All of these come after the question: “What is life worth?”
In both the US and in most Asian cultures work is worth more than life for the vast majority of the average lifespan. Working long hours is considered a badge of honor. In the US you work towards retirement—that’s the goal. That’s the endgame.
The fundamental question is: is that right? Is it worth it? Should we spend 40 years trying to make as money as we can so that we can then do nothing? The entire system, from top to bottom, is designed for this. And we give little breaks in between those 40 years so people don’t become depressed and kill themselves.
Whenever I hear about people justify why they work so hard it’s almost always because they want to become rich so they won’t have to work. It makes me think of that line from Office Space, “You don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my
cousin. He's broke and he don't do shit.“
We do what the media tells us because we never stop to think about what we actually want.
> In the US you work towards retirement—that’s the goal. That’s the endgame.
To further your point, I think this is more a utilitarian societal lie (like cheaters get caught etc.) than anything.
The age of retirement is set to get non efficient people out of the market, and as people get fitter and fitter it gets pushed ahead (right now it is raised (or is discussed to be?) 65 in a number of countries for instance).
Doing everything one dreams to do during retirement is lunacy, chances are this time is spent in an hospice or retirement isn’t even reached.
I've been working towards early retirement for a decade now, but I've never thought about this perspective before. Seeing it from a devil's advocate perspective, you could consider retirement a beautiful dream that people will tirelessly work towards until they are practically spent.
Retirement age as the age where most people are not net contributors any longer, is a very different perspective than the age where most people have enough savings to live for the rest of their lives without working. Of course, there is no sinister cabal that deliberately shapes society in this direction, but there are certainly powers that would want (and probably try to) to pull society in this direction.
If most people could choose how to spend their time (working productively, working on stuff that no one pays for, not working) by the age of 40, there would be a smaller supply of in-demand specialists. And that would mean higher salaries and less return on capital!
> Whenever I hear about people justify why they work so hard it’s almost always because they want to become rich so they won’t have to work
I think most people want to work so they can afford certain things - depending on their values either a really neat place to live, a bunch of experiences, etc, but then find that in order to work to afford those things you get caught up in a cycle. There's plenty of people who aren't optimizing for retired life in their 60s and 70s - but at the same time recognize that after they actually CAN'T work any more they need to take some care of themselves.
We tend to talk about work and jobs as if they're always mind-numbing drudgery - I think that's what people buy into, especially by having families and needing to be a breadwinner. You don't need to have a family. You don't need a big house. But for a lot of people, they want a family, and they want a big house. I wish there were more society did to set up alternate lifestyles, but it is sort of the engine that keeps society going.
Counter point to the question "what is life worth?", which I think is a bit of sophistry in that it complects the discussion to tangential subjects like the price you would pay to save a life.
I would rather ask "what is the value of not working?" To me, an American and a male, work is the number one way I choose to be valuable. If I chose not to work, or to work less, I would unquestionably provide less value to my society and my loved ones. I like being valuable. I like doing, hard frustrating things so my loved ones don't have to. I like working, even if (and because) I fucking hate it sometimes. Therefore, I love that I work. It is the most valuable thing I do.
To me, an American and a male, work is the number one way I choose to be valuable. If I chose not to work, or to work less, I would unquestionably provide less value to my society and my loved ones.
Don't sell yourself short. Your loved ones love you too - for who you are, not for the money you bring in.
Quality time spent with your loved ones should be waaaay higher up the valuable list. Maybe ask them: If I earned 30% less, but had an extra day of time off per week with you guys, would you day that was worth it?
Of course, there's basic provision - providing enough that off time can be quality time. Providing enough that schooling can be decent... But your value is way greater than your income.
Yeah, that's just millennial nonsense. I spend time with my family AND I work. If I chose not to work anymore, my wife would leave me and my kids would remember me as a valueless deadbeat. And they'd be right. Unless I had a reason of course, like disability. Which I don't.
