[krapp]

Employment doesn't exist to improve your quality of life, or even provide you with a living wage. Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company, in exchange for whatever compensation the market deems fair, and under terms that benefit the company's bottom line.

To expect most, or even many, jobs to be motivating or inspiring or even enjoyable is unrealistic. And to be fair, many people would love it if the worst thing about their job was that it was merely tedious. But in any case, the work exists and has to be done.

Automation might provide an escape from some bad jobs, but the purpose of automation is to allow companies to extract profits from labor without compensation, not to free people up to improve their lives. People will likely simply go unemployed in that case, or be forced to find work in the diminishing labor market that remains.

UBI might also help by decoupling the need to survive from the desire to work, but there will probably be some intersection of jobs that are both bad and infeasible to automate, and someone will still have to do that.

[pc86]

Most of HS class did not go to college. They knew with alarming certainty that whatever they did for work was not going to be enjoyable, was not going to pay enough, and for some of them would even be physically dangerous. It was just a fact of life. Work was something shitty that you did so you could put a roof over your head and food on the table, and what you did outside of work was your life.

The privileged few on HN (myself included 100%) who find their work rewarding, fulfilling, and extremely lucrative, are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what "work" is like in the real world.

[fsloth]

"Employment exists to allow you to provide value to a company..."

I would claim employment is an economic pattern our civilization uses to process the resources of our planet. Money is just a signaling and resource allocation tool in this endeavour. Companies are a self organization pattern formed from legal constraints and economies of scale.

There is no intrinsic necessity to organize work into 9 to 5 desk jobs. Lots of the conventions our civilization has are tradition based and eminence based. They are not the pinnacle of human development.

Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.

[krapp]

>Sure, I don't know a better way to organize all of it but that does not mean that there is no need to, or that we can't or won't.

Who are "we", though?

Employers aren't likely to change their job requirements unless profits increase from doing so, or unless a government or union forces them to. A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo. The people capable of making such decisions already enjoy a very high quality of life.

[fsloth]

"A desire to improve the human condition alone probably isn't sufficient to convince businesses to change their status quo."

Generally, providing better wellbeing for employees is profitable. Or, that's at least what trendy management books tell us. I don't have a clue, I'm just a frontline coder. See for example Hamish "Scaling Up : How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't"