Current Events > It kind of sucks how the point of life is to just work and make money.

(+) Yeah! (+)

that isn't the point of life

that is the point of capitalism

That's not true. Working helps you to do the things that life is about.

that isn't the point of life

that is the point of capitalism

What is life supposed to be about? When I think of the things people do and the ways to enjoy life, almost all of them require spending money. So many hobbies are too expensive to follow.

Surviving in and of itself is supposed to be work and hardwork at that.

Same goes for literally every other creature on this planet.

Surviving in and of itself is supposed to be work and hardwork at that.

Same goes for literally every other creature on this planet.

To be fair the number of neets I know who actually hut the gym, read, and complete all the tasks (games included) they set to do isn't that great. By that zero. Work isn't great but just like playing a game set to no dammage you start to lose interest and end up doing nothing because eventually the dopamine kick doesn't happen. Gotta have some challenge to enjoy the reward and if you are lucky you might even enjoy the challenge part as well.

so we should take away all rich people's wealth so they can enjoy the challenge of life right?

they must be so bored

My issue with this line of thinking is so many people expect to be customers of society without being contributors towards it.

At what point in history did people not have to work in order to survive? The only difference today is that it's indirect. You don't have to go kill some animal directly to eat (if you manage to track it down). You have to write some text in front of a screen to get some paper that will buy you bits of dead animal to eat.

You have to write some text in front of a screen to get some paper that will buy you bits of dead animal to eat.

medieval peasants had like half the year off
in addition they could take breaks anytime they wanted in the day and did so like just went into house and took huge long break

A lot of people don't have the luxury of having a white collar job though.

You spend two thirds of your day working

Yeah but they also had far lower standards of living in just about every aspect. And when they did work, in that half year, they probably put more labor than many put into a whole year today.

they probably put more labor than many put into a whole year today.

That's true. In many parts of the world people live miserable lives in poverty and hunger despite their best efforts. I'm not pro-capitalism at all, but the concept of struggling to survive in life is super old. The struggle today for most people able to access a website like this is typically far less.

you are full copium mode

they had more off time and breaks than you

"BUT BUT I HAVE BETTER STANDARD OF LIVING SO! SO!!!"

bro the point is that they didn't live to work and they were fucking medieval peasants

so why are you living to work?

think about it and get back to me

this is also proven false unless you comparing to white collar job then it is about what you consider "work"
yea they did hard labor but
they definitely didn't work overtime into the night cause you couldn't do the work as the daylight goes bye bye

As for the rest, go out and do something that makes you happy. It doesn't have to cost you big bucks.

Friends,

I think you missed a few steps. You have to save your money, then you spend it, and your vacation days, on something super fun. Like an all inclusive resort, on the beach, so you can eat like a pig, drink like a fish, and swim in the warm sea.

NOTHING beat sitting under a palm tree, with a pounding headache, hungover, hear the crashing of the waves.

You have a guy toiling away in the field all day.

His wife is at home preparing food from scratch. And I mean scratch, like getting the eggs from the chickens, taking care of the chickens, getting the flour in a fit state to make bread, the list goes on and on, just so they can have some bland ass food afterwards. I mean, I shouldn't say that, it's still food and a blessing, but they worked like hell for it didn't they? That's like me telling you, god damn man, all you live for is eating. Friggen sucks that you have to eat.

in countries with corrupt governments

the modern human shouldn't have to struggle at all anywhere in the world, this was written about nearly 80 years ago by very smart and well respected men

they do today because of greed

No you don't You seem to not get it.
They took huge long breaks whenever they wanted.
Medieval peasants had better break schedules than most even moderate managers do in big corporations. This is well documented and has been a topic of discussion for the past few years.

oh no they didn't have McDonalds!

What point are you trying to make? You are copium again. I am not saying you should have to revert to being a medieval peasant.

I am saying they had more off time than you ever though possible AND they were medieval peasants!
So why do you not have BETTER than they did in this aspect? Why is your state regressive on this aspect? It shouldn't be right?
Think about it.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS[66] (18 May 1872 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.[67][68]
He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians,[68] and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protg Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism".[b] Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".[70]

Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins.

