- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:
Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:
•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),
•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.
EDIT: for people who didn’t pay attention to my “think about Appalachia” comment.
Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn’t mean the people around you can too.
Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn’t know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.
And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of “grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family” - and who suddenly won’t be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.
And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that’s how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.
Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because “free trade” and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.
You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I’m afraid you’re going to.
The discussion is not centered around a post-work world that people have grown up in. This is a discussion about what happens to hundreds of millions of people when the fabric of their lives changes suddenly because the vast majority of people alive today have grown up and lived in a reality where their life is functionally defined by work. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but it is the reality of the situation. Most people are not comfortable enough to sit with themselves and decide who they are as a person and figure out their real internal motivations because the necessity of work has made it fairly easy to avoid doing that difficult work.
It isn’t a pleasant opportunity, but the experience of being left rudderless, of having to sort things out on your own without a script or a clear path forward is one that many people don’t get, and one that many others fail to seize upon. There are enough people, particularly in America, that have been just comfortable enough to never have to really think about back up plans or contingencies for what to do with their life in the absence of its current structure.
And there are many reasons why people may not have the wherewithal to find meaning in their lives. Some people are so focused on survival that meaning hasn’t even occurred to them. Others are depressed or traumatized or otherwise miserable and it’s hard to find meaning in blinding pain. Some people have been spoon fed meaning by way of work since the day they were born and literally do not know any other way to exist. Personally, I was stuck in a blend of these things when I was still working in tech and it was in the throes of abject despair that I finally forced myself to make the changes required to pursue my life’s meaning through work as a physician. Getting into and through medical school has been a brutal process and it has been immensely painful to try to imagine alternatives after the amount of work I’ve put in to pursue this goal. I’m now within 6 months of graduating and will be starting residency next summer, but it won’t be in the specialty that I had hoped (and that I had already staked a piece of my identity to). I’ve suffered more hardship than many, but I have also been more comfortable than plenty of other people, but I would find a great deal of turmoil and misery trying to restructure my life without being able to work as a physician (and that’s not even getting into the financial nightmare of my student loan situation.)
If society really collapsed, and for some reason the post-society world didn’t leave space for me to be a physician or a healer of some kind, I would probably figure it out…but it would be so incredibly painful to do so. It would be horrible to give up on everything I have worked so hard for to have to replace it with whatever I could manage and I would be unlikely to be happy with whatever that solution ended up being for a long time until I finished grieving what could have been, because that’s what this process is. Losing everything you’ve structured your life on is a form of grief and not everyone is equipped to handle that grief gracefully and effectively while being able to carry on with their lives.
Source? Proof? Or you just throwing that out there as if it means anything?
That also sounds incredibly condescending. I prefer to assume better of my fellow human beings, I see no reason they are not capable of this if I am, because I don’t think myself as better than “most people”.
Oh, do people not choose what to do with their life for work as young as 14 in America or…? Because by then here in the UK I had to pick my subjects for my GCSEs that i’d study for two years, then make sure I can nail the exams so I am eligible to go for the A-Level subjects I want to pursue for the 2 years of school after that, and make sure that I nail those so I can go to uni and get the degree I need to pursue the career I want for the next 20-30 years while also keeping in mind that I must be good enough at it all to actually compete and thrive.
As a working class person who had no parental backing and an immigrant who had to find a way to stay in the country for my own safety, I had to make the right decisions when confronted by an extremely brutal reality at an age when my immediate concerns were heated fandom debates about mass effect 3’s endings.
As far as I’m aware both here and there at 16 someone could literally choose to pursue military service too.
So literally all of us are forced to make extremely comitting choices that impact the rest of our life and figure these things out.
That might have been true 80 years ago, but that’s not how these things work in such a dynamic job market either.
None of these things have anything to do with wage labour specifically. You mention financial nightmares and not being able to be a physician, the former is a product of capitalism, not wage labour, the latter is not relevant as no one is actually stopping you from being a physician in a post-work world, you would be free to be a healer, in fact - more free to be a healer because you would not be stuck in a tech job, or any kind of job for that matter.
Again, I would sure hope in a post-wage-labour utopia that doctors exist. Just because you would not be in wage-labour “work” doesn’t mean you can’t do something. The vast majority of what people do and even more of what people want to do or like to do isn’t and actually can’t be wage labour either, whether it’s art or scientific research etc and many professional like doctors and teachers and janitors that actually do something necessary for society are wildly underpaid by said society because they exist at odds with the capitalist wage labour structure, not because of it, and they existed before and will exist long after as professions.
Of course, but that isn’t what actually would happen so the entire premise is faulty.
I think I need to boil this down a bit. Some people lack the emotional intelligence and personal convictions to make meaning for themselves. This is not a bad thing. I do not think less of people for having shortcomings compared to others, I see it only as variance between people. Just as I do not think less of my patients with diabetes or heart disease or substance use disorders, I do not think less of people for not being able to adjust to sudden changes in their lives with perfect poise and rationality. Everyone has differing strengths and weaknesses, and there is no shame to be had for any of them.
For your argument about choices in life: There are many American children and young adults that pick their education and future career based on external influence/instruction or necessity rather than actually choosing for themselves. Most of the people I know that joined the military out of high school did so because they would have been homeless and unemployed if they didn’t. (I graduated high school in 2009, by the way). So there really isn’t all that much in the way of true free will in this country unless you come from a wealthy family or take on a lot of risks and debt forging your own path. This isn’t even touching on the rampant propaganda in our youth telling us that we will amount to nothing without a college degree.
For the point of being a physician in a post-work world, a lot of people are trying to replace physicians with AI despite the fact that these overgrown algorithms simply do not have the capabilities to do the job properly…but it’s not like they’re taking that into consideration for any other jobs/professions either.