Me_irl
1d 13h ago by lemmy.today/u/sanitation in me_irl from lemmy.today
You don't have to have a "job", but then your "job" will be daily survival instead of paying for luxuries.
More time/effort on survival sure (/more discomfort), though most here likely don't have much luxury (certainly not their main reason-for/outcome-of employment) unless you're really watering down the meaning.
I think you're confusing luxuries with luxury and I think you're missing how much you take for granted. If you don't work to earn money in some form or fashion then you are working to survive and it's a lot of work to survive because a simple mistake means death.
it’s a lot of work to survive because a simple mistake means death
This is also true in the US with someone already living paycheck-to-paycheck (and the mistake doesn't have to be their own).
That's why they use guns to fire people over there! /s
We have:
- extremely expensive healthcare, business more important than public health
- health insurance tied to employment, less worker protections
- sprawl and car-dependent living, a sea of oversized trucks
So yeah... one medical issue can add massive debt, and avoiding care or bleeding out in a non-ambulance on the way to a hospital are possibilities. Or a teacher or nurse living in their car being hit by a drunk driver. Lots of other ways to get onto a downward spiral to some death of despair.
That doesn't mean you'll just die though. I mean I feel for you all over there, but all alone on the savannah is probably worse.
That doesn’t mean you’ll just die though
Some of the things I mentioned you just might. Hypothermia or heat stroke if you're homeless in the wrong place during winter/summer.
Slow death is also worse if you ask me. "It could be prevented" yeah sure, doesn't mean it will.
all alone on the savannah
well, I may ask myself
Fair statement. Good luck!
You still can. It will just suck and inconvenience after awhile.
actually you can't.
have kids? you'll have them taken from you or have to fight tooth a nail with every penny you can scrape together thus forcing you to comply and be a cog.
no kids? you'll have social services called on you relentlessly because you're a danger to yourself. you will have your autonomy stripped from you and force-fed medication until you comply.
married? same as before but you'll be put in jail for spousal abuse if you're a man or interred into a psych ward if you're a woman.
if you don't believe you're enslaved by the corporation, fafo.
I don't know what kind of place you're living in, but around here you're quite free to do as you please as long as you don't interfere with other people. Your children must receive some kind of schooling (which they can get for free), but other than that nobody will get in your way.
Not sure how exactly it would work in practice. You will need some way to feed yourself and your kids, and you will need to pay property taxes if you own land. That's not so much about corporate enslavement, but more about recognising that you're living on land that is being supported by the national infrastructure. And it's not a huge amount, especially if your land isn't worth much.
in the US property taxes vary on location. let's say I owned 100 acres in Montana. property taxes would likely be $10-20 thousand dollars.
if I owned 100 acres in California it would be closer to $1 million.
I own 1.5 acres in the Midwest in a densely populated area and my yearly property tax is $8,000.
the only way I can afford that is by working my high paying, high demand, high stress, IT job. if I wanted to live "off the grid" so to speak, I would need at least $1 million to start with. 2+ acres of rural property (if you can find any that hasn't already been stolen by corporations) start at $250k. to build a home is an additional $300k. solar, water, and other infra will run an additional $150k. I plan on living for another 50 years. Tax at $8000 a year and a 2.15% increase over those 50 years comes to around $130k.
so that leaves me with $170k to live on for 50 years. That's $283 a month in living expenditures. that doesn't cover living expenses like vehicles, property upkeep, home repair, health and wellness, etc.
so, I throw in close to $1 million dollars into a dream and I fuck up once and it's all taken from me. my kids, my house, my marriage, everything. and you want to summarize it down to "you just need to recognize you're living on land being supported by national infrastructure".
get the fuck out of here. we're fucking slaves and there's no way out except for taking a dirt nap.
Ah, for sure, if you want the money to have a large piece of land and a house, a car, private healthcare, then you're talking about the life of a rich man (from my perspective). You want to own property worth a million dollars plus, as you point out.
