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.
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.
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…
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:
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People who would enjoy that kind of work, but don’t want to work the grueling hours will do it.
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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.
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I’d love to scrap toilets for the right pay.
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.
Succinctly well said. Cheers.
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.
Newspapers, owned by rich people, have been regurgitating the same conservative talking points.
I think you could broaden that out and call them capitalist talking points.
Nobody wants to work, they just have to in order to survive.
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)
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
Thanks! Wow Snopes is thorough!
This is legit amazing. Thank you
tl;dr: nobody ever wanted to work
it’s almost like humans were designed to live together rather than for each other
take it from me, I’ve worked before and it sucks.
Nobody wants to work … for the peanuts we’re offering.
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!
Nobody wants to post anymore. We used to have big posters. Huge posters—the biggest posters, many people are saying it!
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work is important for society to function but it shouldn’t be maximized at the expense of quality of life
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.
