Worth.

I am still having sleep schedule issues, it is making doing anything somewhat difficult and I don't like it much.

But I wanna talk about work, specifically about how it is increasingly useless these days.

Zena pointed me towards this article today about how the idea of full employment is not only unnecessary, but may be harmful. It makes some good points, most jobs basically suck and are only able to allow one to barely maintain their position, they certainly cannot afford to improve it much.

There are a number of reasons for that, not least of which is the rich are mostly terrible people and have far too much power, those problems can, theoretically, be fixed, a national living wage instituted, and a national program similar to the New Deal could be implemented to train and employ millions in skilled professions that would also rebuild and upgrade our infrastructure.

The question on my mind, and a bit in the article, is basically: What if the emphasis on employment is not even necessary, indeed is it holding us back from a real solution? And to follow up, can a capitalist society survive at all if work is not a basic requirement to get money?

The article also spends a lot of time talking about the ethics of not working, if people would feel like they are worth less because they aren't working to earn a living. This is a dumb question in my mind, at least as relates to my generation. Basically how could we feel like we are worth less than we already do? I mean, I work at a relatively decent job, comparatively speaking, and I am extremely aware that I am completely replaceable at the whim of my boss, not only that, the money I make is not enough to actually live on without help. So if I am not valued in my position, and cannot support a family with my wage, how exactly am I earning my sense of "worth"?

The answer of course is that I am not, and that being secure while not working can hardly make the average worker feel worse than the average job already makes them feel.

We live in the future, each of us in America has access to resources and technologies undreamt of by previous generations, our phones carry tools for creation that are unmatched by anything that could have been conceived even thirty years ago, and our personal computers are perhaps the ultimate tool possible for the creation of art and science.

Yet for all our advances we still cling to notions of labor and earning that go back hundreds of years, and we don't even question them. Because we feel that we have to, we work our asses off to afford them, and as a result we don't largely have the energy or motivation to take advantage of these tools as anything other than entertainment centers. How many John Lennon's never wrote music because they were too tired after working two jobs to think of anything other than what to have for dinner and to watch an hour of TV before bed? How many Davinci's? Or Tesla's? We our crippling our future as as society by clinging to this outmoded idea of worth and unless we change how we think about earning money it will not get better.

It's frustrating to think about this stuff, as the solutions are essentially impossible to implement with the way our system works these days. Barring a massive shift in the electorate bringing essentially a new party into power, I don't see our political system as it is now making any changes that truly fix things, so we have to settle for the fight for fifteen and what have you, which is pretty depressing.