I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.
And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?
I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.
And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."
I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.
I felt the same way at your age and in many ways still do at 32. 29 wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't biological maturing that happened. I became a father and now have a tenth of the free time I had before.
The perspective that changed is twofold: first is that a job does provide life (your kid's), and second is that life is LONG. If you don't get rich by 30, you can get rich by 40 and still have a long time to do whatever you think is impactful.
The thing I try to do now is to accept my situation and only think about what I can do to improve it. Play the hand you are dealt and don't think about what could have been. That is an endless loop of despair. It takes time to truly understand how to be grateful for what you have. I wasted all I had, including money, because I was not grateful. Now all I have to do is look at my beautiful baby to be grateful.
You are in the top 0.0001% of history as far as what you have. Hell, anyone on this site is. Most people in the past or right now would kill to have what you are describing.
Yeah, you are working for money, so use that to your advantage. What is it that you really want or want to do? Start putting money aside so you can spend time doing that at a later date. Use your free time and when possible work time to work on skill sets and projects which will make that possible.
You are incredibly lucky, and you've got a great foundation to build off of. Don't discount how valuable that is, and don't waste that opportunity.
Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc...
The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example.
There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
The key to a happy and successful life is to find meaningful ways to spend your time. Meaningful to you, of course. Because of the monetary system we live in, usually a large chunk of our time needs to be devoted towards earning money, or at least finding a way to eat, live comfortably, and reproduce (too scientific sounding?). Buddhist monks will be able to show you other ways to enjoy life outside that system, however. That's always an option.
Work is not misery as long as you believe in, and are constantly engaged with, your work. It becomes misery when it doesn't align with your needs and expectations.
The biggest question is, what would you rather do? What would you do with your free time if money wasn't an issue?
If you are happy with your product, then what is it about the work environment? Does simply managing people stress you out? Or, is it the expectation that "I should" enjoy what I do because it is successful?
I understand the sentiment but I think your conclusion is misguided. You're not trading your life/focus/attention/time for money, you're trading it for what you can do with that money. Money is just a temporary store of value. It's worthless unless you use it for something. That something is what you're working for. Whether that's worth trading your time for is the real question you need to answer.
> I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Money is unavoidable, so if you're going to be unhappy about earning it, you're going to have an unhappy life no matter what.
I kind of doubt money is the issue...you might just be looking for inspiration.
Maybe look into the nonprofit world. These are organizations that stand for something, and most are in desperate need of technical talent. You won't make as much money but if you can work for a cause you believe in, you might feel your work is more worthwhile.
I think it is because in college you pursued your passion that was liberal arts. Couldn't find a job in that area, so you learned programming. You did well as a programmer, but it isn't were your passion is at.
I studied computer science and information systems. I also studied business management. These are areas I had a passion in and when I worked as a programmer I felt good enough it because I was passionate about it.
In 2001 I developed a mental illness from too much stress, ended up on disability in 2003. I lost my passion because I was no longer able to work. I became broken as it were. All of the technology changed around me, new programming languages got invented and the old ones I knew ere obsolete.
I got into writing and self-published a short story. I botched some of the grammar so it got some bad reviews. I couldn't afford an editor to fix it.
I've tried writing code on Github, but haven't got noticed by anyone yet. It isn't easy for me to get into a group of people and try to help out. I got into the debates with the Opal CoC, and connected with at least one other person. I am trying to rebuild my career one step at a time.
Work isn't supposed to make you happy, work is there to earn money to afford the things in life that make you happy. You have to invest time and money in other people to form relationships. Sometimes those relationships pay off and you are happy, other times they don't and you are sad. Sometimes you work too many hours and don't have the time to do anything that makes you happy.
It uses a new type of management where employees make their own decisions instead of being micromanaged. Where employees are empowered instead of having a tyrant boss. Where employees have fun working and make a game out of throwing fish to each other and singing. It really does make a difference.
As work becomes more and more abstract, probably fewer and fewer people will find satisfaction in it. Some will, but the majority will not. We're just not built for doing this sort of thing for extended periods of time. We've evolved operating in the real, physical world, and our reward mechanisms are fine tuned for it.
I have an alternate philosophy that doesn't make you quit your job to find yourself. See if it resonates with you.
