I mean, it’ll be unpopular if you post that on bootlicker social. I mean LinkedIn.
Jokes on you, I am unemployed.
It’s not that we’re too busy. It’s that we’re too busy without purpose. What’s the point of being busy when it doesn’t proportionately translate to having our needs met?
We have more abundance than ever before in all of human history, and yet we work harder than hunter-gatherers just to feed ourselves, and we have less leisure time than they did. We work more hours per day and have fewer days off per year than medieval serfs. And for what? What’s the purpose? So some asshole who was born on third base can buy another mansion?
Thats our monetary policy. People must consume more every year to create more inflation, as technology actively reduces the price of goods.
If goods get cheaper we have deflation, they create more money supply via lower interest rates, and the price of inelastic shelter gets bid up, and asset holders receive a value windfall until prices rise. Which is why we are at a higher price to income ratio than 2007.
People born closer to the gold standard are richer, they got in when currency wasnt tethered to consumption.
Exactly! I work in a group home, so my work is very easy, but I want to go into IT, so I can actually go into a field I love
Preach.
I’m currently unemployed, and I was not expecting to be so busy. I thought I would have a little more leisure time, might be able to catch up on a few things that I never seemed to have time for, like catching up with family, playing some video games in my back log, and doing a small bit of travel. That hasn’t materialized. It’s like as soon as I stopped “working”, more things came up that needed my attention. I’m basically busy from the time I get up in the morning until I wrap up for the night and veg out in front of the TV for an hour before bed. I swear I had more me time when I was working. Not sure how this happened.
Would you mind sharing what kinds of things are taking up your time?
This is common, it’s because there was a huge backlog of things you just never got around to doing because you didn’t have enough time. When you’re working you prioritize some relaxing time because you have to go back to work soon. Now you have to do all the tasks you’ve stored up.
There is no reason why taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens. But if everone no longer had to worry about survival, no one would put up with corporate abuse from rich cunts and plus if they’d paid their fair share of taxes and couldn’t just steal tax money to gamble with, they’d never be as filthy rich as they are to begin with.
Imagine not working and still being able to survive.
taxes pooled together from all of our incomes cannot be used to subsidize Healthcare, education and a basic living income for all citizens
Well that’s how it’s done in most rich and even some poor countries. So I assume you are talking about the US which is indeed in a terrible situation with human rights for it’s wealth. And sadly voting red/blue won’t ever change it.
Not the basic living income part, at least not anymore.
There is Social Security but it’s generally pretty miserable and nowadays not even enough to pay for rent (thanks to insane housing inflation all over the place) plus most supposedly developed countries haven’t been building much social housing in the last couple of decades (which is partly why the house price inflation is insane - less state built housing means less Supply but the Demand for new living places is still roughly the same).
Neoliberalism has been exported from the US to even the most Developed nations out there and that’s definitelly screwed up the Social Safety net (also Healthcare, even in countries without a national health service, as well as in some cases the quality of Education).
Also even when things were at their best, there was always this coverage gap for the lower end of the working class: the poor were the ones helped by the social safety net and above a certain income point which was in the area of blue collar work, people could live a pretty decent life from working, but there was a segment of the working class with people having to work shit jobs, juggling multiple jobs and so one just to make ends meet and were the help from social security wasn’t enough.
Even in the best countries this gap has been made much worse by decades of Neoliberalism, both by shrinking even further down the social safety net coverage (to just the trully miserable) and because on the upside income growth didn’t keep up with price growth so even parts of the middle class now have to work shit jobs and count their pennies to the end of the month.
I don’t think it’s the level of busy - for most of human history mere survival took a lot more time than it would take us today if we worked directly on actual survival. The problem is that we do the survival by working on too much irrelevant shit that enriches other people, who keep making our share less and less.
From historical anthropology and studying modern hunter gatherer groups, I believe the current consensus is that these people work or worked between 20-30 hours a week. Please correct me if there is more recent information.
By golly you’re right, the consensus is that people in simple foraging societies worked about 6.5 hrs/day. Scholars seem to believe medieval peasants worked more like 8-16 hrs/day, depending on how long daylight lasted - but taking frequent rest breaks, festivals and other holidays.
The key part is that there was a massive amount of plant and animal life, so there was plenty to forage. Like 80% of all life compared to 10k years ago is dead now and we just have scraps left now.
False, we have plenty of life. It’s just that it’s mostly humans who are basically earth cancer
It’s extremely unpopular in the American business world. This world is so fucked up on so many levels. People wonder how things can be so bad over here… This is a big piece of that puzzle, along with our terrible and underfunded education system, and our lack of affordable healthcare.
Just these three things are bad enough, but then there are so, so many more problems. The United States is a gilded dumpster fire we’ve somehow been convincing the world is a beacon of prosperity.
