I actually enjoy my work, most of the time, sue me.
I guess getting an education in what you like and are good at while it’s in demand by the market is kinda lucky though.
Housing is basically free as well. Have you seen caves!?
Unfortunately we would have a cave housing crisis on our hands very soon. Although our numbers might dwindle in the bear wars.
Yeah, if you don’t take into account the fact that it’s probably slippery and cold and wet and full of bats and bugs, caves are very good housing.
I like the architecture
We’ve extended our population far beyond what “remove the fences and weapons and let everyone scavenge” could support.
Personally I think people who didn’t contribute to that problem should get to scavenge whatever they want, though.
Food production is at an all time high and yet food prices and food waste is insane. It is 100% price gouging. They would rather waste massive amounts of food and ruin topsoil and insist on shrinkflation instead of sacrificing a few dollars.
Transportation cost. I live in a city that makes a specific brand of granola bars. If I go buy a box off the shelf at the store, that box has traveled a minimum of 400km before I touch it (ignoring converters and whatnot in the production facility.)
Centralization has really fucked up the cost of things.That, too.
Food production is at an all time high
and so is world population, so it balances out.
I can’t remember when or where I read this so please take it with a grain of salt; but most food shortages are caused by market speculation
Islam forbids this kind of profiteering off food and stuff. I am an atheist, but the fact that stuff like this is mentioned in very old religions is telling for how far back this bullshit goes.
An anarcho anti-capitalist? What’s the proposal here? That he would have loved his life if he was born a few thousand years ago?
I think a big reason why work feels bad is because in many jobs the surplus value of your labor is being stolen by the executives. When you put in effort to personal projects that feels good because you are actually getting to reap the rewards of your labor.
People like doing stuff that’s useful, not just for ourselves but for others as well. What we don’t like is being exploited.
Yeah the myth that people don’t want to work is crazy to me. How do all these insane open source projects exist then? Why did I spend extra effort to contribute to a project when I already got it working for myself? Most people just inherently like working on things they think will help other people.
Probably because a lot of people find programming fun. I am not convinced that people hold the same enthusiasm for customer service or sorting through recyclables, despite people generally agreeing that people need to be serviced and materials need to be recycled. And when I got slapped while working the register it definitely was not the fault of the exploitation inherent in the capitalist system. In fact I don’t think I would have enjoyed it even if I directly pocketed every cent handed over to me as the fruit of my labor.
All my jobs involved doing stuff that I already liked — and of course, I also complained about it, but it sure was way better than working for Amazons or coal mines or whatever it is USians are doing these days.
Depends on what we call work. Food in nature is free in the economic sense, but spending time and effort gathering it can be considered work as well, and maybe isn’t as joyful as we can expect, especially when doing it for the 3427th time, and when it hasn’t regrown since last time we collected, so we need to go further of find alternate sources.
I like to put a clear distinction on what is work in the broader sense, and what is capitalist work. We don’t need capitalist work to live, and we would be better without it, but some form of daily struggle to maintain ourselves, we will probably always have, unfortunately.
That’s why he distinguished work from effort though. But I think the concept we’re looking for here is called alienation.
Getting rid of capitalist work would be great. We can mostly leave things as they are, except git rid corporate ownership of anything, and corporate personhood.
You sign a contract with a real, living person. If you must sign with a company, you sign a contract that binds every officer of that company personally. If a company does something illegal, well, it didn’t. A person in that company did something illegal and the highest ranking person on that contract needs to take personal responsibility for it and go to prison for murder, tax evasion, or whatnot.
Also regulate the stock market until it’s almost completely gone. It’s not a good place for retirement accounts, and that’s the only good thing that the stock market has going for it.
Then add in a few fix actions in general, like limit home and land ownership to what a person actually uses. No squatting on homes to rent them out.
Also full medical and dental for everyone, no private ownership of either practice. As a doctor, dentist, or nurse, you are suddenly a government employee, with government certification and training programs that are open to anyone who applies. Most people wouldn’t make it through the program (and background check) but anyone could try.
Add in some more social safety nets, and life could be good.
Fuck that sands like a great mid step on the way to full Communism. Even just the part of forcing there to always be an accountable person would be amazing and fix so many issues.
I like to put a clear distinction on what is work in the broader sense, and what is capitalist work.
This here. Also important when you ask people about their work; I try to make it increasingly clear that I’m not asking about where they get their money from.
