Well, it is true. Most people don’t want to work. I certainly wouldn’t if I could help it.
Yeah. Me too. You would literally have to give me money, for me to sacrifice a part of my chilling out time.
hear me out… what about more money? that do anything for ya?
And by part you mean 12 out of 24h
My current deal says 7.5 h and I’m quite happy with that. If I get a better offer, I may reconsider.
Can’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob!
And that should be the goal of a society. Currently we work because as individuals we’re forced to. As humanity we’re already past the forced need. Enabling people to choose would be more beneficial and we have the innate quality of finding meaningful ways to spend our time.
The problem is that we suck at allocating productivity. For example, we produce enough food for everyone but don’t distribute it half as well as we should, so people still starve while food rots somewhere else. We waste resources propping up a whole host of parasites that add no value to society, such as famous-for-being-famous celebrities, advertisers, speculators and redundant managers, while underpaying the people who actually produce wealth. And we want a brand new iPhone every year, a brand new car every two years, etc, and by and large don’t recycle. We’re wasteful.
Most of the actually important and time-consuming work is automated already. If we were smart about what work we do, an 8-hour work week for everyone would be more than possible. But we are so inefficient with our productivity due to warped priorities that most of us barely scrape by as it is.
Our excessive lack of proper planning and foresight really gets accentuated when you evaluate how wasteful and inefficient any of our processes are. I’ve been listening to Walden on audiobook recently, it’s almost as if Thoreau really did transcend his time and saw that the future would be equally as futile as his present at properly providing for humanity in a meaningful way.
We would rather have luxuries and pleasures than fulfilling proper needs, work tends to take away from our needs in ways we overlook.
This just in: humans do not enjoy any degree of enslavement.
Check back next year to see if we’ve managed to break the spirit of the human race.
This is true. It’s because we evolved over many hundreds of thousands of years as egalitarian hunter-gatherers and only relatively recently invented things like agriculture, big stratified societies, the bulk accumulation of wealth and property and work.
This reminds me of a recent meme pushing back against the “greed is human nature” narrative. Was something like:
“If you see a bear riding a bicycle at the circus, do you assume it is the nature of bears to ride bicycles?”
In other news, water has been confirmed to be wet.
no one has ever wanted to work, you’re supposed to pay them enough that they’re willing to work anyway
Treat then fair they’ll do you the same.
I think I found your s/
“Why do you want to work here?”
Uh, I don’t, but this stupid thing called not dying requires me to have money and you’re offering to pay me money for doing a job you need doing.
In case anyone is interested in the sauces https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/
I absolutely love this: “The Miami Herald published an article in 1981 about an 89-year-old man named Sammy James. James had worked for decades as a crate nailer and said his fast moves earned him the nickname, “The Nailer.””
His job title was a crate nailer, but he got the nickname from his fast moves. That’s like being so good at operating the cash register you earn the nickname “The Cashier”
Many of us are only working because we can’t afford not to work. This bullshit world is designed in that way.
My boss has been looking for new technicians since I joined but has had no luck. His excuse is the classic “Nobody wants to work”, but then I saw what he’s paying for entry level for the positions. It’s so low you’re better off working at McDonalds or slinging Amazon packages bad.
Nobody wants to work… for peanuts.
My work ethic is a dlc the boss needs to pay extra for it
Here’s the thing - I want to work. I love it - I create solutions to problems. It’s who I am, and when I have nothing else to do I wander around turning scraps into something useful. I became a programmer because I could create without worries about wasting materials.
What I hate is being exploited like a resource - 40 hours a week is a lot. It’s enough I use every free moment just getting my energy back. I have no time to work on my own projects or properly socialize - I just get worn down until I burn out and can’t wake up in the morning.
I’m also very aware of the impact of my actions, and nearly every possible job involves draining the world of something to make money for someone who has plenty.
I don’t care if other people get to coast because of my work, I just want to solve hard problems in a way that adds to the world.
I do care when I’m used as a pawn in the game of capitalism - But meet my basic and I’d spend my time creating
Cause 40hrs a week is a schedule for workers on a production line with machine tools doing monotonous work. It’s hard, but it doesn’t require you to think much. Thinking, changing contexts is hard.
Ah, also you really are a resource, only your employer is a resource for you too, to get money which you then use for your own purposes. You are mutually resources for each other, that’s the point.
Well, also it seems that in the olden days, when we didn’t have internet etc, it was a bit more normal to do your own hobbies etc at work, unofficial tea breaks, and in general many things other than work. Though I’m from Russia, and the Soviet joke says “they imitate pay, we imitate work”.
Ah, also you really are a resource, only your employer is a resource for you too
indeed. I think pretty much everyone agrees the problem is the distribution of those resources. Much is given by us for very little in return.
You give as little as you can give for as much as you can get. I’d rather say distribution of negotiating power. And the way to fix this is making it easier to do business in your sphere as much as possible at all costs. And I don’t mean making it more profitable for existing businesses, I mean there being as many businesses as possible and them being easy to start, so that the negotiating power would even out.
Which moves us to the IP, patent, copyright laws, which make it hard starting a business in many areas, and any kind of regulation and certification that makes it seriously hard to start a business really. Which is, BTW, the reason regulatory laws directed at fighting Apple, Meta etc are also killing many other things we don’t even see cause it happens in conceptual stage.
Some IT companies also try to make sure you can work on your hobbies in free Time ( in my case it works like this. Here is a room with 3d printers raspberry pi etc. Have fun, Just make sure your work is done and clients dont complain )
Can’t speak about other people, but for me such things really improve efficiency. You should be able to relax when doing intellectual work.