This also assumes I'd want to spend 30% more of my work time with my family. I wouldn't. It would drive me crazy. I can't handle that much emotional fuckwittery in a week. The workplace is nice because feelings don't really matter. It's refreshing.
You need to consider what work and, more generally, what society is. Society is fundamentally a group of people working together to satisfy each others needs and wants. Work, or productivity, is making progress towards this goal and is something we tend to reward with money, though not always.
I think a fair analogy for society's productivity is a grocery store. Imagine there was a grocery store, the only grocery store in existence that also happened to be the only way to get food. Everybody would come in and take whatever they needed, but you didn't necessarily have to pay. If only some people don't pay this isn't that big a deal - the grocery store as a whole eats the losses but continues working more or less fine. And for those that simply cannot pay at all, well - there's not really any other option. But then there are those that could pay, but for whatever reason, do not. If enough people did this - the store would eventually go out of business as it would not be making enough to sustain itself. If everybody just did as they want, society would collapse.
More generally here money is an indicator of how much you've contributed to society. People look at disbelief at how much Jeff Bezos is worth, yet somehow think nothing of how much Amazon has completely revolutionized the world of purchasing things as well as brought prices to lower than ever levels. The reason he's worth as much as he is is because he has contributed immensely to society.
Of course the system isn't ideal and some people manage to make enormous amounts of money while contributing next to nothing to society - people who deal with finance are the prototypical example here. And similarly there are also people that contribute immensely to society, yet never see much in the way of reward from it. Herman Melville is now seen as one of the more important individuals in our literary history, yet received no recognition during his life and died without his work ever really being recognized, let alone rewarded.
Yet for all of its flaws, our system does generally do a good job of creating a system where people who contribute to society are rewarded which creates a strong incentive system to contribute to society, even if only to make yourself rich in the process.
If Jeff Bezos' contribution to society is so immense that he deserves all the billions he has amassed, what about the scientists and mathematicians of the world who died in poverty, but on whose shoulders the modern world is built upon?
"Poverty" is a strong word. I could have used a different word.
What I really wanted to convey is that Gutenberg, Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, Tesla, Gauss and plenty others deserved to be billionaires if Bezos deserves his billions.
- Tesla was a multi millionaire during his life who decided to risk, and lose, his wealth pursuing ideas that did not work out.
- Gutenberg was granted royal title along with all the privileges of such including an endless stipend and industrial volumes of grain and wine during the 15th century. Works from his press sold, during his life, for what was years of salary per copy. He was almost certainly a millionaire, though my point was primarily related to capitalist societies. The 15th century was still more feudal come mercantalistic.
- Curie won the nobel prize which entailed a prize of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a solid gold medal - almost certainly totaling in the millions of dollars as well.
And so on. And in many ways a billionaire of today is what a millionaire of times past was. I don't mean because of inflation but in terms of relative scarcity and effective 'power.' Ramanujan is the closest to a reasonable example, but there are significant extenuating circumstances there. He was religious to the point of bordering on insanity, grew up in colonial India, and had no interest in anything other than the private pursuit of his mostly abstract mathematical works. Whatever he may have 'deserved', he certainly was able to live his life as he wanted.
The big point here though is that this is not a coincidence. When people contribute to society, they tend to be rewarded. There are certainly some exceptions, but the great thing is that they are now a days, without doubt, the exceptions.
"The big point here though is that this is not a coincidence. When people contribute to society, they tend to be rewarded."
Getting rich and contributing to society are very different things. A footballer is almost always going to be richer than a professor in a top-class university. Drug barons are rich, but I doubt they are contributing to society.
Bankers are getting richer. They created the recession and profited from it. The hardworking common man paid for their success. I do not think it is as simple as you say it is.
As I said, "poverty" was the not the right word. Otherwise, the examples are just fine. Curie in particular. She refused to patent Radium. It is hard to comprehend in an era where even simple geometric figures, colors and fonts are being patented.
