a growing shadow population is people who are not even really in the workforce.

It's a race to the bottom here, folks. We built this world through a shared consensus that the rich get richer and if you're not rich you're either unlucky, lazy, or both. That was based on wealth being derived from physical force. You can't fight the big guys with the clubs and bear skin armour so you try to stay on their good side and get by.

It's time to go beyond that. It will require people to not treat each other like crap if they get half a chance, though, which means we need a few generations to be without childhood trauma so they can grow up to be people who don't lead fear based lives. It's going to take some time to get there, and a realisation that that's the only way of the hamster wheel.

this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
552 points (97.1% liked)

Antiwork

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