For research purposes, I’m reading the gushing prophecies of the academics from the 1990s about how amazing the world without full-time permanent employment will be. As long as people’s basic necessities are covered (as they invariably are in developed countries), not having to work more than a couple of hours a week will give everybody great leisure to develop personally and engage in civic activism, they said. The world will become a beautiful place as long as we get rid of work, those intellectuals prophesied.
Stupid tools. I hope one of the millions of young people in Spain or Italy or France who have no hope in hell of ever finding anything but crappy part-time temp jobs will locate these gushy idiots and spit in their stupid, happy faces.
Clarissa's Blog 
The wisdom of Man is pure foolishness in the eyes of God, this great prophecy was written 2,000 years ago, your on the right track
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As long as people’s basic necessities are covered (as they invariably are in developed countries)…
That’s the important caveat…
I hope one of the millions of young people in Spain or Italy or France who have no hope in hell of ever finding anything but crappy part-time temp jobs
Do those jobs actually cover basic necessities? Because if you have a crappy part time temp job in the US you certainly have trouble covering basic necessities.
Part time jobs in the US are notoriously disrespective of your time, especially in certain industries.
Psychologically though, if you know that no matter how hard you work that a particular job isn’t going to lead anywhere, and isn’t going to be a stepping stone for something else, it’s so easy to get bored and sleepwalk. At my last office job, apart from the office politics, I was so intensely bored. I would just go to the bookstore on my way home because I didn’t want to deal with people. The kind of people who would develop personally and engage in civic activism while working part time find ways to do it while working full time.
That said, there is a sweet spot of time devoted to work and time devoted to other things. Too little, and your day devolves into formlessness. Too much, and all you do is go to work, work, and go to sleep.
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Nobody starves in the developed countries. Nobody dies on the sidewalk, nobody has to walk without shoes in the snow. These are the basic necessities I’m talking about, and they’re covered even in Russia, let alone in Spain.
But I agree completely on the need for balance. There’s nothing admirable about the poor fools who work 14 hours a day with no vacations. The mechanism of their disorder is actually similar to that of alcoholism or gaming addiction.
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I’m very sorry and embarrassed to say that chronic, health and even life-threatening child malnutrition is on the rise in the UK, at least (not sure about US, see such conflicting data/reports). Benefits have been cut, and in the more expensive parts of the country are barely adequate for day to day things. People may not be shoeless – but buying a growing child one pair of appropriately fitted shoes requires taking out loans, and there are certainly people dying of hypothermia through poor housing and lack of money to heat it properly (and I get the impression that in parts of the US deaths related to extremes of heat are also on the rise among the poorest?). People DO die in the streets, there are not enough places for the homeless with complex problems, especially addiction and chronic mental health impairments, to be properly helped. There is a lot of anecdata building up on the negative effects of the aggressive, assume-everyone-is-skiving conservative cuts and attacks on the allowances for disabled and long term sick people, and I am inclined to believe at least some of the claims that those changes have been for some people a factor in their choice to commit suicide – I know the sheer terror of becoming disabled under the current regime, even after paying into the welfare state for all of my adult life, is an additional stressor for me, and I am currently able to hold down a well-paid job in an affordable part of the country, and save a little money. It is disingenuous to say that basic needs are met for everyone – the 2008 crash pushed more people down into the levels of hand-to-mouth living where any small crisis is potentially a health and life threatening disaster, and where the continual pressures and fear start to affect a person’s ability to help themselves and their families.
I don’t call having to queue at a food bank regularly and not being able to heat even one room of your home properly through the winter “having your basic needs met” in the sense that article intends it – and that is the situation for working people at the bottom end of the system, as well as those on benefits, especially in the more expensive parts of the country (though the cheaper areas have their own chronic problems, usually a lack of employment opportunities, infrastructure etc.).
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Of course, the concept of basic needs can be expanded endlessly because, as we know, one thing that knows no limits is the human need. 🙂
But this makes the subject under discussion entirely moot. If we keep expanding the concept of basic need, then we’ll never get to the point of even needing to address this issue.
