Still too long, imo. Your personal days should eclipse your work days.
I tend to think that 90% of work that people do SHOULD NOT BE DONE. Not, doesn't need to be done, but SHOULDN'T be done and is damaging to the world and society and the earth and everything.
Capitalism is so great and inventing dumb shit to keep people busy so that everyone can justify their existence and continue putting food in their mouths and a roof over their head.
Dreaming small gets you even smaller results because whether you realize it or not, you're negotiating with powerful and greedy forces.
Can you give a specific example of work that should not be done? Because off the top of my head, nearly every job I’m thinking of is valuable to society
I'd say think of it in reverse of that. Think of what's actually necessary and useful to society and then ask whether a given job fits that.
Off the top of my head, what's valuable is:
Food
Shelter
Medicine
Entertainment
Scientific advancement
In terms of jobs that shouldn't exist, what always comes to mind first mostly deals with production of items that you can find all over Amazon or Ali Express or wherever else. Think if those items should even exist and if anyone should be making them. In addition to this and kind of a separate subject, though, is the absolute trash quality of these items and how utterly breakable and un-repairable they are.
And then start thinking about how things could be arranged so that a million people aren't doing either jobs that cause the need for other jobs or jobs that a million people do but very slightly differently and could be streamlined/standardized.
And then think about what you would do or what many people would do when faced with homelessness and starvation due to inability to find decent employment: you might start a company that does X thing when the world was perfectly fine without X thing in the world before. You might say that, "yes, but now we have X thing" in the world, but what I'm pointing out is that this is the origin story of so much work that doesn't need to exist and in a lot of cases shouldn't exist. People don't work and produce because they think it's valuable to humanity. They do it because they might starve if they don't do it.
Finally, also disconnect "valuable" from "monetary valuable". Gangsters make money for hit jobs. Companies make more money from dumping waste in rivers. I mean genuine, true, human value. You can make money doing anything, positive or negative or neutral.
I don't claim to have answers. I'm problem-oriented rather than solution-oriented. I feel less confident in recommending solutions and you shouldn't trust anyone that offers them, frankly. Especially if you didn't ask, their opinion seems very valuable to them, and they have nothing but endless "obvious solutions".
If you're genuinely curious, I'd recommend Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. I never did end up reading much of that book, but I listened to a bunch of his videos speaking on the topic. My reading interests are elsewhere lately and I'm not at all interested in fixing the world...too old and tired and busy for that. Besides that, I genuinely believe that people "getting informed" on the internet and "having discussions" are kidding themselves. They're entertaining themselves and causing their own toxic fumes for society.
If you want change, you have to be and encourage the change you want to see. And besides that, real knowledge comes from books instead of the internet and real change comes from quiet contemplation and calm discussion with peers/community, not yelling matches and "can you believe X person said Y thing? what dumbasses!" type social media nonsense.
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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '24 edited Jul 31 '24
Still too long, imo. Your personal days should eclipse your work days.
I tend to think that 90% of work that people do SHOULD NOT BE DONE. Not, doesn't need to be done, but SHOULDN'T be done and is damaging to the world and society and the earth and everything.
Capitalism is so great and inventing dumb shit to keep people busy so that everyone can justify their existence and continue putting food in their mouths and a roof over their head.
Dreaming small gets you even smaller results because whether you realize it or not, you're negotiating with powerful and greedy forces.