[david38]

Look at most planned utopian societies. They crash and burn because everyone wants to be a leader / thinker, not a doer, at least not of non-interesting stuff.

The title is bad. You can be brainy and do menial work. Really, too many people who think they are above non-fulfilling work is bad. You need people who are used to selling their minds and bodies for money- in the “I work here because I have a family to support” sense of the word.

[da_chicken]

> You can be brainy and do menial work.

Yes, it's called "programming".

At least 80% of programming is menial. At least. The interesting bit where you understand the problem and find the best solution virtually always takes far less time than actually banging through the code. nevermind documenting it, testing it, etc. The hardest part is simply not screwing up.

I feel blessed if 5% of my day involves actual critical thinking.

[bjourne]

If society "need" people to do non-fullfilling work it should compensate them well for it. Amazon need people to do menial work at starvation wages so that Jeff Bezos can grow his fortune, but that is not a societal need.

[ozim]

Well I would like to point your attention to one little fact.

Jeff Bezos is not buying crap on Amazon and he is not demanding lowest prices or free delivery.

Amazon needs people to do menial work at starvation wages so that bunch of other people with money to spend on crap from overseas could do it for cheap.

Seems that having cheap crap from Asia is a societal need.

Not defending anyone, just taking a different point of view into consideration.

[bjourne]

But that is not true. Skimming a few billions of Bezos' fortune would be enough to give all Amazon employee's a hefty raise for years to come.

[boring_twenties]

How do you figure?

According to [1], Amazon had just shy of 1.3 million employees at the end of 2020.

If by "a few billions," you meant something like $5 billion, that's only $3,846 per employee.

edit: Crap, forgot [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

[rjbwork]

So, roughly a 2 dollar/hour raise? Sounds pretty significant to me.

[boring_twenties]

For one year.

[justicezyx]

> they are above non-fulfilling work

I think there are a lot of fullfilling work. Certainly more than the man power and resources our society can meaningfully assigned to them.

But the problem is that the system forces upon a lot of members a rather distasteful attitude and practical matters that drive them away. Often, one would find certain things lacking monetary rewards are fullfilling, but were drove off because they are in a social circle that exerts pressure. This actually happen more often in China than US.

For example, one is forced to earn money for their offsprings. But to do that one is allowed to do a lot of work that is not really fullfilling by design. Like coding for people to click ads. I am not saying all of the work done for people to click ads are not fullfilling, it's just the percentage is clearly larger than what we want, and is growing still.

From the system thinking perspective, the time for rethinking, a little bit about changing the social rewarding system probably is worthwhile.

[seph-reed]

Community is usually the thing that makes a menial job feel meaningful.

[NoOneNew]

That's one ingredient, sure. But speaking as a millennial, there was plenty of propaganda in American schools that made it seem like if you weren't working in an office, you failed at life. Now we have people who worked in offices throughout their 20s, running and screaming from those office jobs to discover that there is fulfillment in real work.

Problem is, lots of people still believe having callouses on your hands make you a second class citizen or sub-human since your opinion no longer matters.

And labourous jobs dont need community to be fulfilling. Lots of folks enjoy work working, house renovation and their own property maintenance for their own benefit. That and it's a free workout a lot of times.