People for the last twelve thousand years: “Hunting and gathering cannot support the needs of a growing population. We should create a system where crops can be grown efficiently and in high quantities, and animals can be bred and raised. It will be labour-intensive and require specialized knowledge, skills, and equipment, it will lead to the economic stratification of society, but it’s the best way to not have most of our people starve to death.”
One guy who recently read the Communist Manifesto (abridged version): “But food is literally free!”
I mean, yes, food is not literally free. But there are certainly ways to organize an agricultural society that don’t automatically lead to social hierarchies, and that would be vastly preferable, imo. The enclosure of the commons has been a disaster
“growing population” is a sedentary problem. Hunter-gatherers didn’t reproduce like rabbits.
They still did, a bunch of kids just died or were infanticided because that was the closest thing to birth control.
Nope, that started after the neolithic revolution.
Before that, people had way less kids since 1. diseases weren’t as rampant then as they were after beginning agriculture (turns out that living in close corridors and near your animals that are full of diseases and parasites may not be healthy), and 2. people breastfed their babies until 3-5 years, unlike later, when people only breastfed them for a year or so, or even used wet nurses, which allowed the mother to get pregnant again soon after giving birth.
Of course a lot of kids surely died, but not nearly as much as in later societies up until the introduction of vaccines and other parts of modern medicine.
As for infanticide, I’m not particularly knowledgeable on that, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t nearly as common when births were much rarer and attitudes towards groups that later cultures usually killed as babies, such as disabled people, intersex people, and others that were considered ‘deformed’, were much more lenient.
i remember reading that higher calorie supply makes people more willing to breed, so agriculture kinda caused people to have more kids, because they could.
do you have any sources for infanticide?
was infant mortality higher for hunter-gatherers compared to Neolithic or even medieval times?
some information from a quick search (i’m not an archeologist. I was just very interested in Neolithic period at some time 🤷
After the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle with a more steady supply of high-calorie foodstuff ensured by agriculture and animal husbandry, the birth rate increased and demographics changed. Better nutrition and reduced female mobility led to shorter intervals between births, and ultimately to a significant growth of the Neolithic population. This ‘baby boom’ is also known as the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Whether a shortened period of lactation is also a factor in this development, is currently under investigation in a project led by Sofija Stefanović from the University of Belgrade, Serbia. The availability of suitable weaning foods such as cereal grains might have enabled to wean babies earlier, which led to a quicker return of mothers’ fertility.
In the typical pattern of Neolithic societies, siblings are now born in quicker succession, leaving only two to three years between births. Farming communities are known for having many children – not only because they can be supported nutritionally, but also because their labour is needed for the plentiful work in the fields. The physical toll of childbirth probably increases for the mothers, and their social position may change significantly. If they no longer go out on gathering trips as much and remain close to home, presumably with other women in the same situation, confinement and control can be one consequence.
Human hunter-gatherers, for example the Gainj of highland Papua New Guinea, have an average of 43 months between births. Pennington (2001) calculated 39 months for hunter-gatherers, taking the mean of four non sedentary populations. Three and a half to four years between children seems normal for prehistoric people before the Neolithic, i.e. the adoption of agriculture, animal husbandry and a sedentary lifestyle.
How is this child spacing achieved? Mothers breastfeed their babies for at least the first two years of life, and unrestricted breastfeeding suppresses ovulation, preventing further pregnancies. How exactly this mechanism works is still under debate – and do not try this at home: it has been shown that in well-fed, western civilisations with a limited nursing culture breastfeeding alone is not a reliable method of birth control. The continuous, around-the-clock suckling of infants produces hormones in the mother that suppress ovulation, but the energy balance of a lactating woman may also have something to do with it (Thompson 2013).
https://motherhoodinprehistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/prehistoric-child-spacing/
Currently reading the Bobiverse take on this. It’s still ongoing and I’m curious where the author will fall in the end.
Except that we do that and we still have people starving to death. Maybe we ought to try something different.
Sure, but the answer isn’t hunting and gathering.
No one suggested that we go back to hunting/gathering.
This person has never heard of the tragedy of the commons
and you have never heard of the book “governing the commons” by Elinor Ostrom, which is a book explaining in great detail and with the use of real examples how the tragedy of the commons can be avoided
Looking at her work, the first stipulation on pooled resources is:
Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
That seems like she is aware that commons can be misused and simply calling out that societies have found ways to manage them, which in turn kinda refutes the arguement being made in the post.
no it doesn’t? these are people working together in order to all use something, not someone who guards something with weapons and takes a cut of the value of your work
You’re adding in additional concepts that change the arguement. The original post talks about fences and guarding resources, not about someone taking a cut of other people’s work.
