| > Instead, most people opt to work more in exchange for significantly more comfort and pleasure. That's definitely not how it works. First, because people in the global north spend most of their resources on basic survival (unless you're from the upper classes) imposed on them by capitalist system based on private property where imaginary pieces of paper (property titles) means you need to pay ransom to reside somewhere. Second, because the material comfort in the global north is not ensured by the workforce from the global north (i mean, partially yes, but mostly not) but by the quasi-slave labor from the global south, be it in mines or factories or sweatshops. Third, because we have a global abundance of resources and so much of it is wasted. Estimates vary but i believe ~30% of food is wasted globally, yet people go hungry in most countries. There's millions of empty apartments in US/France, yet hundreds of thousands of people living in the streets. We live in a monstrous system where we have the means to make every one well-off but consciously decide some people must suffer. Fourth, because even not accounting for obvious waste, planned obsolescence means stuff that is produced goes to replace shit-broken stuff instead of going to people who could get access to it for the first time. I believe planned obsolescence is a crime against humanity (and other species pollution and climate change are threatening). If you take these points into consideration, i believe sharing work and resources more fairly could lead to everyone having decent material comfort for very little weekly work. |
Watch a documentary about rural parts of third world countries, they're much closer to "basic survival" than pampered middle-class members in the West. For reference, in China, not that long ago people were subsiding primarily on rice - that the majority they ate every day throught all of their lives. Not to mention, they went hungry quite often (but not often enough to starve to death). That's "basic survival".
Here in the West, we can cut out so much fat out of our lives without really losing out anything truly substantial. For example, check out this guy: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/. He's living in Chicago on $700 a month, around half of which goes to health insurance and real estate taxes. But, people think it's "hard" or "miserable", and they prefer to chain themselves to their full-time jobs for decades so that they can fly on vacations, get new shiny cars and go to McDonalds every other day. That's the choice I wrote in my OP.