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Because someone else is getting the majority of the spoils.
Welr, you can change jobs
/s
But for real this has helped me many times.
I genuinely like what I do, but only when I have the freedom to do it right.
Exactly. You need a level of autonomy to be trusted to solve things, and to be given the permission to try.
No matter what I’m being paid to do, I’m going to try to do it as best I can. Gives some minor goals, pride, and accomplishment. Helps the drudgery go faster.
Zoe Bee made a video a few years about motivation. It focused primarily on motivation in school, but it alsobapplies to motivation in the workplace. She also has a section later in the video focusing on the work environment.
It’s 52 minutes long, but it’s worth the watch if you have the time.do we really need a video to know why being exploited feels bad?
karl marx made a video about alienation. it explains how you don’t belong to yourself during capitalist labour and thus don’t feel shit
Shhh, you’re supposed to let the system gaslight you into believing it’s a personal failure of yours and take pills about it
Yeah, the US really tries to transform the human soul into one that is willing to work, even enjoys it, in the context of modern society.
It does this by rewarding those for whom it is true and punishing everyone else and then hopes for natural selection to eventually amplify those who do want to work in modern society.
I’ve been lucky enough to find a job under capitalism where I have more than enough freedom and power in my environment to feel myself.
Checkmate Marx! All that stuff about worker rights is bullshit! /s
But seriously, I wish that wasn’t such a ridiculous unicorn of a thing to find, because that aspect in and of itself has become it’s own shackle. I’m afraid to seek out more competitive pay and lose the (relatively) happy/fulfilling aspects of my job.
Tbf, I doubt he made a video, as he died in 1883, lol.
food is literally free until someone builds a fence around it and guards it with weapons
This is the violence inherent in the system.
Yep. And not just our system - it’s inherent to life itself. After all, other animals hoard food, too. If we just “let nature run its course” things will never change - we need to be proactive in building systems that work differently.
What a stupid world.
Yeah. Life is an accident, and not always a pretty one.
Fortunately it seems we have the power to change ourselves. It isn’t easy, but it is possible.
Doesn’t seem worth it
It does to me, I suppose that’s where everyone’s different.
If we stop believing in the possibility of a better world, it will never come to pass.
I’ve been disappointed by humans too many times to believe a better world is possible anymore.
I understand that, these are dark times. But people have made progress during even darker times than these, so we shouldn’t give up on a better world now.
We are mycelia networks with legs. Seek the most effective source of food for your local cluster, procreate, and eliminate all threats to achieve those ends. That is the base code of our function. We invented the rest in our over achieving pattern recognition brains.
Dude, other animals are food.
Preferably not. That wouldn’t be dismantling hierarchies, even if most humans were on top. We’d still be enacting violence against the “others” in order to enrich ourselves.
I think a big reason why work feels bad is because in many jobs the surplus value of your labor is being stolen by the executives. When you put in effort to personal projects that feels good because you are actually getting to reap the rewards of your labor.
People like doing stuff that’s useful, not just for ourselves but for others as well. What we don’t like is being exploited.
Yeah the myth that people don’t want to work is crazy to me. How do all these insane open source projects exist then? Why did I spend extra effort to contribute to a project when I already got it working for myself? Most people just inherently like working on things they think will help other people.
Probably because a lot of people find programming fun. I am not convinced that people hold the same enthusiasm for customer service or sorting through recyclables, despite people generally agreeing that people need to be serviced and materials need to be recycled. And when I got slapped while working the register it definitely was not the fault of the exploitation inherent in the capitalist system. In fact I don’t think I would have enjoyed it even if I directly pocketed every cent handed over to me as the fruit of my labor.
Berry picker mentality
This person is just describing the psychological factors underpinning Self-determination theory as it applies to work but without the languageto convey it: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2017_DeciOlafsenRyan_annurev-orgpsych.pdf
Ain’t it funny how that can happen? How someone can “stumble across” some academic theory or whatnot without knowing it. This isn’t at all to say academia isn’t necessary, this is just an observation.
Oh, I personally love to see it. It’s how we bridge the gap of academia and the real world. There are many things that people feel or experience but don’t have the language to discuss, but once they do it can be very empowering. If you’re familiar with urban planning discours online then you’ve maybe heard of the word “stroad” describing the horrible 6 lane + type roads in much of the US filled with stripmalls. Being on one you can get this feeling of alienation and artificiality, like something isn’t right. However once you have a name for it, you can now discuss and advocate to change the “stroad”.
/c/im14andthisisdeep
Yeah. There’s not enough naturally occurring forage to support everyone, hence why argiculture is a fucking thing that existed before explicit monetary systems.
You also have the inherent issue of greed. Not everyone out there collecting the forage wants to share. I guess that’s an abstracted version of “building fences”.
