[leereeves]

It's the nature of our existence that work has to be done. At minimum, we die if we don't gather food and water, find and maintain shelter, and prepare to defend ourselves against a variety of dangers.

Social advances and technological progress haven't eliminated that burden, they've increased it. Now we also need to maintain complex infrastructure, educate the young, care for the elderly and disabled, and create entertainment to ease the psychological stress of a life so far removed from our basic instincts.

And at this time, very little of that work is done by robots and AI. Asking not to work is just expecting other people to provide all that for you.

[wiether]

Sorry but I don't see how a software engineer (as me) is doing any work that is in the nature of human beings.

There is more and more people doing less than needed jobs while there is less and less people doing useful jobs.

The Covid crisis showed this to us (at least in Europe) : the people doing the real work are the people with the lowest incone and the lowest social protections.

So instead of giving good incomes to guys like me faking being useful to society, I'd prefer we give real incomes to useful people and let other doing "nothing" instead of having jobs with no "natural" purpose.

If we were in a society like that, I would have never chose being a software engineer, I'd rather be in the fields, growing food. But I'm a coward so I picked the salary instead of the meaning.

[leereeves]

Some jobs are further removed from the end product, and therefore less visible, but society depends on them. The people doing what you call the "real" work depend on a lot of support (including software) to do their jobs.

What use is a grocery store cashier without the whole supply chain that brings products to the stores? What would happen to that supply chain without modern infrastructure and the government that maintains and defends the infrastructure? What becomes of that government without elections and the information infrastructure that keeps voters informed?

Presumably someone pays for the work you do, so they find it useful. Even if you can't see it's ultimate purpose, it probably does contribute to society.

[luckylion]

> Sorry but I don't see how a software engineer (as me) is doing any work that is in the nature of human beings.

The simplistic answer is: you do work that is required (in some form, on some level) for "everything" or nobody would pay you to do it. You might be a few hops away from "putting food on the tables of people", but your work is somewhere in the network that supports society. Yes, there are some exceptions, some negative side-effects of the market approach, but they seem to be too small to make the whole system less effective than a carefully planned non-market system.

> The Covid crisis showed this to us (at least in Europe) : the people doing the real work are the people with the lowest incone and the lowest social protections.

That's mostly because that "real work" is usually work that you can easily train for. I still think we should pay better (and pay more people) to work e.g. in health care, but the reason why we don't is that it's easier to train a software developer to work in nursing than training a nurse to work in software development.

> So instead of giving good incomes to guys like me faking being useful to society, I'd prefer we give real incomes to useful people and let other doing "nothing" instead of having jobs with no "natural" purpose.

I know the feeling, but I don't think it's accurate or helpful. If you hate your job, find another one. Especially in software, there are plenty of jobs where you can very directly see the positive impact of your work on people.

> If we were in a society like that, I would have never chose being a software engineer, I'd rather be in the fields, growing food.

Who did more for society, the person growing food or the person developing a tractor?

[hellisothers]

Sidebar: Don’t be so hard on yourself, not a day goes by that I don’t think to myself “Man, I could walk away from all of this and my family and I could be happier, more fulfilled doing X” where X is a grab bag of moving to smaller towns and picking up baking/farming/local business’ing. It might be true, but it also might not be and picking a known quantity of good/bad over an unknown is not cowardly, it can be your gut telling you “this probably isn’t the right thing”.