I just wanted you to know that.

But also, labor should come with a ranked ELO system for unlockable cosmetics and titles to make society more productive than it has ever been before.

  • Helmic [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Also, most office jobs don't actually do anything productive. Not that the skills used in office work are necessarily a waste, that there isn't a genuine need for office work. But a lot of things that are ultimately about marketing, about preventing theft, about producing some bullshit plastic tat that will end up in a landfill, about presenting information so some executive can decide how to extract the most wealth from both their customers and their employees, all that stuff just stops needing to be done, at all. I don't need to work a cash register because making sure people pay the right amount of money for the food they're taking isn't actually valuable work, it exists only for the sake of making someone else rich at the expense of others, it exists only to gatekeep goods from those that need it but can't pay for it.

    Imagine a grocery store transformed into a food dispensary. You don't have to work the cash registers. You don't have to move everything from one side of hte store to the other because corporate thinks confused customers buy more shit they dont' need the longer they wander around lost. You don't have to simultaneously check every receipt super carefully to make sure no one's stealing anything while also not bothering customers in the slightest and getting the wink wink nudge nudge from management to keep your eyes on black people going into the expensive part of the store.

    You don't have to get yelled at by the store manager who hasn't worked a day in their fucking life because you called in sick yesterday. You don't have to constantly dart back and forth trying to stock tiny shelves with not nearly enough space for niche-ass products that'll sell out in a few hours because there has to be twenty different types of identical cereal, you can just have a huge wall of the shit people are actually coming into the store so you have plenty of time to keep it continually stocked without rushing. You don't have to tape your receipts to everything you buy and get screamed at by management anyways because they think you might be stealing a 70 cent bottle of generic soda, you can just pull it off the fucking shelf and chug if you feel like it. You can wear earbuds and listen to music, audiobooks, theory while you work. You can have not shit music playing over the intercom, or at least silence or something generally nice that won't drive you up the fucking wall the twentieth time you've heard "I Want You and Your Beautiful Soul" today. If you're out of something, you can just take something off the shelf to do the job at hand instead of just not cleaning something up because the store's out of the "approved" cleaner.

    You can actually hang out with your coworkers, date who you want without fearing that you'll make coming into work difficult if you break up since you can literally just start helping out at a different dispensary if things go really bad. You can ask a "customer" to help you with something if they're handy instead of just struggling to lift something over your head like a fucking schmuck. You don't have to put up with someone demanding you do 10 hours work after scheduling you for 8 and yelling at you when it's not done in 6. You don't have to compete with other employees for hours even though all of you are fucking tired and don't want to work so much. You can wear what you want and be honest with others. You don't have to try to upsell a "customer" something they don't need and can't afford when you know what it is they actually want. You don't have to have any moral dilemmas watching someone trying to sneak something out, worrying you'll lose your job and be unable to pay rent if you get fired because you didn't try to stop someone who really needed it. You don't have to be forced by some coward in management to go tell a homeless man to leave and not sleep on that bench nobody is using because it makes rich shitheads "uncomfortable."

    So much of what makes work suck has everything to do with capitalism, even the work that will remain after can be so much better.

    • FiresideHats [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Great post. Most people like getting things done when it can be an outlet for socialization and they're not being micromanaged. So many come home from official "work" and voluntarily go do more work - church bake sales, coaching youth sports, helping people in their cycling group fix their bikes. And more people want to do those things but can't because official "work" drains them so completely.

      It's such a stupid take that people would all sit at home if we eliminated capitalism. Evidence to the contrary is everywhere.