They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.

In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing.

The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England in the early nineteenth century fifteen hours was the ordinary days work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busy-bodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say, What do the poor want with holidays? they ought to work. People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much economic confusion.

Here is the article from 80 years ago

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Bertrand Russel was basically a genius. He argues that technology of the time (again 80 years ago) was MORE than enough to provide and allow for humans to have leisure time.
So why didn't we listen to him?

But people do have leisure time.

usually because wealthier nations colonize and do imperialist BS in.

In early 2017, a French labor law went into effect that attempted to preserve the so-called right to disconnect. Companies with fifty or more employees were required to negotiate specific policies about the use of e-mail after work hours, with the goal of reducing the time that workers spent in their in-boxes during the evening or over the weekend. Myriam El Khomri, the minister of labor at the time, justified the new law, in part, as a necessary step to reduce burnout. The law is unwieldy, but it points toward a universal problem, one thats become harder to avoid during the recent shift toward a more frenetic and improvisational approach to work: e-mail is making us miserable.

To study the effects of e-mail, a team led by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, hooked up forty office workers to wireless heart-rate monitors for around twelve days. They recorded the subjects heart-rate variability, a common technique for measuring mental stress. They also monitored the employees computer use, which allowed them to correlate e-mail checks with stress levels. What they found would not surprise the French. The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is ones stress for that hour, the authors noted. In another study, researchers placed thermal cameras below each subjects computer monitor, allowing them to measure the tell-tale heat blooms on a persons face that indicate psychological distress. They discovered that batching in-box checksa commonly suggested solution to improving ones experience with e-mailis not necessarily a panacea. For those people who scored highly in the trait of neuroticism, batching e-mails actually made them more stressed, perhaps because of worry about all of the urgent messages they were ignoring. The researchers also found that people answered e-mails more quickly when under stress but with less carea text-analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count revealed that these anxious e-mails were more likely to contain words that expressed anger. While email use certainly saves people time effort in communicating, it also comes at a cost, the authors of the two studies concluded. Their recommendation? To suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.

Other researchers have found similar connections between e-mail and unhappiness. A study, published in 2019, looked at long-term trends in the health of a group of nearly five thousand Swedish workers. They found that repeated exposure to high information and communication technology demands (translation: a need to be constantly connected) were associated with suboptimal health outcomes. This trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for potential complicating factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, health behavior, body-mass index, job strain, and social support. Of course, we dont really need data to capture something that so many of us feel intuitively. I recently surveyed the readers of my blog about e-mail. Its slow and very frustrating. . . . I often feel like email is impersonal and a waste of time, one respondent said. Im frazzledjust keeping up, another admitted. Some went further. I feel an almost uncontrollable need to stop what Im doing to check email, one person reported. It makes me very depressed, anxious and frustrated.

When employees are miserable, they perform worse. Theyre also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased health-care costs and expensive employee turnover. A Harvard Business School professor found that giving a group of management consultants predictable time off from e-mail increased the percentage of them who planned to stay at the firm for the long term from forty per cent to fifty-eight per cent. E-mails power to makes us unhappy also has more philosophical implications. There are two hundred and thirty million knowledge workers in the world, which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more than a third of the U.S. workforce. If this massive population is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global miserableness! From a utilitarian perspective, this level of suffering cannot be ignoredespecially if there is something that we might be able to do to alleviate it.

Note what he is saying.

If technology makes it to where it only takes a 4 hour work day to supply the entire world's need of pins, what happens?

Does the company then reduce all workers to 4 hours a day at the same pay?

No they fire half the workers and force the remaining workers to be overworked.

In this technology today can more than solve the issue but greed has stalled that.

It really depends on the job. For instance if you're doing something like game development, often it's very labor intensive with a huge risk of no payoff. A lot of people have to put the work in because if the work isn't put in, stuff won't get done.