Yeah like, in my current WFH implementation support position I’m able to work on school work and paint Warhammer minis if everything else is done. I’m gaining new skills which will benefit the company thanks to going to school, thanks to the hobbying I’m happier so my mental health is better so I’m able to have near perfect attendance, and still all my work scheduled is done every day. I really don’t see why this idea that ppl need to be working 100% of the workday every day persists. The situation I’m in is basically a win all around, but some suit with a spreadsheet still sees only the opportunity cost lost by <100% productivity which yields .1% lower profits or something
That suit is incompetent. He compares real metrics with imagined metrics, of course the latter are going to be better.
I understand very well that nobody wants to work anymore. The problem is, that despite all the technological advancements we still have to work. It’s outrageous!
It’s because people’s wants have shifted as technology progresses. If everyone was satisfied to live like a medieval peasant and all we needed to produce was clean food/water we probably could have automated most of the agricultural work and done away with the need for the majority of labor.
But people today now want on-demand deliveries, entertainment, healthcare, telecommunications, international travel, etc. and they need to pay for these things somehow, which means work. These shifting desires continuously push the boundaries of what we are capable of producing which ends up redirecting labor rather than eliminating it.
Edit: thanks for the down votes everyone. I’m not saying this is the way it should be or that people should live like peasants, just explaining the basis of consumer/labor theory from economics 101. People typically get more utility out of the things they buy using their wages than they would from not working at all. Right now that’s mostly because society would let you starve to death, but even if there was UBI or something like it, there would always be some people who would want to work in order to buy more things for themselves.
Tangentially, if we could support everybody at the medieval peasant level without work, well, why don’t we? By which I mean, let’s institute a Universal Basic Income. What a familiar, yet so profoundly different, world it would be if you didn’t have to worry about having a safe (although Spartan) place to live, clean water to drink, basic, nutritious food to eat, and care if you get hurt or sick, no matter what. You’d still have to work for all the modern luxuries.
I guess the workers would have leverage against abusive, exploitative employers, if the cost of quitting a bad situation was simply not going to Paris this year, rather than life-or-death struggle, and we can’t have that!
This is impossible under capitalism, scalping at necessities always happen.
Some people want to work. They usually have no hobbies, family, or interests.
Or they have a job they love. I have heard legends of such things existing.
I have a job I love 99% of the time. And I have hobbies. I worked really fucking hard to get to where I am. 80+ hour weeks for months at a time for years.
We also have other younger guys come in, and some of them want to learn, and they go right on up the chain. Then, we have people that want things handed to them, don’t wanna do anything, and wonder why they’re not getting promotions. I’ve even given them incentives, raises, and tried to coach them on what they should do to meet a goal we both set. Some just want to point fingers and blame everyone else, and never take responsibility for their actions
But we have more success stories than “failures.” It’s good company to work for.
This is also exactly my situation. I worked hard for my dream job and now it doesn’t feel like work but a fun game instead. I know that’s not the case for most, and I’m grateful for it.
I do hire people for my department, and want to give them the same opportunity to be happy. It’s really hard to find someone who is as excited as me for what I do. It’s not so much they don’t want to work, but they don’t want to work HERE.
I forgot about my comment and just tried out Sync, and saw the replies…
That’s great, though. This wasn’t my dream job, but I kind of fell into what I wanted to do along the way. It turns out that it’s very fulfilling and pays well. And I can’t think of anyone that is above me that I don’t like. No one has given me a reason to hate them, and I think they feel the same about me. The people that work for me like me, even though they’re constantly giving me shit
I do like how this site (pretty much Reddit) acts like every employer is out to fuck them, and everyone is as miserable as they are.
Perhaps there’s a company out there where there’s an exception, but an 80+ hr work week means this company desperately needed to hire, or if you were salaried and especially not earning overtime, it was exploiting your value to get paid without sharing that compensation with you.
If it was under the promise of future compensation, then it’s a case of I’d gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today–still scummy.
Internal promotion is pretty rare these days in my field. Usually, you have to jump ship and you learn quickly not to get too attached to a company.
It’s because you can only put a few people on these jobs at a time, and you want damn good workers that do quality work. You don’t want multiple crews messing with some things because it can cause confusion or things to be missed
And it wasn’t promised to me, but I did make it up the ladder some, and still have places I can go up to. It’s actually a really good job, pays damn good, but requires a person to put in some work.
But, it’s nothing to go work a month like this, pay all your bills and have $15k extra after it’s all done
80 hours weeks for months good company
/s…?
Yea, it’s a good job. And it’s nothing about hiring more people. Some jobs can only be done by a few people, so we just go around the clock until it’s fixed and bring home big paychecks
Could have been a startup
Definitely something white-collar in any case. Nobody is working 80 hours a week for months on end as a roofer or brick-layer. Even fishermen only work 16 hour days for 2 week stretches which are physically punishing enough. The average human body just isn’t up to months of 80 hours/week of manual labor.
It’s not white collar. It’s powerplants. I do work in management, but the deal when I moved up was that I still got to work in the field 50% of the time. I get burned out sitting in my office. And I definitely did not start in management, but at the very bottom
And as far as the hours… there’s only so many people you can put on some jobs, so hiring others will just have them standing around
Also, I’d say 90% of the people that work with me love their jobs. I’ve seen quite a few of them turn down better pay because we’re pretty chill and honest about work and expectations. We keep good people around as long as possible.
Those people still working harder than executives ever will. Priviliged bs.
Executives shouldn’t be in any position of people listening to them. Put them in guillotine and ignore them once it’s fallen down
