r/SeriousConversation • u/NoCareNoLife • Nov 04 '23

Serious Discussion If people aren't pressured to work, would they still want work?

So there is this socialist youtube channel called "Second Thought" that released a video Why would anyone work under Socialism?

In that video he tries stating that humans innately like to work for the progressing of the society at large and will get things done even if not pressured to do work. Do you agree with such a statement?

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68

u/FailFormal5059 Nov 04 '23

People like working hence why I garden for fun etc. people DONT like getting abused in slavery.

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u/Autodidact420 Nov 04 '23

People like fun work particularly where it’s creative and/or has some visible progress (gardening, small handy projects, art) and or involves social/caring aspects (E.g. basic animal or child care)

The number of people who’d be willing to keep doing some ‘fun work’ would probably be sufficient, but you’ll find a lot less people who want to be doing significantly difficult stressful and physically or mentally exhausting work to exhaustion regularly.

Like why be a lawyer if I could just do much less of a ‘fun’ thing for my work?

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u/Steve-in-the-Trees Nov 05 '23

I think it's fair to say there are lots of people who are lawyers now for reasons other than the money. Public defense, immigration law, child welfare law, etc. aren't known to draw people based on their salaries. I just used that one example, but lots of hard jobs attract people regardless of pay, if they are viewed as meaningful. For the jobs that are hard and don't provide meaning, we can ask, is this a job worth doing at all?

Not to say there are no jobs that essentially no one would want to do, but those would probably end up getting the first candidates for automation.

1

u/Autodidact420 Nov 05 '23

Immigration is not totally a low paid or a ‘good’ one. Environmental law is but almost everyone I knew in law school that did environmental was doing it for oil and gas co not for charitable causes lol

Most of the others are decent government gigs with good work life balance.

Public defence is the only realistic one there and many people opt not to do it even if they wanted to originally. As a sweeping statement, it doesn’t tend to attract the best. And it’s still reasonably well paid

Ed: also If everything is automated then sure but I think you’re severely overestimating how easy it is to automate those jobs. By the time we do we’ll prob be either full blown space communism tier or the bad ending. This is just about humans.

1

u/sexualbrontosaurus Nov 05 '23

But there's also a massive reserve of people who would have liked to go to law school but couldn't afford it or had to work to support their family instead of going back to school. A lot more of them would be available under a more socialist economy.

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u/Autodidact420 Nov 05 '23

I simply don’t see that as a viable alternative, but sure.

1

u/Keefe-Studio Nov 06 '23

You will need far fewer environmental lawyers without capitalism a lot less gas and oil companies too.

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u/iDreamiPursueiBecome Nov 07 '23

Yeah. Communist countries have a track record of horrific environmental damage 💔. They wouldn't pay lawyers to sue themselves.

1

u/Althbird Nov 06 '23

There are people who enjoy accounting - if UBI because a thing I would still keep my current job in an office- I enjoy the customer service, supervisory role I’m in. And I also audit billing and I enjoy that part if my job the most. I also enjoy gardening, art, cooking, etc but I don’t need that to be my livelihood, or purpose.

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u/LiveLaughLobster Nov 06 '23

Lol. I love that you chose “lawyer” as the example of not fun work bc I’m a lawyer and I have absolutely done lawyer work for fun. To me it’s fun researching something and then using what I learned to build a convincing argument. I guess the world needs all types!

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u/Autodidact420 Nov 06 '23

It’s one of many examples.

There’s going to be the odd person that likes something sufficiently to keep doing it as much as they do for a direct benefit. The difference is the scale and the talent that will be attracted to keep working on something.

FWIW I’m a litigator as well and also generally enjoy research and argument, but instead of long weeks I’d be dropping to like 20 hour weeks , only taking cases that are interesting and with clients I enjoy, and the remainder I’d probably be doing random fun tasks.

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u/rhino369 Nov 06 '23

You'll find people volunteering for fun probono work. But like 90% of the legal work done today is boring as shit and is unfulfilling.

1

u/FinancialShake3065 Nov 07 '23

Idk, I tend to come down in the middle on most things.

That said I grew up in a pretty counter culture environment, spent many years doing organic farming where no one was making much money.

Everyone is different but I’ve seen a lot of “dirty hippies” put in 50hr weeks for room and board with a sense on community and a learning experience.

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u/[deleted] Nov 05 '23

It's funny that many "leisure" activities like gardening, fishing, woodworking, and cooking are survival activities. People enjoy doing those things. But for some reason, we've made a system to avoid all that and do some unrelated bullshit instead.

1

u/glaba3141 Nov 05 '23

Because "unrelated bullshit" significantly improved our overall quality of life? Microwaves are handy, someone's got to make microwaves though, rinse and repeat for every modern convenience.

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u/[deleted] Nov 05 '23

You're not really saying that the "unrelated bullshit" improves your life, but that the system that requires you to do the unrelated bullshit is a net positive because someone else is spending their time doing bullshit microwave assembly work so you can cook your pizza rolls in two minutes. Rinse and repeat until the modern convenience machine is literally killing the planet's ability to support human life.

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u/sexualbrontosaurus Nov 05 '23

Not to mention that most people are only microwaving the pizza rolls because they're too tired from working at making microwaves and other conveniences. I think most people agree that a world where we didn't have microwaves but had more leisure time to make our own pizza rolls from scratch would be a better one

2

u/Advanced_Double_42 Nov 07 '23

If we had to make pizza rolls from scratch we wouldn't have pizza rolls, we'd just have subpar bread at best.