You can't be too emotionally attached to your job. Jobs have value but they come and go. You change jobs throughout life. Some jobs that used to pay really well are now becoming extinct etc.
Eventually you retire. My dad has been retired for ~15 years. My mum has been retired for ~10 years. (He lectured in music and she taught primary school.) Even if your job is awesome, you can't do it forever. Circumstance forces you out. Life moves on. I've been kinda retired for 1 year.
Most people have different jobs throughout their working life. I've been through a few as have my parents. The grass always looks greener from the other side.
You chase each dream and when/if you get it, you realize you probably had some unrealistic expectations of how great it should have been. Even the jobs that seemed super important at the time turn out to be not that mind blowingly significant over time.
In whatever work you do, you have to detach yourself a bit from the triumphs and tragedies. If it all goes bad, you don't take it personally. If things go really well, you don't get a swelled head about it. That's the nature of true professionalism.
Maybe if you cure cancer or something, you can take the time to do a quiet double fist pump. But then you move on! :)
Essentially, you should perform your work like a machine. Or like breathing. There's no emotions necessary, good or bad. You act how you believe another professional should act without bringing your personality into it. In engineering jobs, people want you to be the engineer. They don't need the other parts of you. Outside of work you can be yourself.
In Australia, we tend to say, "Work to live" rather than "Live to work". It means do your work then enjoy living.
If life feels awful, what makes you continue on the same path?
I was feeling like that a few years ago. I stopped, thought about what was wrong, and took a different path. Now I'm making much less money, I'm not working in things I don't believe in and I interact with people I like. Much better than before.
I am 29 and I also feel uneasy about my life. I have no real interests. I make a pretty good salary as a pharmacist and I've been saving and investing 80% of my income (up to 90% this past year) the past five years. I plan to do this for another few years.
But then what? I already designed my minimalist life to be filled with free time (no possessions, no obligations). No mortgage, no loans whatsoever, and getting a vasectomy next month. Literally all the time I have not at work is free time.
This may sound like humblebrag, but because my expenses are so low I can quit working right now. But it's nothing to brag about. Because I'm scared. I'm addicted to a salary and the reason I keep working (I don't like my job - it's repetitive and tedious and stressful) is because I don't want to make less money than I'm currently making.
I don't want kids, I don't want to travel. I don't want to commit to a relationship. What will happen in five years when my passive income comes close to what I make at work? What will I do with myself? I really don't know. I'm learning how to code but lose motivation every two weeks.
It'll be interesting to see what people actually do when there's no work left to do. I don't picture a good outcome, mainly from my perspective of having too much freedom. Yes, there is such a thing.
While I broadly feel the same as you do about wage-labor, you're not going to be able to do anything positive for your situation in life if you're clinically depressed. Have you started seeing a therapist?
To emphasize: I'm not implying something's wrong with you. In fact, I sought therapy for work-related depression only ~4 years ago, and had the bad luck to find a therapist who told me, just after graduating university, that adult life just is careerism. That wasn't helping! But, again, unhappiness is a part of life, whereas clinical depression is a crippling illness that prevents you from being able to work on your situation or even experience your unhappiness as meaningful.
Clearly, happiness does not seem to correlate entirely with how well off you are.
Perhaps happiness relates mostly to social relationships, and spending your most productive hours with colleagues with whom you generally have relatively weak bonds depletes your 'social happiness' reserves.
Or perhaps the kinds of jobs many of us do in modern life, especially those involving computer screens and office buildings, are just not well-suited to us.
Or maybe it's just an inherent human property to be unhappy much of the time, and perhaps some people suffer more from this than others (a happiness 'baseline').
I could go on, of course, but fortunately a lot of research has been conducted on this, and many very wise people throughout the ages have written extensively about this.
One thing that could help is to start researching 'happiness' or what you could call 'the good life', whether through philosophy or religion or psychology, if you haven't done so already. And I don't mean 'google for happiness and click through few articles', but rather really dive in. Treat it as a proper project. Take a particular philosophy/approach that appeals to you, and actually apply it. Properly. At least for a while. A lot of it might be crap, or just not for you, but some of it will resonate. For me, it was Alan Watts (and zen buddhism), Seligman/positive psychology, and just the act of reading 'denser' philosophical stuff in itself that somehow tickled my happy bone (hmm, poor choice of words).