If you can get by without that much property, things get a lot easier. In the extreme you could live like a vagabond. In my Scandinavian home country some people live decent lives on the road without much property. Not comfortable lives, but not necessarily bad ones either.
Or with modest US savings you could move to a cheaper country and build a little life there.
Weird I see a lot of homeless people all the time that do that, granted its becoming illegal in a lot of places now
weird, ask them if they're happy.
In this big world there is someone who made that choice and is happy regardless of the struggle, I'm sure most didn't have the luxury of choice.
I'm just saying that it is possible, and agree to the original comment that it will suck and be an inconvenience
Yeah ypu can. Heres someone
basically you are not allowed to just live somewhere and live off the land. every place is owned by somebody. Even if you own your own farm you pay property taxes and stuff.
To escape the hamster wheel you just have to be rich and live off of interest. Or be a landlord.
In all honesty, its prolly not possible for most of us. But if you have or want children, you can set them up to have a better life than you. Educate them financially, die before you spend more money than you make. Hope they dont spend it all on coke and iphones.
The image accurately depicts what would happen to 98% of all people: lying dead by the river, starved or killed or died by disease.
When I saw the pic all I could think of was the horrendous amount of ticks that person may now be hosting.
I've never heard of this rampant deadly disease that targets the unemployed.
Go work in an ER. The homeless are super susceptible to all kinds of diseases.
I doubt that in a society of abundance and equality, everyone would choose to live homeless.
Cool, soooo if we're all no longer working, then who's taking care of food production? Shelter? Medical care? Defense? Maintenance? Etc.
There is a happy medium.... everyone not having jobs is not it. A lot of jobs are hard work but benefit society heavily.
Think of it like a Star Trek esque utopia. A lot of people have jobs, but only to further themselves and grow as people. Noone has to take a job which takes all of their waking moments just so they don't die if starvation.
Yea and star trek has replicators...let me know when those are available.
Where does the abundance come from if nobody is working?
Ok here's my pitch: murder the top 5 billionaires and liquidate their assets. That's 2.5 trillion. Everyone on earth gets like 300 bucks. Keep doing that until it evens out a bit. Also grow a vegetable garden.
Money's worth comes from the ability to buy someon else's work with it. If no one is working money is worthless.
Good, buy someone else's work by trading for it with some of your own.
That's already how the system works.
when no one works, this person will not have blue jeans, shoes, socks, shampoo, toothbrush, underwear, shirt, soap, domicile, clean hygienic food, sanitary conditions, assisted travel... electricity for their internet points - just for starters.
Sure, when noone is forced into wage slavery, everyone will just waste away and do and produce nothing. That's why we all died out before humanity discovered various forms of servitude.
You seem to use 'slavery' and 'employment' as interchangeable. These are separate concepts.
No, they are not. Not in most countries.
‘Enslave me?’ you wonder. ‘Why, I am a free citizen!’
Are you free, really? Free to do what? To live as you please? To do what you please?
Let’s see. How do you live? What does your freedom amount to?
You depend on your employer for your wages or your salary, don’t you? And your wages determine your way of living, don’t they? The conditions of your life, even what you eat and drink, where you go and with whom you associate, — all of it depends on your wages.
No, you are not a free man. You are dependent on your employer and on your wages. You are really a wage slave.
The whole working class, under the capitalist system, is dependent on the capitalist class. The workers are wage slaves.
So, what becomes of your freedom? What can you do with it? Can you do more with it than your wages permit?
Can’t you see that your wage — your salary or income — is all the freedom that you have? Your freedom, your liberty, don’t go a step further than the wages you get.
The freedom that is given you on paper, that is written down in law books and constitutions, does not do you a bit of good. Such freedom only means that you have the right to do a certain thing. But it doesn’t mean that you can do it. To be able to do it, you must have the chance, the opportunity. You have a right to eat three fine meals a day, but if you haven’t the means, the opportunity to get those meals, then what good is that right to you?