You can’t find a solution to things if you’re going to ignore the path and reasons why things ended up like this in the first place. That reason is that some humans suck, and selflessness has not always been a virtue over time. There is purpose and survival value to selfishness in certain scenarios, so even if we could magically erase it, it might not be the best idea in all situations.
“Put on your own mask before helping others.” “Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”
Like a lot of things, moderation is key.
This is also why so much of so many cultures, society, and even religions are attempts to create external motivations to look out for your fellow man.
“The world would be so much bettee if people weren’t, you know, people.” is not a particularly groundbreaking thought, lol.
Also, “No one can explain why effort feels good but work doesn’t.” Because you don’t enjoy your job, which is fairly normal, unfortunate, and not a guarantee. More often than not I get all those warm fuzzies of stretching myself, solving a difficult problem, and accomplishment from what I do for a living. It’s one of the big reasons I haven’t fucked off into the woods. Not every day is enjoyable, but more are than aren’t.
The way I see it, if I enjoyed it too much they wouldn’t pay me to do it.
maybe it’s their first real job
screams early 20s to me
Lol without agriculture you would literally end up eating shit and dying.
every civilization around a large body of water makes this a half truth
Not really… No major civilization around bodies of water subsists without agriculture. Fishing just supplements the protein requirements of the population, and unless they’re fishing just mackle it’s not likely to be sustainable.
Fair, but fishing still requires a lot of work.
Real, this is a delusional slop post. All food requires some degree of labour, maintaining food supply or access to food requires even more labour.
Civilisation ≠ the natural human ecosystem, it’s something we created… To feed ourselves.
Not true. Other ways to cultivate plentiful food that are not ‘agriculture’; adjacent practices
No there aren’t. Not at the scale that humanity currently exists. We would literally die even if we just couldn’t make fertilizer. There would be no way to produce enough food for this many people.
Your mom isn’t at the scale humanity currently exists!
For much of history, progress was driven by exploitation. If you leave them be, farmers will produce what they need to survive and a little more for safety margin. There wouldn’t be much surplus to feed non-agrarian workers with, particularly those not immediately visible to the farmer. The smith forging their plows may be visible, but the lumberjacks, colliers, miners and such producing the metal for those plows aren’t.
To a farmer without modern education and understanding of logistics, the idea of working more just to support some nebulous group somewhere out there that does fuck-knows-what, on the promise that the results eventually circle back to them, that’s a little far-fetched. After all, what they’ve been doing has been working well enough, why change anything?
The driving factor for progress, cruel as it is, has been the military aristocracy doing things like demanding taxes* or guarding land with weapons so the farmers can’t feed their family with just their own land and are forced to work on that aristocrat’s land as sharecroppers, taking home one share of the crop while the other goes to the landlord. Thus, the aristocracy forces the farmers to work more than they personally need.
The
extorted“extracted” surplus can then feed other professions, which can produce stuff that eventually improves life for the farmers (such as steel tools making work easier, improved weaving racks, figuring out how diseases work and can be prevented). Ideally, the extra work would eventually pay off, the farmers would recognise the value and no longer need forcing.The problem is obviously that the landlord in question doesn’t do it for the good of society, but for their own enrichment; the crumbs that fall off the table for everyone else’s benefit are incidental. If they just took those taxes and supplies in order to distribute them as they are needed, we might be looking at some form of despotic communism (which is a separate debate), but it’s a bit hard to convince people “your extra work is totally worth it, dude” when they see their extra work building His Grace another pretty mansion to station his goons at.
I won’t spell out the parallel here, but the point is: our prosperity, technology, culture is built on exploitation forcing people to work beyond subsistence. With education, we could understand that value and make working some measure beyond bare necessities palatable and perhaps even rewarding.
But that kind of education would also point out the injustice and inefficiency in the system, so we get “guarding land with weapons” instead.
* As an interesting aside, pre-modern taxes often come in two forms: in currency and in kind, which means in food, fabric, goods in general. Taxes in currency are a great way to introduce money into a society: by demanding they give you money, you force the peasants to find a way to get money, like selling surplus. This also enables them to spend whatever is left over after taxes to buy goods and tools, and that’s how they actually get things in return for their surplus labour. In the absence of some other method of distribution, this is another case of the aristocrats’ greed accidently fostering a useful system. Of course, the flipside of that coin is – again – that the extorted taxes end up funding the luxury of few instead of the utility of many.
Nope, bullshit lies based on less than zero understanding oh history and some crazy racism against indigenous peoples of generally everywhere but the Americas in fucking particular.
Fuck you and fuck your made up racost bullshit please.
I read four paragraphs in and the only thing I can find that isn’t a blatant lie is that tools can be used to make work easier, and even that is deployed in a deceptive manner that elides other ways to save labor that real historical cultures have practiced.