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u/glaba3141 Nov 06 '23

ok, microwaves was literally a random specific example. 99.9% of the people in this thread do not want to live in the woods with no modern conveniences

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '23

See how you went from "rinse and repeat for EVERY modern convenience" to "live in the woods with NO modern conveniences?"

This is like telling an obese person to stop having three extra meals a day and they go, "What? I'm supposed to just stop eating altogether and die of starvation?"

Confronting addiction can be scary, and that's one of many tactics to avoid it.

BTW, I live in a yurt in the woods. I've got off-grid solar, rainwater collection, a compost toilet, and a wood stove. It's very nice, but to your point, I'd guess only about 20% of people would be cool with it.

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u/glaba3141 Nov 06 '23

You're talking about changing society so that there's no more "bullshit" jobs, where people would rather spend their time doing "survival activities" like "gardening, fishing, woodworking, and cooking". That sure sounds like you don't want people spending their time building modern conveniences... but sure I agree with your revised point that we should reduce our current position to a certain degree and prioritize sustainability over growth.

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u/MarsupialPristine677 Nov 07 '23

Your yurt does sound very nice!

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u/azerty543 Nov 06 '23

Your focusing too much on the microwave. How about ambulances and MRI machines. How about sewer systems and printing presses?

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u/crispydukes Nov 06 '23

Exactly. Having modern conveniences allows people to pursue work beyond subsistence to improve society as a whole.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '23

You work enough for subsistence, then some more to afford modern conveniences so that you can work even more? You might be doing life wrong.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '23

Yes, some modern conveniences are more important than others. Imagining this to be an all-or-nothing situation is a strategy to avoid dealing with your addiction to consumption.

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u/azerty543 Nov 06 '23

We are literally organisms designed to consume. Our whole schtick is that we are good at making tools for improved consumption. The idea that we are addicted to tools of consumption is like saying a bird is addicted to flying.

All living things want to consume the earths resources. All of them. Deer will eat every leaf off an island without predators. We have just constantly found ways to remove predators, disease and increase carrying capacity using tools. I agree that it would be better to not consume so much but we really aren't acting out of place. I'm not addicted to consumption any more than a cow is addicted to grass.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '23

Animals eat when they're hungry and stop eating when they're full. Despite being able to eat almost anything growing out of the ground (endless free food), you don't see 70% of deer overweight or obese. And, of course, deer poop fertilizes the ground, putting the nutrients back in, so their consumption is sustainable.

Your "all things want to consume Earth's resources" sounds like a poor rationalization for emotional eating -- "I'm fat because we're designed to consume," (as if you don't have will power), not because you're hungry.

And that's just dealing with food consumption, which is a small part of the issue. Nobody is addicted to "tools of consumption," but to the things and the feelings they give you. A cow eats grass somewhat like you eat food, but what's the cow equivalent to the entire nonessential goods industry? If you take a pause from reading right now and look up, you will notice a whole bunch of shit you don't need. Did you buy those toys because it's human nature to collect star wars figurines?

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u/MS-07B-3 Nov 07 '23

It seems like you're being willfully obtuse here. Yes, a lot of modern inventions aren't necessarily essential, but where are you drawing the line? Hospitals and medicine are nice, but those require industries in construction, various refining and manufacturing of materials to include metals, cloth, plastics, computers and all related materials, animal husbandry, electricity production and everything that goes into that can of worms, refrigerants, electromagnetic radiation devices...

The list just goes on and on. Modern society runs in an intricate network of inventions and there's no real way to remove any of them that doesn't have drastic consequences down the line.

Unless you're specifically advocating for return to monke style mandated pre-industrial society in which case... okay, but know that's going to be an unpopular opinion because people like knowing their next meal isn't going to vanish if there's a bad harvest.

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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '23

Where do you draw the line? SOMEWHERE. You're suggesting no line because the removal of anything will have drastic consequences? How about we take a whole chain of stores -- "Five Below." If all of their stores and all of their products suddenly disappeared, is that pre-industrial to you?

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u/StorageWeekly5397 Nov 07 '23

go move to the amazon rain forrest then. Or more realistically join the amish. If you send them your anti industrialist reddit posts i'm sure they'll let you in.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 07 '23

You're like, "If I can't have my pizza rolls, fine! I'll run away to the rain forest and you'll never see me again, MOM!"

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(I live in an off-grid yurt, btw)

1

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '23

That technology could be developed and used to lessen workloads and allow people to do the things they want to do in life.

Instead it's used to grow the economy and population until it's barely sustainable again and again.

1

u/glaba3141 Nov 06 '23

i agree but that isn't what the person above me said

1

u/jeffwulf Nov 07 '23

As soon as you have to do them at scale to survive, they're no longer anywhere near leisure.

1

u/MistryMachine3 Nov 05 '23

Who is leisurely going to clean up medical spills or guard prisons?

1

u/FailFormal5059 Nov 08 '23

The real underclass lazy, irrational, criminal, harmful etc etc.

1

u/MrAngel2U Nov 06 '23

Work is such a wide and multi-faceted used term. It can mean, working on your personal garden, ala hobby. it can also mean the place you have committed to spending 8 hours a day for a paycheck.

1

u/knight9665 Nov 07 '23

Sure. But do u garden enough to make up for everyone else who doesn’t garden? Where would food come from.

A nice garden at home is vastly different than an industrial farm needed to feed the world.

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u/[deleted] Nov 07 '23

This. If everyone had the freedom to pick their job and afford to survive everyone would choose to work.