Also consider what you've tried, and most importantly, if you've actually tried these things. It took me until my thirties to realize that I had not, in fact, experimented with different ways/perspectives/philosophies of life in my twenties, but rather I had mostly half-heartedly flirted with all these things from a safe distance, and mostly let things happen to me. And all that generally just confirmed what already was while making me feel like I'd explored.
Or, to make an analogy: if you want to find a partner to be happy with long-term, this usually requires a degree of 'experimentation', as few people are lucky enough to find such a partner right away. Common mistakes in this regard are to 1) keep dating the same essential person, and then wondering why it keeps going wrong, or 2) be too shy to take initiative, and wait for things to 'happen'. I've noticed that 2 often ends up leading to 1, as you tend to attract and feel attracted to the same types of people if you remain the same kind of person.
Basically: break your patterns, and break them properly. Our natural instinct is not to, and cling to safety and the familiar. And if breaking patters becomes a pattern, well, then break that and go do the same thing with full abandon for a while.
If quitting your job seems like too much, and perhaps it is, then start with other stuff. Perhaps that will be enough. But just make sure that you really did try other things, because I think the illusion of doing or having done so is an easy trap to fall into. I personally did quit my job, because it was the only way for me to actually try different stuff, but then I'm perhaps just generally too inclined to get sucked up in what I do for work. You might not need this.
And finally, with my rather biased current perspective: give up on trying altogether. Just let yourself be 'now'. Perhaps read some of Alan Watts' material before you do this, so you have an idea as to why this might be effective.
For me the major breakthroughs and a more consistent sense of happiness came as a direct result of giving up (mostly) on all that finding. I can strongly recommend Alan Watts' 'The Book', as well as 'The Wisdom of Insecurity'. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he's an entertaining writer, and the approach he suggests is (relatively) unusual, perhaps especially to many of us HN types (ambitious, stuck in the 'virtual', analytic).
I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine.
When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.
A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s
But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans.
I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands.
We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.
Hi Falcolas, this is Derek Thompson, the author of the piece.
1. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive, because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies. How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work?
That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress! -- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said in the piece:
"The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.”"
2. The fact that unemployed men seem to be less social overall suggests to me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away.
3. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs and crime is very complicated.
4. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly.
5. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at least this question as I understand it) head on.
"The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing."
This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished by society on many levels.
But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status, well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in misery and lazing around doing nothing.
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty.
If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
Sorry I didn't mean to suggest that at all. When I wrote "the ills of unemployment go well beyond the loss of income" that was my way of saying loss of income is the first-order outcome of losing a job, but there are more complicated effects to consider.
The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, flow, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.
Does having a mincome stop you from stressing over the guy across the street who has a bigger one and a better looking wife? Maybe it does, but I don't think the mincome or quality of life is the biggest driver for that. The biggest driver is freedom (Do I truly believe I have every opportunity to become what/WHO I want to be?)
Can we really achieve that freedom for everyone in the real world? Is getting close good enough? Will virtual worlds and simulation provide us that freedom?
I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I do not belive humans can handle significant idle time in a socially productive way. Look at the disaster zones that are most public housing projects.
Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.
Cultural observations: Lots of people currently believe in the idea of go to school, get degree, get great job, and work hard, get ahead or at least don't get downsized. Today we laugh at people in my grandfather's generation who had weird employment ideas like lifetime employment at one firm, college isn't necessary, and no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc).
Cultural analysis and conclusion: Generation AJSKGJ, or whatever the marketing people will call tomorrows kids, are highly likely to laugh at our ideas like the previously mentioned "school/degree/job" or "work hard get reward or at least not punished" axis of evil.
We have other weird cultural hangups that'll likely look weird in the future, its hard for us to understand how nationalistic foreign cultures (nazis, communists, etc) in the early 20th century were all into promoting the nation ahead of their citizens, yet today we see corporations as the only important members of our culture and we're mere resources to be thrown away at their whim, this is likely to look equally weird in the future. Or how about endlessly describing boring old corruption as holy capitalism, thats going to look totally weird to people in the future.
What if the new capital is creativity? The new model for "work" is OSS? Replace money with creativity in the definitions of capitalism. Material possessions are socially discounted; creating new designs, new originals the new currency to excel.
