[CountDrewku]

>Yes fix the odd broken stuff and help out when is needed, improve and innovate for the sake of optimization/discovery and scientific curiosity, but nothing mandatory to the actual single in order to have basic needs covered, food, housing etc.

Unfortunately, I think this is just a fantasy utopian outlook. Humans have HAD to do things almost their entire existence in order to survive. When you take this away a lot of people fall in to depression. I'm not convinced our minds are able to cope with the option of doing nothing. We currently have to do very little to exist in 1st world countries, at least compared to what we had to do in the past and yet you've got a plethora extremely unhappy individuals. I think the problem is not having to do stuff but having to do things that aren't directly giving you a sense of purpose.

>improve and innovate for the sake of optimization/discovery and scientific curiosity,

Maybe I'm pessimistic but I don't think many people do that just for the sake of curiosity or discovery. They do it because they have to in order to provide for a living or keep themselves and their 'allies' alive. I think you can look at your hobbies and see how you treat them to get a good perspective of how far simple curiosity will take you.

[rland]

The pandemic made this crystal clear to me. The phrase "essential worker" is pure comedy.

If like 80% of the population is not an "essential worker" why the fuck do we need to coerce people to work under the threat of eviction, homelessness, and withholding healthcare?

That's why the phrase "essential worker" had to be drastically expanded. To the point of completely destroying any chance of preventing the spread of covid19. Because if we actually took that term at its true meaning, it would destroy these myths that we have about work and the necessity of work. Even containing covid, which we all believed was pretty goddamn important, was not as important as preserving this myth.

We are living in post-scarcity. Which is why everyone except the "essential workers" are so alienated by their work. If you went to college, you're doing yoga and taking prozac to deal with the anxiety of your alienation. If you didn't go to college, you're ODing on fentanyl.

This problem will not go away with more culture and more myth-making.

[bennysomething]

We're living in a post scarcity world? Really? So if all the people who worked to get food on your plate just stopped it would all be fine? Thats just one example and the list of exchanges required so food just appears in the super market is too long for me to even begin. Take any other product you use and it will be the same. No idea how this is post scarcity, all of this thing called the modern world takes work, it's not magic.

[rland]

Those people are the essential workers I'm talking about. They are a small portion of the population.

Do you notice how during the pandemic, none of them stopped working? How many do you know personally? And how large that group, the everyone else who stopped working, is?

[pdimitar]

> I'm not convinced our minds are able to cope with the option of doing nothing.

You conflate "doing anything" with "working".

A lot of people would be extremely happy partying every other for most of their lives.

> We currently have to do very little to exist in 1st world countries, at least compared to what we had to do in the past and yet you've got a plethora extremely unhappy individuals.

You don't know how strongly those two are correlated and why. I'd claim that a lot of unhappy individuals are such because they have no direction in life and that direction can be a ton of other things who are not paid work.

> Maybe I'm pessimistic but I don't think many people do that just for the sake of curiosity or discovery.

Correct, I'd optimistically say 20% of people would but the cynic in me says 6-7%.

Still, as said above, there are plenty of activities that aren't paid work that are enjoyable. Plus you don't need to have only hobby.

I've known some rich people who have anywhere between 7 to 10 active hobbies at a time and they successfully alternate them to keep themselves busy and engaged.

[courtf]

For most of humanity's existence, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. The majority of what we HAD to do was keep moving. We traded that life for a more predictable food supply during the agricultural "revolution." That was when the back-breaking labor, long hours and slavery really took off.

We might not be good at sitting around doing nothing, but it's the sitting around part that is really the problem.