Is Work Really So Important to Our Lives?

One may define a "post-work society" as a society where the level of economic productivity and affluence are such that work need no longer be at the center of its members' lives, that indeed society could function well even if much of its able population elected not to work. The possibility, which has gained a new currency in an age of (supposedly) headlong progress in automation, horrifies or outrages the conservative, especially touching their elitist, libertarian and puritanical nerves. The idea of delinking work from market-determined income, especially if by "income" we mean an income that a human being can live on decently, is apt to require public interventions absolutely intolerable to elites from the standpoint of plain and simple self-interest (read: the desire of the rich for a world entirely organized their growing even richer with as little effort or risk on their part as possible), sufficiently so that nothing else matters from their standpoint, really. However, the conservatives who represent their position do not content themselves with defending elite selfishness, or rationalizing it by way of the economic Scholasticism they so favor, rather insisting as they do upon the necessity of work to human life from a subjective, psychological, health-of-the-human-soul standpoint.

That last position seems to me a matter of a genuine truth buried at the bottom of a cynical and stupid muddle. I personally do think that people's lives are richer and fuller when they have a purposeful activity that engages their talents, passions and capacity for effort, and that they can feel makes some kind of contribution by preserving or cultivating or creating something of value. The cynicism and stupidity lies in the insistence that the jobs that people really do for just the paycheck, and nothing else, as their jobs in every other way impoverish a human existence through the well-known alienations that go with the subordination of one's needs, potentials, desires, personality entailed in the sacrifice of control of their self, motions and product in the context of Hobbesian competition of all against all required in "a job" have ANYTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THAT. Indeed, the violence the jobs often do to those who perform them are the worse for the violence they so often do to the society in an age in which a situation of "public poverty" making "private affluence" a necessity for a decent existence is a strategy for driving up consumption, the deliberate "waste making" of consumer culture has metastasized into the "enshittification" of the goods and services we depend on in daily life, and the hypertrophy of the portion of the economy devoted to the parasitic appropriation of value rather than its creation that we call "financialization" has reached its present extreme proportions--with one of the ironies of our time that many of the highest-paying and most respected jobs not only do not create value but actually destroy it, be it bankers trafficking in usurious loans, software engineers designing crippleware, or lawyers and lobbyists championing the blatantly vicious agendas of greasy corporate grifters. (Indeed, given that so many of the so-called best and brightest demonstrably destroy so much more value than they ever receive as salaries and bonuses, an entirely rational conclusion is that we would actually be better off paying such people as investment bankers and admen to not do their jobs to go by what one study reveals about them.)

There is cynicism and stupidity, too, in the claim that the fact that work is part of a full human life means that everyone should be required to live to work their whole life long, rather than work to live, especially when--one cannot emphasize this enough--the work they do for the paycheck offers nothing in return but that paycheck while taking so very much from them, and that on terms that mean that even if the worker holds up their end of the bargain perfectly they may still find themselves without the means to survive as a result of disability, or a layoff, for no better reason than improving the bottom line on a quarterly statement issued to their employer's "activist" shareholders. Indeed, it is a counterpoint to the conventional stupidity this that much of the work most important to society is indisputably done outside the market, as seen in people tending to their families and communities (bringing up children, volunteer work assisting the poor or otherwise in need, activism on behalf of good causes, etc.), while much other work that may be regarded as having value to society is compensated far below its true worth (as seen when we consider the work of artists). For many, in fact, their real vocation is something they begin when the working day is done. (Certainly the artist knows full well what it means to have to do one job to pay the bills even as the work that really means something to them does not even enjoy recognition by society as work at all. But one sees this too in the parent who has to choose between the work feeding, clothing and sheltering their children and actually "being a parent" to them.) Indeed, I imagine that only in a world where people work on very different terms from those we know--not least, through a person's physical survival at least being assured, and the work that they do not being evidently useless or pernicious, that they are not working bullshit jobs enshittifying the world as so many are now--can what is conventionally recognized as "work" even begin to become truly meaningful in that way so many speak of so insistently, all as given the choice between work as we know it and not working, all other things being equal, I suppose many and perhaps even most would be leading happier, healthier, and even more productive lives not "working." In the meantime, speaking of "work" as if it were so meaningful just romanticizes a decrepit status quo with its exploitation, its destructiveness and its cruelties for the shabby purpose of beating down any questioning of things as they are, in that way par for the course with the conventional wisdom of our day.