Like there’s no part of this that is true. Read ‘the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity’ and ‘debt: the first five thousand years’ for a very bare bones but actually real scholarship account of how any of this shit happened by actual scholars who examined history and evidence and facts. As I recall at least one of those was a little bit of a doorstopper, as actual not just made the fuck up racism to justify your bullshit actual fucking history tends to be.
I’m not writing about modernity, let alone the Americas. You’ll find no disagreement from me that the way European Imperialists forced their culture on indigenous people was an atrocity.
The history I’m talking about is centered on Europe, because that’s what I know most about. Simplified, sure, but if you want the full version you might as well read these series on agricultural subsistence, textile production and the general outline of the lives of pre-modern peasants, with all the attendant insights into the social structures of those times. Which, by the way, were written by a real historian, thoroughly sourced with history and evidence and facts, and with all the appropriate caveats that I omitted because I’m not writing a fucking dissertation when I’m trying to show that education is a key ingredient to even properly understanding the shitshow we’re in.
I’m pretty sure we agree on the last part too, if you weren’t hung up on hostility about a topic I neither mentioned not disagree with you on.
So can we be civil and try to help me understand what part of this comes across as racist to you? Or at least some substantial criticism instead of “this is all wrong, but I’m not telling you how”? What part do these books explain that I got wrong?
Could you try explaining what the user said that was incorrect instead of calling them racist four times and citing some book?
All of it except ‘tools can be helpful’, as I said.
And offered something that explains the real version of what they’re making shit up about-books written at least in part to address the fact people just make shit up about early humanity and the origins of things like social forms and hierarchy and money based on what they think makes sense from what they can see right now in the present day. And the fact its made up.
No I can’t explain in detail, like I said they told too many lies for that, and suggested two books that would do that.
Once you have read those, if you still need me to explain why I think that was racist, I’ll try in very small words.
Did you not read my comment? I feel like you just asked for things I said in my original comment.
The truth is big and complex and lies are simple and fit just-so. The truth is bigger and messier and always more complicated and almost always stranger. Hence entire volumes of work.
I even cited scholarly work, if not in strict academic format! so if you want to be a fucking debatelord about it, you are free to do so.
I actually enjoy my work, most of the time, sue me.
I guess getting an education in what you like and are good at while it’s in demand by the market is kinda lucky though.
Yeah, this exactly. I actually really love my job, most of the time, and it pays pretty well, with a strong union and an excellent work/life balance. But I look out at the market, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize, boy was that a miracle. I’m not so blinded by my own anecdotal evidence to not realize things drastically need reform, and that everyone deserves a job as fulfilling as mine.
Housing is basically free as well. Have you seen caves!?
Yeah, if you don’t take into account the fact that it’s probably slippery and cold and wet and full of bats and bugs, caves are very good housing.
I like the architecture
Unfortunately we would have a cave housing crisis on our hands very soon. Although our numbers might dwindle in the bear wars.
Depends on what we call work. Food in nature is free in the economic sense, but spending time and effort gathering it can be considered work as well, and maybe isn’t as joyful as we can expect, especially when doing it for the 3427th time, and when it hasn’t regrown since last time we collected, so we need to go further of find alternate sources.
I like to put a clear distinction on what is work in the broader sense, and what is capitalist work. We don’t need capitalist work to live, and we would be better without it, but some form of daily struggle to maintain ourselves, we will probably always have, unfortunately.
That’s why he distinguished work from effort though. But I think the concept we’re looking for here is called alienation.
Getting rid of capitalist work would be great. We can mostly leave things as they are, except git rid corporate ownership of anything, and corporate personhood.
You sign a contract with a real, living person. If you must sign with a company, you sign a contract that binds every officer of that company personally. If a company does something illegal, well, it didn’t. A person in that company did something illegal and the highest ranking person on that contract needs to take personal responsibility for it and go to prison for murder, tax evasion, or whatnot.
Also regulate the stock market until it’s almost completely gone. It’s not a good place for retirement accounts, and that’s the only good thing that the stock market has going for it.
Then add in a few fix actions in general, like limit home and land ownership to what a person actually uses. No squatting on homes to rent them out.
Also full medical and dental for everyone, no private ownership of either practice. As a doctor, dentist, or nurse, you are suddenly a government employee, with government certification and training programs that are open to anyone who applies. Most people wouldn’t make it through the program (and background check) but anyone could try.
Add in some more social safety nets, and life could be good.
Fuck that sands like a great mid step on the way to full Communism. Even just the part of forcing there to always be an accountable person would be amazing and fix so many issues.
An anarcho anti-capitalist? What’s the proposal here? That he would have loved his life if he was born a few thousand years ago?
simplistic view of agriculture