If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus, art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.
This still doesn't sound fair. It's still an economy based on luck (those fortunate enough to be creative types) in a land of abundance. In a land of scarcity, prioritizing efficiency and rewarding based on getting things done (even or especially creative things) makes sense, but not if robots are producing all the necessities of life.
It makes sense that creative work will continue to be rewarded, but something more fair (in terms of human dignity, not in terms of meritocracy) will be needed.
Read Veale's The Creativity Myth. What you call "creativity" can be automated much like anything else. Emphasizing creativity would work for an extra couple of decades at most, so there's no sense in building, say, brand new educational institutions around it. Check out the N.Y. Times article announcing the creation of the Camp Fire Girls (co-invented by Gulick, a co-inventor of basketball) - there was a panic then about automation and the problem was not solved, it has just been continually deferred as the pace of change increasingly wreaks havoc on our ability to prepare children for adulthood. When the buzzwords of today's companies are "innovation" and "disruption", you may translate them to "unpredictability", "chaos", and "social insecurity". No one even tries to design to rightfully earn a place in a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley designers often enough end up making dopamine squirrels for poor toddlers on touch screens. The designers then heed warnings against giving their own children screens, ban TV's in the home, and send the kids to an unplugged school. Fewer are able to escape the swathe of the indefatigueable machine. Have we made some thing more clever than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks.
Perhaps instead some could follow Kant's idea of treating humans solely as ends, never as means, a sort of human-centered chauvinism or "humanism". Or one can conclude that if machines lack human flaws, and out perform homo sapiens at their supposed virtues, they deserve the future.
New genders, new sexualities, new body images, these might get some attention economy for a few, but they must be rewarded by a mass of bored, a creativity economy is the fame and long tail economy we already have. The assimilation of new distinctiveness will approach instantaneousness. And computers can be reformatted much more easily because they have no "self" to worry about or reinforce.
This is what happens in the post scarcity society of Iain M. Banks's Culture series. No one has to work, but the ones that do devote themselves to intricate creative pursuits or the study of some highly obscure field. Attention and social capital is the currency of success.
Creativity may be good for human satisfaction and happiness, but it, too, will likely fall to automation.
More and more I'm convinced that computational creativity will be able to better and more finely translate resonant emotion into consumable art than humans.
While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human population.
In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need for workers. So as machines displace workers, one might expect human population to gradually decrease, perhaps back to neolithic levels.
The challenge, then, would be to have that occur as humanely as possible.
"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this.
Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system.
Who owns the machines? Who owns the land?
Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land?
Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled?
Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian worldviews to rationalize the inequality.
The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right psychological adjustments.
Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common operational data exchange.
Machines create value, if we socialized that value, we could easily implement a minimum income for everyone and have work be strictly a part time or hobbyist thing. Or "work" will become a strange mix of fighting for social or knowledge capital and other non-monetary value while machines do all the crap work we used to do before. I'd rather be judged at a co-op poetry slam where my social capital gets hurt if I lose than losing my home/car/savings/income if I lose at my job.
Capitalism has a built-in end game: extremely efficient automation. We're walking this path now and have been since steam power. Smart, cheap, and general purpose robots are probably where this all ends.
It seems like the mass amount of money dumped into alternative advertising models is increasingly pushing the 'Attention Economy'[1]. Video games designed by behavioral psychologists to be addicting, compulsive, and time consuming [2].
Advertising IS attention economics, but now it's being said we're reaching peak advertising and that the attention of the masses is saturated.
Amazon recently begin experimenting with paying writers based upon feedback of single pages being viewed long enough. [4]
I could only hope for the money previously allocated to garner everyone's attention for brand recognition may now be channeled into further product development and research, as it's becoming harder to rely solely on brand name identity with easier access to information on alternative products and review websites like anandtech or thewirecutter. Although I have a hunch much of that development will be into building more invasive advertising and attention economy games - [5]
Nicely written[1] and not as hyperbolic as others but to buy in you have to get past this:
The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end.
This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal relationship between work and spending.
People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a specific "job" there is only money and goods.
Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened? People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services related to horses or wagons.
Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same "number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed.
They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone, changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't but the number of jobs stays about the same.
The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1 person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have the 80% you are not spending on those goods available for still other goods and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be applied toward.
