"Nobody wants to work" The truth about labor in an affluent society

Much of employment is merely laundering your time and free energy into a work history... so that you can find more amenable employment.

There are more different jobs than ever before

The nature of employment and work has changed, and this is one reason why humans have to shuttle themselves incessantly across our cities and communities.  Specialization is definitely a boon, but we live in a world, where not only individuals specialize, but communities as well.

 

The needs of humans are relatively simple, and have been unchanged over thousands of years: food, shelter, warmth, and some kind of work or effort to be involved it.  Without something engaging to do, our abilities atrophy, both mental and physical.  This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of work and having a job, for your own personal development.  We could all take online courses and go to the gym every day, but making your labor a part of human development saves times and helps you focus.

A job is never going to be perfectly suited for the purpose of human development and personal improvement, if you are doing real work, then that will sometimes present needs and demands apart from what one might consider a "training schedule"

The Politics of Employment

When you are employed, there is an expectation to be supportive of the employers ends and the customers demands.  It is expected that you "drink the koolaid", in a sense, and both believe that the work is important and present it as such.

So it becomes very difficult to criticize these jobs from within, to re-evaluate and redeploy.

Necessities are handled by an increasing small portion of the workforce.

We need shelter, food, water, and transportation.  But for the most part, our logistics allow us to operate with a smaller labor force.  Those who produce necessities are very often not compensated particular well.  To make up for the small share of the workforce who bear this burden, they are expected to work harder, and yet often not paid proportionally.  As an individual, you would like to support everything that does contribute to your quality of life, and reduce or eliminate everything else.  If a certain economic activity is not beneficial to you, you would not be crazy to expect that your life might improve were it eliminated.

Politics Does Significantly Shape and Impede Daily working Life

One can be for regulations, and yet recognize that many labor policies are poorly designed or implemented.  Perhaps not so much that they are poorly made, but only that we have very high hopes and expectations for our rules and policies, when really much of it is being made up and shaped on the fly.

Work relationships are complicated, and the layers of rules and regulations, even if they are a net benefit, can make this relationships poorly suited or 

Laundering time into Money and Work Experience

Given all the complications of employment, what ensures people end up being employed at all?  Well, we must be honest on this point, that macro-economic policy has needed to compensate for a lot of poorly conceived development, trade and educational practices.

It is generally easy for small local communities to organize themselves spontaneously, what is not so easy is dealing with larger social issues like racism or politics, from the community level.  So you need both.  But trying to navigate a system with so many rules is not always easy.

To overcome these difficulties, often the appearance of work and productivity becomes more important than the substance of it.  This can be incredibly frustrating and demoralizing as an individual, until you realize that most of these layers of rules, are made by people really trying, and have some positive benefit.

So even if some parts of our daily working lives are superficial or ritualistic, it is not always a simple matter of negligence.  The boss may just need you to smile and pretend you are working, for their boss, and their boss may only care about that impression coming across to customers.  For these reasons, it is very often that modern work seems very unauthentic.

What does it even mean "To want to work?"

I think this is a very straightforward question.  So in your career, there's high stakes involved, wages are one of the least uniform prices, and wage disparities do not always have good justification.

 

Inflation Across Space Is Important Too:

 

Cost of living, purchasing power parity.  The list can go on.  But inflation across space is very real, and it is as important as inflation across time.

 

Thanks For Reading

 

That's all for today.  Have a good one