You're conflating contributing with some sort of subjective utilitarian type view. People want drugs, drug barons facilitate their availability - this is a substantial and highly productive contribution to society. To emphasize how arbitrary value systems can be, you might consider an opera singer to be contributing to society. But they're providing the exact same product to society that a footballer does - entertainment.
But back on the scientists, poverty was not just the wrong word - it was the wrong idea. Most of the people you listed lived lives as pleasant as they desired and could have retired in complete comfort at various points in their career. Of course that would not make these sort of people happy. Instead they mostly lived normal lives (in terms of standard), and put their money back into furthering their research and in many ways right back into society.
The same is true, though in a different way, for Bezos. He will likely never, in his entire life, spend more than a tiny fraction of a percent of his wealth on himself and his family. The vast majority of it will end up going back to society working to do his part to try to bring humanity into the space age. This isn't to say he lives modestly, but rather it exposes an interesting difference. When most people think of being a billionaire most don't think of what they could create, instead they think of what they could buy. Yet the former mindset creates wealth and the latter destroys it.
When Bezos was in his teens he worked one summer at a McDonalds. He hated it. The next summer decided to found the 'Dream Institute' which was a 10 day camp for younger kids. He only got 6 signups, but at $600 a child he probably earned vastly more than he did at McDonalds and provided a great service to society at the same time. No doubt his idea was heavily incentivized by money and that's the beautiful thing about our system. When you create things, you tend to be rewarded. And on that note, I'm going to dodge the banker issue. I do agree with you there and while productivity tends to be rewarded, it's not an exclusive relationship. E.g. - those that are nonproductive can also find substantial reward at times. However, I think the issue with banks is far more complex than 'they create [and profit from] recessions so they're bad' or 'they lend money to create businesses so they're good'.
I'm not entirely certain what you're trying to suggest, but there is very little in society that it is completely automated. The vast majority of systems today require an immense amount of effort and management just to maintain, let alone expand, themselves. Those that do not, invariably rely extensively on systems that do.
Just look at your desk right now and think about all of the things on it and the path that they took to get from raw materials to finally ending up shaped to what's in front of you. Think about this site, and these messages we're exchanging and how many thousands of different components, products, and pieces that are required to build and then maintain the capacity that just let's us post some text to one another.
Think about all the maintenance you have to do in a year just to keep your house from turning into a dilapidated pigsty. Now imagine that on a global scale with immensely complicated and interdependent infrastructure.
My father in law worked nights and weekends his whole life with big plans for what to do after retirement. Then he passed away unexpectedly at 57. My father on the other hand just didn’t retire, because he loves working too much, but he goes on a lot of vacations.
> The fundamental question is: is that right? Is it worth it? Should we spend 40 years trying to make as money as we can so that we can then do nothing?
Consider that 100-200 years ago, you had to work your entire life just to stay alive. There was no retirement.
The problem with being broke and lazy is that the quality of life totally sucks and that a single health emergency probably means you are going to die. Food for thought.
Also, it sucks but I can tell you firsthand that having a million dollars isn't that helpful. I don't worry about bills, but I can't really retire young. Well, I could, but I would never be able to travel, pay for my kids' college, or have any unexpected expenses for the rest of my life, which would totally suck.
I don’t see how wealth should effect an individuals ability to survive a medical emergency. In the US they really try and brainswash people with nonsense like this
In both the US and in most Asian cultures work is worth more than life for the vast majority of the average lifespan. Working long hours is considered a badge of honor. In the US you work towards retirement—that’s the goal. That’s the endgame.
The fundamental question is: is that right? Is it worth it? Should we spend 40 years trying to make as money as we can so that we can then do nothing? The entire system, from top to bottom, is designed for this. And we give little breaks in between those 40 years so people don’t become depressed and kill themselves.
Whenever I hear about people justify why they work so hard it’s almost always because they want to become rich so they won’t have to work. It makes me think of that line from Office Space, “You don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin. He's broke and he don't do shit.“
We do what the media tells us because we never stop to think about what we actually want.