The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you could do.
So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence.
[1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic
[2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"
Weird how the article keeps reusing the word "paradox". I don't think it means what they want it to mean.
The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. - if you haven't found out how to live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw ingredients you chose.
Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. - this is still not a paradox. You could insert "ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s
When I was a kid, I instinctively felt (did not have any kind of intellectual ability at that age) that I was in a trap. I can NOW supply language to my instincts. That instinct gradually grew into a concept - or a non-concept - and at 35 while still not sure what IT was - started saving, saving and more saving. In a country with high interest rates - that helped. I finally quit in 2010 at 50 - exactly 50. I spent the last 5 years doing absolutely no work for money. I never felt that I was missing out on anything at all. And I am sure I will never ever have to ask for help outside my family - unless of course any one of us is struck by an expensive disease. But then what that mostly would mean is physical pain. So we are now getting mentally ready for pain. Preparing to endure unendurable physical pain, which I personally have never experienced before. I do not feel like I am prostituting myself. That takes a lot of misery out of my system. I never ever switch on the TV, but spend a lot of time reading random stuff off the net.
Only read very small part but author talks about Youngtown and says that when the local steel industry went bust suicide and assumingly criminal behavior increased.
To me this is because of loss of income not so much the loss of having to report to work. Does the article talk about why loss of income was not pointed to as the reason for the problems?
The best kind of work is flow: immersed in an activity with energized focus and involvement, seeing progress, learning and achieving goals. That just isn't a concept that machines or automation can take away. But, yes, it does seem like virtual reality will step in to offer this if actual reality has no more to offer.
I honestly don't think this will be much of a problem because frankly most of the work we do today is not essential for living. We busy ourselves with busy work. Ideas have become the product. And since we are so unhappy when we're not working towards something, we'll simply invent something new.
Can the author expound upon his encounters with universal basic income and his decisions on how to include it in the piece? I see that it's mentioned in the piece as something that can assuage the financial loss of work, but not the loss of civic cohesion or meaning in people's lives. However I feel that this idea was not an alternative the author seriously investigated, if you're still commenting can you confirm?
Did you encounter any deep exploration of what even a basic $1000/mo. guaranteed income might mean for people lacking work? What guided your thinking in how to approach this aspect of dealing with a post-work future, did it just feel too different, or another topic entirely?
Thanks for commenting here and thanks for the great piece!
[+] [-] methodover|10 years ago|reply
I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.
And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?
I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.
And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."
I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.
[+] [-] nicholas73|10 years ago|reply
The perspective that changed is twofold: first is that a job does provide life (your kid's), and second is that life is LONG. If you don't get rich by 30, you can get rich by 40 and still have a long time to do whatever you think is impactful.
The thing I try to do now is to accept my situation and only think about what I can do to improve it. Play the hand you are dealt and don't think about what could have been. That is an endless loop of despair. It takes time to truly understand how to be grateful for what you have. I wasted all I had, including money, because I was not grateful. Now all I have to do is look at my beautiful baby to be grateful.
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|10 years ago|reply
Yeah, you are working for money, so use that to your advantage. What is it that you really want or want to do? Start putting money aside so you can spend time doing that at a later date. Use your free time and when possible work time to work on skill sets and projects which will make that possible.
You are incredibly lucky, and you've got a great foundation to build off of. Don't discount how valuable that is, and don't waste that opportunity.
[+] [-] oliveira12345|10 years ago|reply
Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc...
The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
[+] [-] washedup|10 years ago|reply
Work is not misery as long as you believe in, and are constantly engaged with, your work. It becomes misery when it doesn't align with your needs and expectations.
The biggest question is, what would you rather do? What would you do with your free time if money wasn't an issue?
If you are happy with your product, then what is it about the work environment? Does simply managing people stress you out? Or, is it the expectation that "I should" enjoy what I do because it is successful?
[+] [-] misterbwong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|10 years ago|reply
Money is unavoidable, so if you're going to be unhappy about earning it, you're going to have an unhappy life no matter what.
I kind of doubt money is the issue...you might just be looking for inspiration.
Maybe look into the nonprofit world. These are organizations that stand for something, and most are in desperate need of technical talent. You won't make as much money but if you can work for a cause you believe in, you might feel your work is more worthwhile.
