[tsimionescu]

The message itself is wrong.

We live in a world of plenty. We should be working less, not more. We have created more music in this century than all of the last combined. We have the ability to listen to thousands of years of music at the touch of a button. A concert that would have taken hours of work for 50 people to entertain 200 now takes nothing - a million people put on their headphones and listen to a recording made 20 years ago.

And that is just music - the same plenitude is available in almost all aspects of our lives. And yet, people insist on ever more growth, on ever more work.

Hopefully in the next decades, as the reality of global warming and worker empowerment gain traction, we'll realize that in fact the work week can be drastically reduced without affecting our material needs, as long we let go of this level of consumption.

[a1369209993]

> the same plenitude is available in almost all aspects of our lives.

To be fair, there's orders of magnitude less plenitude in certain necessities like food and housing - still more than enough over all, but not by so large a margin that you don't get local shortfalls (especially in housing).

[Apocryphon]

It's there, it's just not evenly distributed- or evenly zoned. As a species, we can probably produce enough to cover everyone's basic needs if we wanted to.

[a1369209993]

> > still more than enough over all

[Nasrudith]

How do you think the world of plenty came about in the first place? A hell of a lot of growth and work to provide for the demands of broad consumer bases instead of the whims of some head honcho who wanted pointless setpiece folly castles or grand monuments.

[tsimionescu]

The world of plenty mostly came about from technological advancement.

In my opinion, we're way past the point where we should have stopped trying to grow, in most fields. In particular in music, we're at least 2 decades past the point where the music production industry is being helpful.

Also in art in general, it's interesting to think about what this world of plenty has cost us. Even if we have incomprehensibly more music available to us than any generation before say 1920, most people have actually lost the pleasure of producing their own music.

In the times before recording and playing back music were common, a much larger proportion of the population would be learning how to sing and play themselves. Many more people would be composing and sharing their own stories - the almost dead world of folklore.

This can also apply to a lot of crafts - we're more and more becoming dependent on industry for simple things that we would have done ourselves in centuries past.

If all of this had been a way to help free us pursue other passions, it would have been good. But it seems to me that it's mostly a way to free us to do more work for other people, and that, for the average person who is not working in a job capable of using their creativity, it has started stunting a lot their creative potential, which would have found an outlet in some of these domestic pursuits in the past.