I’m sure that soon enough we’ll be discussing an absence of a smart phone as intolerable hardship.
It’s not a bad thing in itself but I’m sure it’s really not the kind of basic need that the creators of the post-work theory had in mind.
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(This is tangentially related)
I have recently come across a whole bunch of blogs on extreme frugality and early retirement. Basically, the point is to live very, very frugally so you can save and invest a ton of money and then live off of that money and interest without ever having to work again.
I have various thoughts on the early retirement movement. One is that is strikes me as disingenuous and imperialistic: while you may withdraw yourself from the economy of the society and let the money “work for you”, someone actually has to work — as in, be employed with companies in which you invested — to produce the goods that that results in all the increased value of all your assets and all those dividends.
While I wouldn’t mind not having to work 60+ hours during the school year and would appreciate some rebalancing of the duties I currently have (I don’t think I have exhausted how much I can do myself in this respect), I love my academic job and can’t imagine one that would give me comparable freedom along with fulfillment. And I like having a job, yes, for pay. I can’t imagine not wanting to have any obligations; I fear I might reduce to sloth, although that may be because I am perpetually tired and can’t imagine how it would look once I have gone through a real 3-month vacation (or however long) and am finally itching to work again. I think most people want to do meaningful work, be paid for it, and be engaged with the society.
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I think people vastly overestimate their abilities to structure their lives without a job. Early retirement posits that you’ll be healthy enough physically to enjoy being retired.
My father is going to retire, he says, his health is bad. I just don’t see him staying retired long without going cuckoo and driving all of the other family members cuckoo. He took a less demanding job nine years ago, and then followed it by buying a place in an expensive area, buying a business that required 60+/hr work (other people) and significant capital (his) which he kept past the point it was obvious he wasn’t going to recoup the money, and buying a rental property and now he just decided to buy a more expensive larger house near his work. He obviously does what he wants, but to me these are not the actions of somebody who wants to stop working. My mother says she’s concerned, but is floating the idea that he keep onto the house for a year and rent it out, move into the new house and keep the rental property. Uh, what?
My uncle retired, then after a year went back to work again. He has money, so I must conclude he was bored.
I’m talking about white collar professionals. People who work blue collar, physical jobs have their bodies quit on them much sooner.
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This is why it is so important to have “hobbies” other than work! My Dad was made redundant in his early sixties from a very specialised role which didn’t allow much option for using those specific skills, and is not an entreprenurial type (that involves working with other people to sell your product or services and he isn’t keen on them). But my parents always grew some produce in the garden, and on retirement they moved to a more rural area so they could have a large garden, took over a nearby allotment, and are pretty much self-sufficient in most vegetables and in soft fruit now. My Dad was a keen birdwatcher and cyclist, and as his physical health began to make those things harder, he took up digital photography and learnt image processing, and walking. He helped set up a photography club – a small group of retired people who set themselves monthly or yearly challenges. He keeps detailed weather records for his garden (he ‘borrowed’ my field equipment catalogue on a visit once and marked all the things he wanted, proper gauges etc., which made great christmas and birthday presents for a few years) and compares the results with those of his friend who lives about a mile on the coast. My Mum is more social, and involved with village life, including fund-raising for local charities, lobbying the local council, being on the committee of the W.I. and on all the church rotas etc. They both make good use of the library service, they started ‘collecting’ a special type of old buildings typical of their region by visiting (by parking the car at lesat a mile away then hiking to the site) and photographing them all, they are depressingly obsessed with knowing all the coffee shops where there are pensioner discounts on particular days and making the most of all the vouchers.
They always had little bits of a life other than work, and on retirement, were happy to turn to those things and let them fill up their days; often we have quite a job finding a good evening to talk on the phone, never mind fit in a good time for them to come and stay with me or my sister. I hope I can be like that!
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It is a great fortune to have parents who can occupy themselves so well and don’t feel the need to consume their children’s lives. I’m very happy for your parents and for you!
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