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?
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.