So freedom really means opportunity to satisfy your needs and wants. If your freedom does not give you that opportunity, than it does you no good. Real freedom means opportunity and well-being. If it does not mean that, it means nothing.
You see, then, that the whole situation comes to this:
Capitalism robs you and makes a wage slave of you.
The law upholds and protects that robbery.
The government fools you into believing that you are independent and free.
In this way you are fooled and duped every day of your life.
But how does it happen that you didn’t think of it before? How is it that most other people don’t see it, either?
It is because you and every one else are lied to about this all the time, from your earliest childhood.
You are told to be honest, while you are being robbed all your life.
You are commanded to respect the law, while the law protects the capitalist who is robbing you.
You are taught that killing is wrong, while the government hangs and electrocutes people and slaughters them in war.
You are told to obey the law and government, though law and government stand for robbery and murder.
Thus all through life you are lied to, fooled, and deceived, so that it will be easier to make profits out of you, to exploit you.
from Now and After by Alexander Berkman, Chapter 3: Law and Government. Available to read for free here.
You seem to have absolutely no idea how many people just died away in those times. You need food and health care, nobody will just give that to you. It will be survival of the fittest again, much more extreme then what we have today.
You seem to assume that everybody will have enough of everything and we all live in happyness and joy, only doing what you love.
That's of course BS. You will be fighting for your survival and chances are you'll lose that fight. Only thanks to our civilization it is possible at all to sustain that many people.
Tribes were found to actually take care of their old, unlike us.
Can confirm.
We also sent the mentally unwell ones who hoarded all the bananas into the forest alone...
This is a romantic view on that. In reality, 'old' meant 30 years old and then people died pretty soon. There were no real old people. And the very young also died left and right, that's why women had to throw out one child after another just so the tribe wouldn't go extinct.
That's also not very accurate. Old = 30 is why there are many ways to measure.
6 kids dying before the age of 4 and one guy living to 60 means the average age is 30.
The point is people died very frequently and in no way could we sustain the current population if we went back to those practices. Even if some people got older, a tribe needs a huge surplus of young people to survive. And everyone had to pull their weight one way or another. If people stopped working today, most would absolutely die off and that's it. It is beyond me how some seem to think it would be some kind of paradise where everyone has everything they need. Delusional.
You trust info from the same ones that enslave you?
You're saying there is a giant glowing orb in the sky watching you all day, and you're not allowed to look at it?
Your username checks out buddy. I'm not enslaved btw.
That's what they all say
Thank you for summarising the mentality of capitalism and why one guy has a trillion dollars, a few others have billions and the rest are fighting for their survival as you describe.
Yeah, thanks for even more BS. Nothing I said is linked to capitalism, at all.
Enlighten us, how would it go in your mind. Why would you not just fucking die, who will provide for you and why.
It is still possible to gather and grow food and trade with others, even create luxury goods, without having what is considered a "job".
It's a really odd concept that you wouldn't be able to enjoy the world and that you would immediately die without your job.
Ok listen, we're 8.3 billion people on this world. If everyone goes back to growing and gathering their own food, there is no fucking way you can sustain this population. There is not enough land for everyone to grow their food. There is not enough food to gather if everyone depends on it. There will be a massive fight over resources, where a very small subset will come out on top, a massive amount of people just die and then a good portion of people who will try to survive by serving the winning group.
And no matter where you land, IF you even happen to be the lucky one who survived, you have enough land nobody is strong enough to take from you and you happen to resources in your area you can gather, doing that will be a full time job, massively labor intensive. No matter if your 'regard' this a job or not.
BTW. You can live your dream of gathering your own food right now. It's called being homeless. Knock yourself out.
Sure, we don't have enough space on the planet to farm, even though we do it currently and waste 19% of all food. Communities can farm together and share things. Not every way forward is Mad Max.