[+] [-] orionblastar|10 years ago|reply
I studied computer science and information systems. I also studied business management. These are areas I had a passion in and when I worked as a programmer I felt good enough it because I was passionate about it.
In 2001 I developed a mental illness from too much stress, ended up on disability in 2003. I lost my passion because I was no longer able to work. I became broken as it were. All of the technology changed around me, new programming languages got invented and the old ones I knew ere obsolete.
I got into writing and self-published a short story. I botched some of the grammar so it got some bad reviews. I couldn't afford an editor to fix it.
I've tried writing code on Github, but haven't got noticed by anyone yet. It isn't easy for me to get into a group of people and try to help out. I got into the debates with the Opal CoC, and connected with at least one other person. I am trying to rebuild my career one step at a time.
Work isn't supposed to make you happy, work is there to earn money to afford the things in life that make you happy. You have to invest time and money in other people to form relationships. Sometimes those relationships pay off and you are happy, other times they don't and you are sad. Sometimes you work too many hours and don't have the time to do anything that makes you happy.
There was a video someone showed me of a fish market, where they made the work at the fish market enjoyable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxQW5xgX8A8
It uses a new type of management where employees make their own decisions instead of being micromanaged. Where employees are empowered instead of having a tyrant boss. Where employees have fun working and make a game out of throwing fish to each other and singing. It really does make a difference.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gluggymug|10 years ago|reply
I have an alternate philosophy that doesn't make you quit your job to find yourself. See if it resonates with you.
You can't be too emotionally attached to your job. Jobs have value but they come and go. You change jobs throughout life. Some jobs that used to pay really well are now becoming extinct etc.
Eventually you retire. My dad has been retired for ~15 years. My mum has been retired for ~10 years. (He lectured in music and she taught primary school.) Even if your job is awesome, you can't do it forever. Circumstance forces you out. Life moves on. I've been kinda retired for 1 year.
Most people have different jobs throughout their working life. I've been through a few as have my parents. The grass always looks greener from the other side.
You chase each dream and when/if you get it, you realize you probably had some unrealistic expectations of how great it should have been. Even the jobs that seemed super important at the time turn out to be not that mind blowingly significant over time.
In whatever work you do, you have to detach yourself a bit from the triumphs and tragedies. If it all goes bad, you don't take it personally. If things go really well, you don't get a swelled head about it. That's the nature of true professionalism.
Maybe if you cure cancer or something, you can take the time to do a quiet double fist pump. But then you move on! :)
Essentially, you should perform your work like a machine. Or like breathing. There's no emotions necessary, good or bad. You act how you believe another professional should act without bringing your personality into it. In engineering jobs, people want you to be the engineer. They don't need the other parts of you. Outside of work you can be yourself.
In Australia, we tend to say, "Work to live" rather than "Live to work". It means do your work then enjoy living.
[+] [-] hamoid|10 years ago|reply
I was feeling like that a few years ago. I stopped, thought about what was wrong, and took a different path. Now I'm making much less money, I'm not working in things I don't believe in and I interact with people I like. Much better than before.
[+] [-] cko|10 years ago|reply
But then what? I already designed my minimalist life to be filled with free time (no possessions, no obligations). No mortgage, no loans whatsoever, and getting a vasectomy next month. Literally all the time I have not at work is free time.
This may sound like humblebrag, but because my expenses are so low I can quit working right now. But it's nothing to brag about. Because I'm scared. I'm addicted to a salary and the reason I keep working (I don't like my job - it's repetitive and tedious and stressful) is because I don't want to make less money than I'm currently making.
I don't want kids, I don't want to travel. I don't want to commit to a relationship. What will happen in five years when my passive income comes close to what I make at work? What will I do with myself? I really don't know. I'm learning how to code but lose motivation every two weeks.
It'll be interesting to see what people actually do when there's no work left to do. I don't picture a good outcome, mainly from my perspective of having too much freedom. Yes, there is such a thing.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
To emphasize: I'm not implying something's wrong with you. In fact, I sought therapy for work-related depression only ~4 years ago, and had the bad luck to find a therapist who told me, just after graduating university, that adult life just is careerism. That wasn't helping! But, again, unhappiness is a part of life, whereas clinical depression is a crippling illness that prevents you from being able to work on your situation or even experience your unhappiness as meaningful.
