This is what they keep telling us. My hunch is that people will find plenty of "work" to do in their families, their communities, in creative pursuits. Let's find out.
We have found out, it's just that the people who do the finding out generally have money, so their opinion is automatically discounted.
It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.
Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.
There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.
I have no data either way but I can imagine that there are many more people who are wealthy and quietly having a great time with it. Most of the retired people I've known, early or not, also enjoyed it. Some have definitely taken up work-like pursuits on their own terms.
Secondly the wealth being the means to achieve this is itself a confounding variable. I don't think it's good for your mind or soul to "have everything," no. Life isn't and shouldn't be merely a series of your own preferences. That doesn't indicate to me that lacking confidence in your mere survival is necessary for human thriving. As far as I know research indicates the opposite.
My point is that I was firmly in the “I want to retire early” category, found myself with the means to do so, and that this wasn’t theoretical for me.
But the thing I imagined is not the reality that I found.
I realize “they” have other motives for convincing people such a future is a problem. But that doesn’t remove what I truly believe would be a hellish reality for many.
I’m all for pushing society in a less work-centric direction and think current work culture is toxic. That’s a big part of the reason I burned out and went on sabbatical.
But I’m also pretty worried about what a sudden shift without careful planning may bring about. I know I certainly didn’t have the habits/skills in place to navigate it in a healthy way.
If you switch from (forced) workaholism and burnout to the opposite, you're going to have whiplash. And perhaps PTSD.
I think the concept of personal freedom is hugely misunderstood. The US model seems to be some combination of wealth, privilege, and absence of social/financial obligation to others.
But we're seeing over and over that the people who attain that kind of freedom are often deeply unhappy, and sometimes deeply toxic.
Which is reflected all the way through work culture.
What would a non-toxic economy and work culture look like? Not just emotionally and personally, but in terms of social + economic structures and collective goals?
I've not seen many people asking the question. There's been a lot of oppositional "Definitely not like this", much of which is fair and merited.
But not so much "We could do try this completely new thing instead." Answers usually fall back to standards like "community" but there doesn't seem to be much thinking about how to combine big planet-wide goals with individual challenges and achievements with supportive social middleware that has to bridge the two.
I agree with this comment. If I’d started from a position where I had a better relationship with work, maybe the whiplash wouldn’t have been so severe and I could have transitioned to something better before getting stuck.
My worry is that so many people around me - from all walks of life and across a wide range of pay scales - have a similarly unhealthy relationship with their work and would experience the same whiplash.
My deeper worry is that the rate of technological progress is far outpacing any efforts to implement a less toxic economy and culture, and that such changes to economy and culture must necessarily be gradual to avoid massive societal upheaval and chaos.
Ultimately I want to work on big world-impacting problems whether I’m getting paid for it or not. I know this is possible, but spent most of my early life training for the toxic work culture that burned me out.
I think we need off-ramps and on-ramps, not cliff dives.
I was basically unemployable due to health problems for several years before covid made work from home normal. It's not really theoretical for me either.
It was, all things considered, great. I have never been more involved in the communities and connections that I find valuable and fulfilling. I learned several complex skills that continue to benefit me and the people around me, I taught and mentored young people some of whom are now adults entering professional careers based on that momentum.
I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
> I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival
If we're all struggling for survival, some of us will fail. I invite you to dream bigger about what we're "equipped for." One of the very few universal human traits across time and culture is refusal to be bound by our biological history.
> I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
No, and I said as much in my comment. My point was not that my experience is universal, but that I have direct experience with the failure mode of such an arrangement. Am I 50% of the population? 75? 5? I don’t know. But as I went though it, I met more people who’d gone through something similar, and I learned a lot about myself that made me realize my previous imagination about a life without work were mostly fantasies. Again, this isn’t to say there aren’t productive ways to navigate it. Just that the ways I imagined this working were very different from reality.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what such an arrangement would bring about at mass scale, and if people are more likely to have an experience like yours or like mine. There’s probably a spectrum of experiences between them. I just think we should approach such a future thoughtfully and carefully.
Diving in head first with a “let’s see what happens” attitude seems dangerous and ill advised.
You had that disclaimer but most of the rest of the comment was about your prediction that most people would be affected in the same way. Some friendly feedback for your future writing on the subject, I guess.
That’s fair, and I edited “most” to “many” shortly after I wrote it because the truth is that I don’t know what exact proportion of people will have the same issues. I had hoped the extensive context throughout the rest of my comments made that position clear.
I do feel confident that the number is higher than some of us think. Certainly I did not expect this to unfold in my own life, and through the experience I became aware of the many others who’d gone through something similar and were similarly caught off guard.
All of this will hinge on personal upbringing, background, support systems, life experiences, locale, etc. At some point I hope to write in more detail about the factors in my own life that I believe led me here after I’ve gotten fully to the “other side” of the experience.
