Spurred from this post about The Office where I saw some back-and-forth about potential occupation-shaming(?), like why are people getting heated over being able to work?
I understand there's mental health, physical disability, learning disability, or just general lack of opportunity for some people or situations, but shouldn't everyone's drive be to contribute to society as a byproduct of participating in it?
Yeah, capitalism is fucked up, but at the end of the day, shouldn't everyone be motivated to contribute something back to earn their keep? Or can we just say "fuck it" and get mad at people who shame us for choosing not to submit to the 9 to 5?
This reminds me of a story my mid-Western friend (a liberal, lesbian holistic type) told me. In her grampa’s day, one of the farmers got maybe depressed (although that wasn’t a framework for that then and there), and just sat on the porch day after day instead of working the fields. Eventually a bunch of the other farmers got fed up and roughed him up — and he went to work after that.
I’m not sure what her point was, but she seemed to be telling it in a favorable light.
I’m more of the view that we have sufficient resources now to give people a clean room, 3 squares and an internet connection. I also think most people want to contribute. Look at all of internet moderators and curators who work for free or for fake internet points/cred.
Turning a hobby into a job changes those parameters, though. Like the difference between some kid who plays WoW for 10 hours a day for fun versus the foreign gold farmer who "plays" 10 hours a day gathering resources to sell on a secondary market to subsist off of.
what if there was a social good register system and things like curating a wiki, or archiving digital media, or modding a pro-health internet forum counted, as did all sorts of other things, helping your elderly or disabled neighbors, reading to children, fostering children, fostering pets, helping in the community garden, staffing a community tool library, etc etc I hear in Japan, people must keep parts of the street clean, taken as a daily shift for some number of months of the year, and they also take turns shepherding kids to school and it’s just a part of the culture that you’re raised with.
That said if someone really wants to opt out, I think society could support a basic apartment subsistence at our current level of wealth, especially if we stopped wasting like 90 percent of energy on warring.