The parts of the Nazi “economic recovery” from the Depression besides refusing to pay the rest of the Versailles debt and deficit spending financed by futures in tooth gold and slave labor was literally just making people work longer hours.
Yeah this is one of the reasons labor needs to organize.
There’s one boss telling 500 workers that they all need to work themselves to death? Fuck that. We outnumber him. We could be productive without burnout and things could be fine.
For anyone else reading this: you could be the one to make that change, and gain you and your coworkers better pay and time off.
Seriously consider joining the IWW. They’ll train you on how to organize your coworkers and form a grassroots union, no matter what your job is.
Thanks for the recommendation. I am heartened by recent pushes towards unions. In particular, tech workers are beginning to understand that they are workers (as opposed to the narrative that tech workers exist at a level above the kind of people who need unions).
I haven’t heard of the IWW, but the website for the UK branch has the headline “Bigoted bourgeoisie courts never cared about workers, whether cis or trans” (regarding a recent UK supreme court ruling). I haven’t read the article, but that headline has given me a strong first impression of these guys. They seem pretty based
I’ve been excited at that development as well. It’s honestly a bit baffling it took them so long, especially game developers, where extreme crunch time and post release seasonal layoffs are the norm.
The IWW is the only union that leans heavily anarchist, with a rich history going back to 1905. :)
Unfortunately there is a pyramid scheme in place filled with fools that think they can become that one and are willing to fight against those “beneath” them.
Under the table were the fatcats are sharing slices of the cake, squirrel the little mice living of the crumbs that fall down, and once in a while one of the mice catches a bigger crumb, proudly raises it above its head and shouts: “See, the System works!”
True. There are also many idiots who think like, “I work hard and when I take a break it’s well deserved. When they take a break, they’re lazy good-for-nothings”.
There’s a name for this I can’t remember right now. Something more specific than “stupid” or “no empathy”.
Fundamental attribution error
Fundamental attribution error
Yes! That’s it! Thank you
Wiki on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Arrogance? Greed? Being a clueless asshole?
“recursive bulling”
yea, “unpopular” because we’re all indoctrinated from preschool onward that it’s “natural” to be yanked out of sleep by an alarm, bust our asses to show up at work, move on to things at the sound of a bell for all the daylight hours, then get minimal, if any, sleep in order to do it all over again tomorrow. god forbid you get an opportunity for a nap in the middle of the day
thank the industrial revolution: slavery dressed up in “freedom and opportunity” – same as the other familiar phrase “arbeit macht frei”
you exist to generate value for your owners. that’s it.
I worked 55+ hours a week for years. During the pandemic I became a stay at home mom. I suddenly, never sped while driving and any road rage tendencies vanished, nearly overnight.
While I feel quite isolated and lonely sometimes, as everyone I know works and are busy all the time, I can’t stress enough how much of a change my driving habits went through when I was no longer in “workmode”.
I used to break an average of 3 traffic laws every morning getting to my 6am shift. Then, the rush to just.get.home.
To a point now, I don’t like driving during rush hours, or shopping after the work crews get off. 10am on a weekday at the grocery store? Everyone is pleasant and polite.“excuse me” I say, and we have a polite interchange. I’ll give a compliment to a womans dress, and I’ve passed some good on to a fellow human, sometimes I even receive compliments from the little old ladies, I’ve learned from them after all.
If I go to the shop after 4pm or on a weekend? I can feel folks souls have been ripped out and stomped on, knowing what they feel… I say excuse me as i have to scoot pass their cart, and I don’t even get a response just a glare. Then I return home sad.
Work/life balance is crucial. Ideally, everyone should be guaranteed a healthy work/life balance, while still being able to live comfortably. With one job.
It would be healthy for everyone to live comfortably, and then, work how and if they want to
i noticed a similar benefit to my mental state regarding the rat race. i’d been living in city/urban areas pretty much my whole life ~40 years. when i moved to a rural area and could travel 25 miles in 20 minutes instead of 10 miles in 45 minutes, the difference was indescribable. like 3 traffic lights instead of 12, people know what driving etiquette is, no road rage, etc.
now, even when i occasionally approach the nearest “city,” which is tiny by city standards, i feel the stress and irritability level rising right when i start to see more tail lights than road. it’s insane. and people do this all day every day. fuck. all. that.
You can’t just state facts and then call it an unpopular opinion for likes
Is this your first day on the internet?
no but I’m getting tired of this “unpopular opinion but I think the sky is blue” shit
I often find this aggravating, but in some cases, I think that stating an opinion as being unpopular is a defence mechanism that may stem from previous responses to said opinion.
On the topic of everyone being busy, for example, a friend once shared a similar opinion at work and their colleagues jumped on that opinion and argued against it in a manner that was effectively dick-measuring about how tired and burnt out they are, but how they’re going to take on more work nonetheless. It was an especially toxic work environment, but it’s not abnormal to find people who seem desperate to sacrifice themselves on the altar of capitalism.
