> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large.
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.
>I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of american tech workers to tech workers at large. Anywhere else, you're most likely just as underpaid and overworked as the rest.
Being generous, OP might have been referring to plain survival.
You can buy actual homes for $10-20k in the US, youtube has told me, with enough land to grow enough food to sustain yourself. It's certainly not impossible to survive on a very small amount of money (until you die of a horribly expensive health problem).
That might not be the path most of us choose, but it's still there.
One of the reasons food is cheap in the west is the automation, but the machines used for that automation are big and expensive, and only make sense if you’re feeding a lot of people rather than your immediate family. That leaves you with inefficient farming, hard work even though the $€£ cost is low.
A cheap home and a part-time job to buy necessities, letting you take advantage of economies of scale and specialisation? That can work, but it’s rare to find a cheap home with access to the labour market — where the jobs exist, you compete against those willing to work longer hours as a customer in housing market, and where you rely on remote work you risk being outsourced to someone willing to do ten times the hours for a tenth the hourly rate in the labour market.
> In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month
It is questionable what the signal of that statement is. I know people earning top tier salaries who can "just pay their bills". Truth is that their bills cover their mortgages on which savings they plan to retire -- If one count in adding money to you savings account, the I reckon 100% person of all people earn just enough to cover their bills.
Isn't the number of people living paycheck to paycheck more a measure of how few people save money vs how many people work more than they need to? I imagine plenty of people fall into both categories.
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.