Work

Ok, time to be a little off hinge. I have a serious beef with the concept, culture, and state of mind created by what we call work. I absolutely believe, or more accurately, understand the truth that if we want something to be done, someone or something must do it, this is very clear and evident to me. Without the many generations of people who have lived before me that put in their time and effort to accomplish things, the world would not be what it is today, but here is my question: should getting stuff done be the point, or the means to achieve a more desirable point? If your reason for doing things is to create a better future for your children, but you don’t really enjoy a whole lot of your own life, are you going to pass that mindset down to your children and expect them to be happy? At what point does a person get to actually enjoy that better future to it’s fullest extent?

I believe we’ve spent so much time tying to “get ahead” that we’ve completely lost sight of what we are trying to get ahead in. Me personally, I agree with John Lennon on this one, that the whole point should be to try to be as happy as possible. Therefore anything that is done in this pursuit but makes you less happy in the process is pointless. If you have a job to make money, and therefore be happy, but the happiness you lose in pursuit of that money is greater than the happiness the money could ever bring then having said job is not worth your time. If the only way we know how to create things as a society is by making most people less happy than the happiness those things bring, then we need to rethink how we are deciding to live.

I absolutely loathe to the core of my being what I see work culture doing to everyone that I love. I find it genuinely depressing that we all are ok with a life where we are always looking forward to the weekend and ok being genuinely unhappy for 40 hours a week. I feel like this is absolutely normalized abuse, no sane person would look at this model and think it was ok unless they had been conditioned to believe that it was. Now, listen, I do understand that some jobs just by their very nature can never be very enjoyable, but we shouldn’t use that fact to make every job a soul crushing experience. I believe most jobs, or things that need to be done for society to run, could be infinitely more fulfilling if we made human happiness the goal instead of it being production or profits. The happiness of all people should be the central and direct goal of all jobs. Happiness at a job is not something one should only have if they are “lucky”. Fuck man, life is short, this is just no way for humans to exist.

For me, I see the healthiest way we could manage the system is to not force people to work. If no one wants to work for the rest of eternity and we all die because of it, that is absolutely better than this garbage. I don’t know if you know this though, but people actually have a desire to contribute to society, people want to be valued, it is hard wired into our brains, just ask you friendly neighborhood Spiderman, I mean psychologist. The reason a lot of people in today’s time don’t contribute isn’t because they intrinsically don’t want to, it’s because they see no path for themselves to, or worse, they see no path to contribute while also being able to live with themselves. Like me, I’ve worked jobs, and I absolutely detest how they make me feel about myself and have decided I’d rather die than feel how most of them make me feel so right now I’m just trying to find a way to exist without hating what I have to do to sustain that existence. I love getting stuff done, I recently produced an album entirely on my own which was every form of the word exhausting so if you desire to tell me I’m just a lazy piece of shit you can kindly fuck right off. I want to do so many things with my life, I want to design homes maybe, I want to combat social injustice, I want to write and play music, I want to just live, but the worry of how to make money in a way I can just even tolerate has me paralyzed to even move.

On the topic of work itself and it’s place in society. I think most people are so intertwined with the system that the see work as the only way of existence but I’m telling you it is not. Up until this point I’d say it was but with the advent of technology it no longer has to be. We can use technology to do the things we don’t want to do in order to better enjoy our time. We already do this with all other technology: we save time walking to the river by having running water, we save time going to the library by having search engines, we save time planting our own food by practicing mass farming. Yes, one can benefit by doing any one of these things the old fashioned way but just like living in a tent outside, it is infinitely more enjoyable when you don’t have to do it. I believe to the very core of my being that we need to stop seeing jobs as things society needs to survive but rather the tool to get to a place where we no longer need them, then we should yeet them through a black hole into another universe far far away from here.

The issue now is finding a way to transition away from jobs while not having massive wealth disparities. We are currently seeing the benefits of technology by way of the free time and wealth it has created, but our current system hasn’t allowed most of humanity to share in those spoils but rather a very few extremely wealthy people while the rest of us mostly struggle. I wish I knew the best way to transition from a system that is based around jobs to a system that’s based around the enjoyment of life supported by the technology created by all generations before us but I can’t say that I do. I also don’t think we are quite at the place where all jobs can be automated but I do believe we are directly on that cusp of it and if we stick to our current system we will eventually see some of the worst wealth gaps we could ever imagine and therefore one of the most unstable societies. Studies have shown that wealth gaps are one of the strongest predictors of societal instability. I think it is possible to transition if we just have a few smart people making big decisions who realize it is in their own best interest to help make all of society happy and healthy. My favorite method of achieving this is through a Universal Basic Income but that should be a different post for a different day.

As always thank you for reading and I love you all. You can donate to the charity of Help Steven Do Things on my about page and help me live my life a little closer to what I want others to also live theirs. Truthfully, that is my goal here, of course I want to be content too but I cannot truly be content until everyone around me more or less is also content. I want to be lifted up only so that I may also lift others… and by lifted up I mean funded. Plz help, much love, see ya’ll next week.