[+] [-] mj_langford|10 years ago|reply
Go start a microISV-style tiny business a la @patio11 in a field you feel you can make things better
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jcovington|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercer|10 years ago|reply
Perhaps happiness relates mostly to social relationships, and spending your most productive hours with colleagues with whom you generally have relatively weak bonds depletes your 'social happiness' reserves.
Or perhaps the kinds of jobs many of us do in modern life, especially those involving computer screens and office buildings, are just not well-suited to us.
Or maybe it's just an inherent human property to be unhappy much of the time, and perhaps some people suffer more from this than others (a happiness 'baseline').
I could go on, of course, but fortunately a lot of research has been conducted on this, and many very wise people throughout the ages have written extensively about this.
One thing that could help is to start researching 'happiness' or what you could call 'the good life', whether through philosophy or religion or psychology, if you haven't done so already. And I don't mean 'google for happiness and click through few articles', but rather really dive in. Treat it as a proper project. Take a particular philosophy/approach that appeals to you, and actually apply it. Properly. At least for a while. A lot of it might be crap, or just not for you, but some of it will resonate. For me, it was Alan Watts (and zen buddhism), Seligman/positive psychology, and just the act of reading 'denser' philosophical stuff in itself that somehow tickled my happy bone (hmm, poor choice of words).
Also consider what you've tried, and most importantly, if you've actually tried these things. It took me until my thirties to realize that I had not, in fact, experimented with different ways/perspectives/philosophies of life in my twenties, but rather I had mostly half-heartedly flirted with all these things from a safe distance, and mostly let things happen to me. And all that generally just confirmed what already was while making me feel like I'd explored.
Or, to make an analogy: if you want to find a partner to be happy with long-term, this usually requires a degree of 'experimentation', as few people are lucky enough to find such a partner right away. Common mistakes in this regard are to 1) keep dating the same essential person, and then wondering why it keeps going wrong, or 2) be too shy to take initiative, and wait for things to 'happen'. I've noticed that 2 often ends up leading to 1, as you tend to attract and feel attracted to the same types of people if you remain the same kind of person.
Basically: break your patterns, and break them properly. Our natural instinct is not to, and cling to safety and the familiar. And if breaking patters becomes a pattern, well, then break that and go do the same thing with full abandon for a while.
If quitting your job seems like too much, and perhaps it is, then start with other stuff. Perhaps that will be enough. But just make sure that you really did try other things, because I think the illusion of doing or having done so is an easy trap to fall into. I personally did quit my job, because it was the only way for me to actually try different stuff, but then I'm perhaps just generally too inclined to get sucked up in what I do for work. You might not need this.
And finally, with my rather biased current perspective: give up on trying altogether. Just let yourself be 'now'. Perhaps read some of Alan Watts' material before you do this, so you have an idea as to why this might be effective.
For me the major breakthroughs and a more consistent sense of happiness came as a direct result of giving up (mostly) on all that finding. I can strongly recommend Alan Watts' 'The Book', as well as 'The Wisdom of Insecurity'. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he's an entertaining writer, and the approach he suggests is (relatively) unusual, perhaps especially to many of us HN types (ambitious, stuck in the 'virtual', analytic).
[+] [-] Einstalbert|10 years ago|reply
When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.
[+] [-] notahacker|10 years ago|reply
But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans.
I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.
[+] [-] notNow|10 years ago|reply
We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
How many of the ills observed in non-working adults are due (at least in part) to the culture of "your value is based on the job you hold"?
How many people sit around watching TV because that's what they can afford to do, or because their peers are unavailable at the same times?
How many teens revert to crime because they need money, or don't have other affordable opportunities for entertainment available to them?
1977 is a time very different than today; what differences in attitudes and activities can be attributed to the climate of 1977?
What can we learn from these examples to make the coming change in employment levels work out better now than it did 40 years ago?
[+] [-] waxymonkeyfrog|10 years ago|reply
1. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive, because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies. How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work?
That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress! -- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said in the piece:
"The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.”"
2. The fact that unemployed men seem to be less social overall suggests to me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away.
3. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs and crime is very complicated.
4. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly.
5. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at least this question as I understand it) head on.