I speculate that some of this bizarre defense of hyper productivity arises from people who are forced to work that way for so long that they start to think of it as a thing they choose to do. My friend was fortunate enough that he was able to quit his job to stay home with his newborn child, but far too many people don’t have that opportunity. I wonder if some of the men who mocked him for quitting the job did so because they wish they had been able to do the same thing, but given that that ship had long since sailed, pretending that they chose to stay at that shitty job helped them to weather the stress.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I sympathise with people who hedge their beliefs with saying an opinion is “unpopular”. I think that sometimes, it’s a way of saying “this is something I believe, but I’m not actively trying to change your mind about it”. There may also be an element of someone hoping that people will say “idk what you mean, that’s not an unpopular opinion”, in search of validation. That’s annoying, but I’m sympathetic towards someone fishing for validation in this topic, at the very least.
But then how is someone supposed to argue about how how the sky is red sometimes?
Got 'em.
I think about this a lot. We have essentially, purely through accident tbh, created a society that we are evolutionary unprepared to live in. So much of our typical day to day is actually horrible for our bodies and often antithetical to their good function.
In a strange way, it’s almost incredible. We have invented a rock that we cannot lift.
That’s because you don’t lift the rock, you grind it. Try waking up earlier!
(jk)
Eh, agreed except it’s no accident. A small group of people have managed to convince everyone else to do all the lifting in exchange for crumbs and little green pieces of paper. We have allowed ourselves to become our own worst enemy rather than unite and explore the stars
Competition is good for a lot of things, but it also becomes a day-to-day race to the bottom that rewards whoever is willing to sacrifice more of their life for the sake of their job than others.
The logical consequence is exactly this: we back ourselves into an increasingly uncomfortable corner that leaves less room for living than we could easily enjoy with our current technology.
Competition is essential in almost all (if not just all) human interaction, as its what pushes us to better ourselves and our species. healthy competition has rules in place that all parties know, and if someone is hurt or confused the competition is stopped to assess and adjust if needed, like sports n shit. We forgot to add that to the economy, whoops
Actually capitalist competition hinder progress, by not allowing humanity to have a goal other than profit
So you just didn’t read my comment or what
I think the commenter is focusing on the idea of ‘competition for what?’. ‘Better ourselves’ how, and for what purpose? I struggle with this myself, specifically in terms of motivating myself at work. i.e. What is the goal of all this (our working society, at large, not just my role as a cog).
But they’re better at lefting than you and they really need you to know it!
No it’s not, people naturally wants to do better each day by themselves, for people they love and care.
B-b-b-b greed is human nature!
Yeah, go check out how any society outside of Europe worked before colonization. Winner writes the history!
The colonists were able to easily defeat most of the natives by out-arming them. But does anybody ever stop to think about why none of these societies ever invented guns? 🤔
I have a friend who is probably going to become a nun, and the place where she seems likely to join is a convent which has very little contact with the outside world (it’s even on an island). It struck me that the monastic life seems like a pretty good escape from conditions that are objectively antithetical to humanity, especially if you’re someone whose faith is already a huge part of how they cope with the world.
Hell, I’d be tempted by it, if I had a compatible religious belief. Alas, I think that if I had a “vocation”[1], it would probably require me to stick around and work alongside others who are trying to build a more humane world. I can’t do much, but my sense of duty is greater than my desire to escape.
[1]: As I understand it, “vocation” has a particular meaning for Catholics. Here’s a definition I got from Google: “vocation in a religious context is how God calls you to serve Him in the world.”. “Vocation” came up a lot when my friend was discussing her plans. Despite me being hilariously far from being a Catholic, the concept resonated with me — perhaps because I’d loosely describe myself as an agnostic theist. I don’t believe in a God, per se, but the sense of duty I feel to things like Truth, Justice, Beauty etc. (all of which I feel the need to capitalise) — things which a more religious person might just call “God”.
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I think this is accurate. We may be the most “intelligent” animal on this planet, but we’re still animals. We’ve been pulled out of a natural order and forced into systems the worst of us came up with to keep said worst ones happy. At the exact same time we also have the capacity and potential to make this planet a habitable, utopia for all creatures, but those systems, man…
Yeah, I feel this. We’ve been forced into a system that treat life like a nonstop grind instead of something we’re meant to actually live. Real connection got replaced by control. It’s crazy how unnatural all this ‘normal’ really is.
It’s only unpopular for the 1% extracting wealth from the 99%
Sort of, but there really are huge swaths of Americans that grew up learning about “work ethic,” putting in those extra hours, etc… I still struggle to turn it off sometimes myself. And then have to learn over and over and over again that “put in extra unpaid work and it’ll pay off” is horseshit every single fucking time and I’m a fucking idiot.
Especially in USA
As long as groups of people (states?) are locked in deadly competition, there can be no slowdown, anyone who does gets conquered or obliterated.