Additionally, even in the self-governance principles mentioned above there is a need for:
- Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
You could argue that “sanctions” and “weapons/violence” are separate things, but ultimately even the economists mentioned above call out there is a need for enforcement on how “commons” are used.
Edit: quotes are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom
The tragedy of the commons is ahistorical bullshit used to prop up bad policy, and it is completely detached from any resemblance of how the commons actually functioned. Garrett Hardin had no idea what he was talking about. Elinor Ostrom literally won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work studying how common-pool resources are collectively managed in real life.
Isn’t the whole point of the “tradegy of the commons” narrative to draw attention to the fact that the “commons” need governance?
The image you posted seems to be in support of non-goverance, which would be the opposite of what people like Elinor Ostrom advocated.
The tragedy of the commons, as Hardin put it, supported the need for government to impose regulation to prevent “rationally self-interested” actors from depleting the common resource. However, the scenario he imagines in which that’s necessary does not mirror the real world. What Ostrom found was that when faced with a dwindling resource, communities find ways to cooperate and develop rules to manage those resources without requiring a central top-down authority.
I actually don’t find all that much connection between the image I posted and the tragedy of the commons argument. (I just really hate Garrett Hardin.) My interpretation of the post is less an advocacy for no rules in managing common pool resources, and more a complaint and pondering of how work seems to lose meaning when it is on behalf of someone else
I don’t have any issue with the bottom part of the image, it’s the top part that seems to be oblivious to how the world works.
There isn’t enough food in nature to support the population. We need agriculture so people are going to have to work to provide food. That’s not free.
Also even if our whole population could be sustained by hunting and gathering alone, that’s still a shitton of work. Don’t come at me about that before you’ve spent 5 hours in the woods crouching over bilberry bushes getting stabbed by twigs and stung by mosquitoes to earn less than a liter of berries.
lucky we’ve been doing this woke agriculture thing for a few thousand years and have gotten rather competent at it.
Agriculture is a fuckton of work, have you ever grown anything?
That doesn’t mean the work doesn’t exist. If nobody went out of their way to do the undesirable and menial labor involved with mass agriculture then we’d all die. If you’re not in a tiny, hunter-gatherer proto-society then you really do have to put in work to live. It’s just our modern distribution of labor and reward that’s fucked.
Some people have. the vast vast majority don’t know shit about farming.
/c/im14andthisisdeep
Yeah. There’s not enough naturally occurring forage to support everyone, hence why argiculture is a fucking thing that existed before explicit monetary systems.
You also have the inherent issue of greed. Not everyone out there collecting the forage wants to share. I guess that’s an abstracted version of “building fences”.
You can’t find a solution to things if you’re going to ignore the path and reasons why things ended up like this in the first place. That reason is that some humans suck, and selflessness has not always been a virtue over time. There is purpose and survival value to selfishness in certain scenarios, so even if we could magically erase it, it might not be the best idea in all situations.
“Put on your own mask before helping others.” “Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”
Like a lot of things, moderation is key.
This is also why so much of so many cultures, society, and even religions are attempts to create external motivations to look out for your fellow man.
“The world would be so much bettee if people weren’t, you know, people.” is not a particularly groundbreaking thought, lol.
Also, “No one can explain why effort feels good but work doesn’t.” Because you don’t enjoy your job, which is fairly normal, unfortunate, and not a guarantee. More often than not I get all those warm fuzzies of stretching myself, solving a difficult problem, and accomplishment from what I do for a living. It’s one of the big reasons I haven’t fucked off into the woods. Not every day is enjoyable, but more are than aren’t.
The way I see it, if I enjoyed it too much they wouldn’t pay me to do it.
maybe it’s their first real job
screams early 20s to me
food is literally free until someone builds a fence around it and guards it with weapons
This is the violence inherent in the system.
Yep. And not just our system - it’s inherent to life itself. After all, other animals hoard food, too. If we just “let nature run its course” things will never change - we need to be proactive in building systems that work differently.
Dude, other animals are food.
Preferably not. That wouldn’t be dismantling hierarchies, even if most humans were on top. We’d still be enacting violence against the “others” in order to enrich ourselves.
What a stupid world.