Its sad that people can't even fathom a world where people aren't fighting each other to be on top and just want to fight and murder to control all the data centres.
Lol. We can sustain and oversupply right now BECAUSE people do their jobs. This becomes absolutely impossible if people just stopped. Do you even have the slightest idea how many people have to do their job in order to build the simplest of machinery needed for modern farming?
Who is building the machines and equipment needed for that? Ok, just for fun - let's imagine someone still does that in your world without jobs, why would they just give it to you or someone else? In exchange for some bones and pretty stones you've found in your backyard? What can you possibly provide that's worth even a fucking tractor? This is so delusional I have really no words for it.
If you think it's so easy and great then go get your like-minded buddies and just do it. What's stopping you? Nobody will care if you play somewhere out in the wilderness.
You clearly have never have touched a plant. The amount of work required to farm and feed yourself in a single year is immensely labor intensive. That's just one person. Try doing that with a family of just 3 or 4.
Well I guess it's good that very few people would choose to do absolutely nothing if they could literally do anything instead of settling into something they don't like at all just to survive.
I tried to explain to my Christian friend that (if) god created the world for us to live in. They didn't create the 5 days, 9-5 work week.
Having to ask your boss to get a day off should go against every human spirit. But no. Some people will bow down to the grind (just to complain every week about the 9-5)
Does anyone even have a 9-5 anymore?
Every job I have seen in the last decade is 8-5 with (optional/not-optional working) lunch.
Plus availability after hours...
Also 9-5 has never been true especially if you commute. Most jobs are 8-5 or longer plus commute…..
I think many people have children or other complicated life situations, and might not have the choice to participate in the grind or not...
Not too late for you to not have children.
EDIT: Realized how horrible that sounds. I mean, to use contraceptives.
I do use them, but I have an academic background and stable job with a permanent contract and good income. To make or to net make the decision of having children often comes from a very privileged position. However, the poor educated people with low ecosocionomic background are the ones who often become parent when they are very young adults or even youths. They are the ones that can't make this decision and have to suffer throughout their lifes with shitty jobs and shitty pay. If from such a position you try to create a better future for your children, you do need to make the grind.
Even throwing god out the window. I hope we can all agree on "5 days on, 2 days off shouldn't be the ideal work environment"
Most of the year (maybe even your life) is spent working to improve other peoples lives, rather than your own personal life.
Longer rant about my personal job
I work in education. I'm not in this for the paycheck. KFC night shifts payed more than my starting salary here.
I'm here for the smiles on kids faces. The eureka moments when they understand a topic. The hope that thy will carry the torch after I'm gone.
I wonder (even hope) if other public jobs like hospital workers and fire fighters feel the same way.
Only sometimes eh? Pump those numbers up rookie
She didn't explain the other sometimes she thinks that the proletariat should rise up....
You don't have to work. But you also won't have food, shelter, and Lemmy.
Antibiotics. I really like antibiotics. If I had to choose between antibiotics and internet, I'd choose them.
This world has a massive lack of frolicking. Our numbers are way down on that front and it shows.
Fuck "sometimes", I wish that all the time.
itt: capitalist bootlickers
Man, you shoulda been here. The ground was full of stuff to eat, the air was full of stuff to eat, you could drink all the water. Sometimes we wouldn't eat much for a few weeks, but we'd dance and take drugs and play games and have crazy sex to get through it. And ofc, we always had beef jerky.
Oh, and we did this all day with our best friends, who we never had to leave. It was pretty sweet.
But hey, now there are big pretty churches and supermarkets full of only half-poisoned food and billionaires and AC. Though, the air hurts, the sun hurts, the water hurts, and everything is mostly dead. So, that's a trade-off. How's your childhood best friend doing?
Sometimes??
I'm happy to work, in fact I'd probably see myself out if I couldn't keep myself occupied.
