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Can you elaborate on this a bit? Haven't seen your full take.
Overall, I feel you man. Working a paycheck job that you don't find fulfilling is awful. For certain personality types like myself, it is downright torturous. And I don't say that lightly.
It's sad that so many people, especially on the right, cannot understand this basic fact. I completely agree that there is dignity in working for something meaningful, and gaining discipline and teaching yourself to do things you don't enjoy in the short term for long term gain is a crucial skill. Yet all of that can be true, while still saying that the modern model of a 9-5 job that is most likely utterly meaningless to the employee is one of the most broken and evil systems man has ever created. Yes it doesn't have the outright violence and evils of the past, but it's far more insidious in how justifiable it is, and how it slowly breaks people's spirits over time.
As to fixing it... well, who the fuck knows? I like to think if we genuinely build good AI and robots, hopefully we can automate away much of the work. Unfortunately the trend seems to be that as we get better tech to theoretically make our lives easier and better, instead we just end up demanding more stuff from ourselves and each other, then burning out.
I think the only realistic solution I can see would be some combination of a better understanding of how early childhood trauma impacts people's ability to do useful work, and gene therapy. Then we slowly get everyone regardless of race or family wealth on a close to level playing field, and we can have a true meritocracy. The people who don't want to work can pursue art or whatever the hell, and the people who do want to work can own starships and planets and have galactic empires. That's the dream, at least.
Maybe I'm an idiot or too Pollyanna, but I've worked a bunch of jobs ranging from farm labor to Walmart to mopping floors to financial analysis and I've never thought any of them were awful. Most had bad days occasionally but never beyond that. I've had less than wonderful bosses and wonderful bosses and prefer the latter but even then there have always been things about the job that were at least decent.
After about 10 days vacation I'm still enjoying myself but am usually starting to get bored pretty quickly.
The closest I've come to non-accidental death is working a waggie job that had me legitimately considering assaulting a guy for being in my way at Home Depot just because the idea of going back to work was so utterly unbearable prison or getting shot by the cops sounded better.
This might seem like an exaggeration; it is not. The only thing that saved me was school mandated anger management classes from 7th grade.
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i think salaried work is liberating in the sense it gives you autonomy. you can say " i have work, I cannot do XYZ" and everyone understands, without the guilt trip of having to make up an excuse for not attending a wedding or some other shit that you don't want to do
The thing I don't want to do is work, because I'd rather be doing various things that a dependency on work is keeping me from doing (like exploring the world or full-time intellectual pursuits), so this doesn't really seem like autonomy to me.
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As I mentioned in my post, it depends heavily on the temperament of the person in question. Personally I cannot understand the perspective of someone who is okay with working meaningless jobs when the world is so beautiful and has so much to spend your time on.
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