Same here, but did you read the article? The bizarre problem is that it’s addressed to everyone, not to the richest people in the world.
If I could support my family in the manner to which they have become accustomed without working full-time, I’d never work another day in my life. I do not need to be rich, and I have all the stuff I could ever really want. What I really want is time to spend with friends and loved ones, the opportunity to travel, and the freedom to create whatever I feel like creating on any given day. If I have money to spare, I’ll give it away. Day-to-day toil for a paycheck, however, is kinda for the birds, in my opinion. Getting paid for doing something you love is great (my brother is one who knows how lucky he is to be paid handsomely for doing things he’d happily do for free), but “working” in terms of having a job is something that I wish people didn’t actually have to do. But I do have to do it, and so I’ll keep working until I can’t work no more.
Unless @miasm and I can get any studios interested in that screenplay we occasionally noodle on. 
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[quote=“milliefink, post:21, topic:58028”][quote=“daneel, post:20, topic:58028”]
If I was the second richest man in the world, I wouldn’t work any days a week. And I’d still enormously make more money than I could spend just from the return on capital.
[/quote]
Same here, but did you read the article? The bizarre problem is that it’s addressed to everyone, not to the richest people in the world.
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I read it but skimmed past the “richest man” part without noticing it. The bit that made it clear how much of an asshole piece this is was the end bit:
Pretending that the reason a student can’t live in the mountains without a job is because he doesn’t have the courage to instead of the fact he’ll probably have to work full-time for most of his life to make ends meet much less repay whatever student debts he likely has been saddled with.
“Christ what an asshole”
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I would consider working full time (even with plenty of overtime) in an industry I don’t detest to the core (big oil) as a massive step up.
Absolutely, quality of life from overwork is an important consideration but I feel that working in such a morally bankrupt industry really grates on your soul in a unique fashion.
“But the money is good,” used to be a motivating factor, but have you seen what oil firms are doing to contractors lately? It’s criminal. Well, more criminal than previously.
Think I’ll go and noodle summore. 
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I think this article reflects an emergent new ethic in this century. While the option may be out of reach for many at present, confronted as we are with the very near-term prospect of total automation, we are compelled to reconsider the Calvanist ethics so deeply rooted in our passing Industrial Age culture. We cannot continue to define our worth to society and ourselves in an economic context when we soon will have no functional place in production and economics except as generators of demand. We must accept that ‘job’ and ‘work’ increasingly mean two different things. I never imagined that I would see Basic Income become a topic of mainstream discussion in the US in my lifetime, but the nature of things now compels it.
Underlying the Maker, Open Technology, and P2P/Commons movements is a meme called ‘unplugging’–the term perhaps first coined by Vinay Gupta but an idea well known to Post-Industrial futurists. It’s the notion that we can leverage emerging technology–technical and social–as well as a streamlining of lifestyle and abandonment of consumer fetishism on a progressive reduction in the cost of living through the application of independent and cooperative production. Thus we ‘unplug’ from the market system and into a new infrastructure. This is an emergent lifestyle option that an increasing number of people are considering and exploring. Automation isn’t simply getting smarter. It’s shrinking, becoming more flexible, lower in minimum production volumes toward production-on-demand, and cheaper as well, obsolescing both jobs AND capital. Its long-term trends point to the end of the factory (already an anachronism), a transition toward increasingly local and on-demand production, and ultimately immersion into the general infrastructure of the built habitat. That’s what total automation means. And in this context the triad of worker-market-consumer, our conventional models of ‘wealth’, and our economic basis for self-worth no longer make sense.
The single-greatest overlooked impact of automation is that it catalyzes the evolution from homo-economicus to homo-ludens.
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If people worked on average just 3 days a week, unemployment would cease to be an issue.
Eh. I work part-time. Luckily my partner has a very good job so we aren’t financially reliant on my income. As a result I’ve had the chance to do two feature films in the last year along with a bunch of other productions. Still, I’d rather have a full time job at the right company.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I found that cleaning and tidying up a home is a time consuming and exhausting chore. Now instead of wasting my life on this tedium I just douse the whole mess with gasoline each week and set fire to it, then buy a brand new mansion down the street. Works like a charm!
Yours truly
Some rich ass hole
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It’s entirely cultural, this religious belief that anyone who doesn’t spend a bare minimum of at least half their waking life making someone else richer is somehow subhuman and does not deserve even basic health care, housing, food, or clean water.
Trouble is, we don’t need people to work that much. We already have way more empty housing units than homeless people and way more than twice enough food for everyone (although less than 2% of the population work in agriculture). Agriculture doesn’t need them. Industry doesn’t need them. So we’ve had to make up service sector jobs. Like massive bureaucracies to determine who is worthy enough to receive those ‘scarce’ resources of food and housing.