We are mycelia networks with legs. Seek the most effective source of food for your local cluster, procreate, and eliminate all threats to achieve those ends. That is the base code of our function. We invented the rest in our over achieving pattern recognition brains.
Yeah. Life is an accident, and not always a pretty one.
Fortunately it seems we have the power to change ourselves. It isn’t easy, but it is possible.
Doesn’t seem worth it
It does to me, I suppose that’s where everyone’s different.
If we stop believing in the possibility of a better world, it will never come to pass.
I’ve been disappointed by humans too many times to believe a better world is possible anymore.
I understand that, these are dark times. But people have made progress during even darker times than these, so we shouldn’t give up on a better world now.
Work does feel good and I dont even like.my job that much. When i put in a good day at work or finish a project or something i feel good. If you dont thats a personal perspective issue. If you are so mad about other people preventing you from stealing food off their land you can get land for less than a bag of chips. There is so much rural land available where you can “work” till your hearts content.
It could be ADHD too. It, other neurodevelopmental disorders, and affective disorders can affect how one feels about just about anything.
I have ADHD and I derive nearly no pleasure from “a job well done” unless the outcome is directly and fairly immediately beneficial.
Project completed at work? At most I’ll be relieved it’s done unless it shows off my skills, which I like - dopamine!
Baked a cake? For myself, fuck yeah - dopamine! For someone else and I don’t get any? The forecast shows a light chance of a low pressure dopamine system entering the region this afternoon, depending on how much I like the person.
As someone with severe adhd, I will absolutely maintain that it’s a mindset issue. I don’t think it makes it harder to derive pleasure from a job well done. I think it disrupts the ability to connect that feedback to doing that task in a way that changes the amount of effort to do that task again in the future
I blew my dopamine circuits out with a meth addiction and have the same effects of ADHD now, which sucks because they can’t exactly put me on a stimulant for it. I drink coffee and smoke weed until I’m capable of accomplishing small tasks, and then build on those to occasionally have productive days.
You just have to push through! Willpower!
Just kidding, I hate that shit. Sorry to hear it, I can’t imagine how difficult that must be. I’ve never tried meth. It sounds like it’d be too much of what already works for me.
you can get land for less than a bag of chips.
Citation needed
Ok redditor
Lol without agriculture you would literally end up eating shit and dying.
Real, this is a delusional slop post. All food requires some degree of labour, maintaining food supply or access to food requires even more labour.
Civilisation ≠ the natural human ecosystem, it’s something we created… To feed ourselves.
every civilization around a large body of water makes this a half truth
Not really… No major civilization around bodies of water subsists without agriculture. Fishing just supplements the protein requirements of the population, and unless they’re fishing just mackle it’s not likely to be sustainable.
major civilization
Going the fence a name doesn’t make it not a fence.
I cannot opt out of being inside of fence, if I’m really lucky I might get to choose between a couple of them.
Anyone who misunderstands the issu, does so because they cannot accept their position as just another peon.
I actually like my job enough that the feeling of this meme is mostly background noise. I can still empathize because I have refused to allow the fences to beat it out of me. That is a never ending battle. It’s a pity so many have lost the battle but I get it, that ignorance does look blissful.
true but major is doing some value lifting here
even though farming is credited with allowing for population density supporting civilization (tech, stratification etc) plenty of peoples subsisted on the coast for numerous generations prior
we’ve been a species much longer than we’ve had farming (30x?) not really fair to toss all that out just because there is no historical documentation
we have oral traditions arguably from before farming societies
but fish ponds off the coast supported relatively large populations in antiquity, just by then farming was also a thing so there was no reason not to do both
even though farming is credited with allowing for population density supporting civilization (tech, stratification etc) plenty of peoples subsisted on the coast for numerous generations prior
Generations prior to agriculture? I don’t really see how that’s relevant to the current conversation.
but fish ponds off the coast supported relatively large populations in antiquity, just by then farming was also a thing so there was no reason not to do both
Since the advent of agriculture grain, legumes, and vegetables have made up the vast majority of calories that have supported human life. Up until relatively recent times animal protein was a relatively small part of most people’s diets.
Fair, but fishing still requires a lot of work.
it can still be feast or famine but the ocean was once plentiful in many costal areas, pacific islands have some written history from sailors / explorers of some pretty great living conditions all things considered
won’t be for much longer
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
– Marx
In fact, one must not imagine Sisyphus happy, for the labor he does does not belong to his intrinsic nature.
