71 sats \ 4 replies \ @didiplaywell 24 May \ on: Work to Gain Experience, Not to Make Money alter_native
"In this broken world we live in, we are conditioned to work for money"
For as long as you need food to keep yourself alive, and for as long as we divide tasks so that you don't have to hunt your food, build your shelter and sew your clothes all by yourself, and for as long as said work division is organized by measuring exchanges between people with a unit of account to help to allocate resources where they are needed, yes.
Money is resources. If you don't want to be conditioned to work for the resources you consume, then either you don't need to consume or someone else will have to work double to provide you.
That's correct, but I don't think it's the most charitable reading of the post.
In the developed world, many people earn far more than they need to for strict survival. Once you've earned enough to cover the necessities, there's scope for making tradeoffs between maximizing monetary earnings and pursuing other forms of value.
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I agree and I personally think that way. The absurd part is the "forcing" part. Above basic needs, it's pure freedom of choice. Yet there's a second balance within that freedom in that again money pays for most of those other forms of value. And all along, still no one forces you to do nothing. The "broken world forces me to pay for things I want others to pay for me" part is just a way to blame personal shortcomings, indicisiveness and weakness of spirit on others. And I can't stand it because that's the weakness of spirit and blindness that leads to welfare programs that destroys complete nations.
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The ideal would be spending your time in the way you would if you had no resource constraints.
Of course, that's a utopian pipedream. However, if you can get closer to that by figuring out how to get paid for what you wanted to do anyway, then that's a huge quality of life win.
My summary of this post is that we work in order to maximize our quality of life, not our income.
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"Jobs are a means, not the ends in themselves. People work to live better, to put food on the shelves. Real growth means production of what people demand." Liberalism at its finest
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