I can’t seem to understand it. Day in and day out most of us wake up to clock-in for some bullshit product that creates waste and inflates the pockets of some bullshit board member? What the fuck is that? Don’t give me the productive member of society rhetoric. How am I creating benefit to the world while simultaneously destroying it? You don’t need that new model car. You don’t need a smart-oven. Just like the livestock industry, we are born and urged to consume. We keep getting bigger, taller, stronger - but for what? We don’t have any actual predatory threats except for ourselves, so why do we insist on strong-arming one another? The convenient excuse of the Human Condition? We developed critical intelligence and dextrous motor skills to engorge ourselves to extinction? Stupid. Stupid. STUPID.
Why does crunching imaginary numbers for a socially-engineered financial index get you “paid” more than feeding your local population, or delivering health-critical mail to someone’s front door? Our existence collectively has placed our value in all the wrong places. I suppose Man’s need to dominate all things prevails; our planet included. When will we stop raping our soil of cash crops to feed an industry that poisons our wells every day? There is no bastion for any precious material on Earth. Especially so for the hope of future generations.
The worst part? It’s that I know I am part of the problem. I don’t want to lose my comforts. So, I go back to my bullshit product and make wealth for some bullshit board member. This way, some day, I’ll gain that 15% of my actual life to live with a neat variety of health issues to physically limit everything I’ve wanted to do in life before that moment. All the while, said board member will be able to replace internal organs in order to enjoy their sports yachts for much longer than I can even dream of.
Life is great. Thanks for listening.
The problem is one of game theory and sociology. If production doesn’t happen during productive years, what then? Child labour? Forcing you to work into your twilight years when you have the variety of health issues you lament?
Without production somewhere in the civilization, we all just sort of die, eventually.
In a future where robotic production is the vast majority of production, this probably changes. How do you have consumers if there are no jobs for them. Economy of abundance stuff might give you your Star Trek utopia. However, it might not… Best you can do is help move us as a civilization towards that goal, with whatever small political force you may have.