[+] [-] Sideloader|10 years ago|reply
This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished by society on many levels.
But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status, well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in misery and lazing around doing nothing.
[+] [-] zzalpha|10 years ago|reply
If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
[+] [-] waxymonkeyfrog|10 years ago|reply
The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, flow, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.
[+] [-] kmnc|10 years ago|reply
Can we really achieve that freedom for everyone in the real world? Is getting close good enough? Will virtual worlds and simulation provide us that freedom?
[+] [-] ams6110|10 years ago|reply
Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.
[+] [-] oldmanjay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Cultural analysis and conclusion: Generation AJSKGJ, or whatever the marketing people will call tomorrows kids, are highly likely to laugh at our ideas like the previously mentioned "school/degree/job" or "work hard get reward or at least not punished" axis of evil.
We have other weird cultural hangups that'll likely look weird in the future, its hard for us to understand how nationalistic foreign cultures (nazis, communists, etc) in the early 20th century were all into promoting the nation ahead of their citizens, yet today we see corporations as the only important members of our culture and we're mere resources to be thrown away at their whim, this is likely to look equally weird in the future. Or how about endlessly describing boring old corruption as holy capitalism, thats going to look totally weird to people in the future.
[+] [-] frandroid|10 years ago|reply
The Valley has its own social obstacles to women's employment...
[+] [-] Hoasi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapitalistCartr|10 years ago|reply
If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus, art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.
[+] [-] SapphireSun|10 years ago|reply
It makes sense that creative work will continue to be rewarded, but something more fair (in terms of human dignity, not in terms of meritocracy) will be needed.
[+] [-] daodedickinson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesjyu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkozyra|10 years ago|reply
More and more I'm convinced that computational creativity will be able to better and more finely translate resonant emotion into consumable art than humans.
[+] [-] rezistik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73v3r|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need for workers. So as machines displace workers, one might expect human population to gradually decrease, perhaps back to neolithic levels.
The challenge, then, would be to have that occur as humanely as possible.
[+] [-] ilaksh|10 years ago|reply
Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system.
Who owns the machines? Who owns the land?
Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land?
Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled?
Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian worldviews to rationalize the inequality.
The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right psychological adjustments.
Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common operational data exchange.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
Capitalism has a built-in end game: extremely efficient automation. We're walking this path now and have been since steam power. Smart, cheap, and general purpose robots are probably where this all ends.
[+] [-] nosuchthing|10 years ago|reply
Advertising IS attention economics, but now it's being said we're reaching peak advertising and that the attention of the masses is saturated.
Amazon recently begin experimenting with paying writers based upon feedback of single pages being viewed long enough. [4]
I could only hope for the money previously allocated to garner everyone's attention for brand recognition may now be channeled into further product development and research, as it's becoming harder to rely solely on brand name identity with easier access to information on alternative products and review websites like anandtech or thewirecutter. Although I have a hunch much of that development will be into building more invasive advertising and attention economy games - [5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crus...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmv...
[4] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN
[5] https://vimeo.com/14533403
[6] http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end.
This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal relationship between work and spending.
People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a specific "job" there is only money and goods.
Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened? People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services related to horses or wagons.
Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same "number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed.
They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone, changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't but the number of jobs stays about the same.
The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1 person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have the 80% you are not spending on those goods available for still other goods and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be applied toward.
The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you could do.
So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence.
[1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic
[2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"
[+] [-] hamoid|10 years ago|reply
Why assume we can either work or do nothing? Of course doing nothing sucks! What about doing something instead?
Could the problem be that most people have been trained to do what they're told, instead of being creative?
[+] [-] anon4|10 years ago|reply
The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. - if you haven't found out how to live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw ingredients you chose.
Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. - this is still not a paradox. You could insert "ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s
[+] [-] nothing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wehadfun|10 years ago|reply
To me this is because of loss of income not so much the loss of having to report to work. Does the article talk about why loss of income was not pointed to as the reason for the problems?
[+] [-] woodchuck64|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianstallings|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roneesh|10 years ago|reply
Did you encounter any deep exploration of what even a basic $1000/mo. guaranteed income might mean for people lacking work? What guided your thinking in how to approach this aspect of dealing with a post-work future, did it just feel too different, or another topic entirely?
Thanks for commenting here and thanks for the great piece!