What I want is for the effort and care I put into my work to be reflected back on to me and my life, I have watched businesses make millions of dollars off my work alone and I have been paid minimum wage for that work.
Bit fucken' unfair ain't it mate?
We could have it, if we grouped up and fought for it. Free humanity from the burden of unwanted labours.
When I get hungry, I just start grazing.
I don't mind doing unpaid things for other human beings (if it matters, if conditions aren't terrible)... but things like interviews, driving, and paperwork I wouldn't want to do even if I were paid for them (not that it's even a thing). And really between housing, driving, and all types of insurance... I don't see much hope for a decent life.
Most things seem like scams or junk anyway (extortion if it's actually useful, reliable, or good for health), get me out of here. Physically put my brain in a Matrix if you must (not the Facebook digital-real-estate one).
You absolutely can. Ypu just wont like the consequenses.
We're all like minded here but the reality is that some people want work as distraction from their personal lives.
You can, you just have to step outside the bounds of what the system says you should do, which is not a statement about the legality of one's path but rather one's ability to not be a lemming. Figure out how to break free. I figured out how to generate massive amounts of attention. The FBI said no, I gotta have education first. But y'know, what I'm saying is, if you know how to generate 100k views on a profile per day, or juggle, or write 2k-7k words a day without AI or drugs, well, those are examples of things that can open doors you don't see because you're looking at the world the way you've been programmed. And if you figure out how to do a buncha stuff like that together for a good purpose, you get used in bigger picture shit, because our culture is engineered.
Anti-work people are really a special case... If you don't want to work for someone else then start a business and work your arse off for yourself, if you don't want to do even that then quit society and go live in the woods like in this picture, maybe you'll survive, maybe you won't...
But 90℅ of these posts are about some utopia where all millionaires and up are dead, no one works and somehow it all works out...
There is an enormous gap between working to make ends meet and working on something that seems useful or important to you or your community. Anti-Work is not against work. It’s against being forced to beg for a job that keeps your belly full and planing your life from childhood on to be a resource for capitalists to harvest.
We are taught from a young age, that a persons worth correlates with their ability to be exploited for other people’s wealth. Almost every human want‘s to create something, wants to build, wants to help others in one way or another.
So in this place who's doing the day to day grind like being a janitor, a cashier, a trash collector or even the boring office jobs and so on?
It’s not the job that’s bad, it’s that there’s no purpose except making other people rich. A lot of people are pulling weeds in their garden, (which pretty annoying€ because they like their garden. I take my trash out without being payed to do so. Teachers work for bad pay, because they think their work is important.
That's already a much more sensible view on anti work than i'm used to, I can see the argument in this. However there will be such ethically wrong jobs in the current system for as long as they don't get automated away.
Once that happens things could get even worse for the people dependent on such jobs, so we need to fight on forcing the wealth created by automation to be shared, either through UBI or some other system... This would partially eliminate that dependency maybe?
Shut up asshole
"If you dont like working just work or else we wont have a wealthy elite class of greedy fucks who exploit everyone below them and are rewarded with several times their fair share in wealth"
Gargle gargle chortle chortle
Lmao. You know, billionaires are fuckers because they live off the production of other people. (Acording to you/ marxism). So you want to not work and still have food? How so? Through the labor of other people? You become what you say you are against.
Given the lower-than-ad hominem I won't even bother to try and correct you in deforming my words, just know that the very tech and infrastructure that allows you to say this was built by the system you say you hate...
Why don't you go live in the woods then?
You got suckered hard, jobs don't exist. Feel free to walk off!
Says 30 year old man in a work outfit
Why can't we live ust like it's a peaceful Minecraft server where I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor? I know I'm a good worker. I would have everything a person possible can get, I feel exhausted, unappreciated by my job, and I live from paycheck to paycheck despite several increases in the last few years.
Hell, I fucking love working and EVEN THEN all my previous jobs felt soul-crushing every single day in hindsight.