On the flip side, just a few generations ago, people sewed their torn clothes, repaired their radios, and ate their leftovers. It’s not necessary for all consumer goods to be disposable and/or fad-oriented. We also now have the education and tech to do a lot of things ourselves that we would’ve needed someone else to do before; much of the service sector is obsolescent. We don’t really need to buy anywhere near as much as we do, whether it be from agriculture, industry, or services.
People are beginning to see this, but it might be awhile before we can reconcile it with our ingrained cultural beliefs. In the meantime, things will be messy. We’ll just keep working more than we need to so that we can buy things that we don’t need. Those who aren’t able to get a job (necessary or not), those who lose one that’s no longer necessary, or who don’t behave as irrationally as us, will continue to be looked down upon and treated badly. How many of us need to get pushed down into that category before we collectively consider that our beliefs might be suboptimal?
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I believe that I have a couple of medical conditions. Conditions that require drugs. Drugs that cost between $400 and $800 a month. That’s the cheapest you can get those drugs. Without those drugs, I’ll probably kill myself. So I go to work, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, where I do stuff that ranges from mind numbingly boring, to so frustrating I want to cry.
Then I go to the pharmacy, pay about $40 a month instead of $400 for the pills that make my brain work because my job is how I have insurance and can afford to not have a perfectly formed body with no problems ever and also not have any accidents or injuries ever, then go home and do things I enjoy with my functional brain, and don’t think about work at all.
Then I get up the next day, drive for 2-4 hours depending on traffic, and do more very boring and frustrating things all over again.
Because I’d rather live and do a job I don’t like, a job that doesn’t really matter, a job that I can eventually leave one day for something better, than die.
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I don’t understand the question.
Who is the author? I’m guessing my google-fu is correct:
Mohit Satyanand M.A. (Economics)
Independent Director, Chairman of Shareholders & Investors Grievance Committee, Member of Audit Committee and Member of Remuneration Committee, DFM Foods Limited
This person is connected to 16 board members in 3 different organizations across 4 different industries.
Age: 57 Compensation: 105,000
Background*
Mr. Mohit Satyanand, MA (Economics) serves as Management Advisor at Delhi Flour Mills. An investment analyst, Mr. Satyanand is Consulting Editor to Outlook Money, the personal finance publication of the Outlook group. Mr. Satyanand is a Management Consultant with an Economics background. He started his career in sales & marketing management at Hindustan Lever Ltd. and then set up the India’s first successful packaged snack food brand, Crax, in 1984.
So it sounds less like part-time work and more like early retirement with a few consulting gigs on the side. That still pay $100k/year. Yeah, I’d work “part-time” for that, too.
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And that in a nutshell is why single payer healthcare systems are such a wonderful thing …
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Wow, do I feel old.
/person who still does these things
Edited to add: in all seriousness, poor people still do these things. And even a lot of non-poor people. You know who don’t? Wealthy people, who believe that their wastefulness is the norm. Talk about lazy.
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Right there with ya.
Off to do my mending!
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Heh I work at the bomb factory as someone I knew once put it. Though I have little to directly do with that side of the company and I don’t even work directly for them anymore. I kind of want out more just that both the company I work directly for and work at have are not what they were when I started. Hey we can get all our people who have been here for years and know things inside out to get laid off if we move the work center to another state and make them reapply for less $. Just not the same work environment anymore and from what I hear it isn’t much better elsewhere.
And as more things get automated we are going to need less and less people. This is going to be the biggest problem for the next generation of us, what do we do when we actually can automate 99% of work. Not everyone can be a programmer/doctor/dentist/plumber/etc. We are not going to have any real economy based on giving each other massages or haircuts and markets can only grow so much before they catch up to the world population. What do we do when there isn’t any work for us to do because we got robots to do it. Not that this is bad I think it is awesome if we could get there just that so much of our culture is based on WORK WORK WORK that humans are going to be at a bit of a loss for awhile when we don’t have to do that.
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When some creepy weird upper-management politics went on at my previous job, my boss encouraged me to freelance. What started as a between-jobs lark became gainful self-employment pretty quickly, and somehow I’m still doing it, ten years later.
The myth of self-employment is one of leisure, working in pajamas/underwear, doing an 8-hr shift’s worth of work in two hours and then kicking back with a beer as the rat race rushes all around you. The reality is that as a freelancer, I can’t afford to be lazy, so I still pull 10-14 hr days when needed. And that brings me to the number two downside of not working a full-time office job: there’s no separation between your Work and your Life. There’s no moment of walking out of the office and leaving work behind for the evening; you can’t just “turn it off” without making a conscious decision to turn the computer off or shut things down. When you’re your own boss and your time is literally money, taking an hour to play Xbox is expensive.
The number one downside is the lack of benefits, of course. Healthcare, taxes, insurance are all bonkers expensive.
All that said, I can walk into the next room and snuggle my dog anytime I want, which makes it all worthwhile.
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