Zoe Bee made a video a few years about motivation. It focused primarily on motivation in school, but it also applies to motivation in the workplace. She also has a section later in the video focusing on the work environment.
It’s 52 minutes long, but it’s worth the watch if you have the time.do we really need a video to know why being exploited feels bad?
karl marx made a video about alienation. it explains how you don’t belong to yourself during capitalist labour and thus don’t feel shit
Shhh, you’re supposed to let the system gaslight you into believing it’s a personal failure of yours and take pills about it
Yeah, the US really tries to transform the human soul into one that is willing to work, even enjoys it, in the context of modern society.
It does this by rewarding those for whom it is true and punishing everyone else and then hopes for natural selection to eventually amplify those who do want to work in modern society.
I’ve been lucky enough to find a job under capitalism where I have more than enough freedom and power in my environment to feel myself.
Checkmate Marx! All that stuff about worker rights is bullshit! /s
But seriously, I wish that wasn’t such a ridiculous unicorn of a thing to find, because that aspect in and of itself has become it’s own shackle. I’m afraid to seek out more competitive pay and lose the (relatively) happy/fulfilling aspects of my job.
Tbf, I doubt he made a video, as he died in 1883, lol.
Depends on what we call work. Food in nature is free in the economic sense, but spending time and effort gathering it can be considered work as well, and maybe isn’t as joyful as we can expect, especially when doing it for the 3427th time, and when it hasn’t regrown since last time we collected, so we need to go further of find alternate sources.
I like to put a clear distinction on what is work in the broader sense, and what is capitalist work. We don’t need capitalist work to live, and we would be better without it, but some form of daily struggle to maintain ourselves, we will probably always have, unfortunately.
That’s why he distinguished work from effort though. But I think the concept we’re looking for here is called alienation.
Getting rid of capitalist work would be great. We can mostly leave things as they are, except git rid corporate ownership of anything, and corporate personhood.
You sign a contract with a real, living person. If you must sign with a company, you sign a contract that binds every officer of that company personally. If a company does something illegal, well, it didn’t. A person in that company did something illegal and the highest ranking person on that contract needs to take personal responsibility for it and go to prison for murder, tax evasion, or whatnot.
Also regulate the stock market until it’s almost completely gone. It’s not a good place for retirement accounts, and that’s the only good thing that the stock market has going for it.
Then add in a few fix actions in general, like limit home and land ownership to what a person actually uses. No squatting on homes to rent them out.
Also full medical and dental for everyone, no private ownership of either practice. As a doctor, dentist, or nurse, you are suddenly a government employee, with government certification and training programs that are open to anyone who applies. Most people wouldn’t make it through the program (and background check) but anyone could try.
Add in some more social safety nets, and life could be good.
Fuck that sands like a great mid step on the way to full Communism. Even just the part of forcing there to always be an accountable person would be amazing and fix so many issues.
Your work is valuable and profitable
When you work for yourself, all that value is for you to benefit from … that’s why you like working for yourself and it feels enjoyable.
When you work for someone else, almost all the value of your work benefits someone else and you receive very little back. You are also aware that you are just one of many, many people around you who are being held in the same situation. This is why you don’t enjoy working for someone else.
There isn’t enough food in nature to support the population. We need agriculture so people are going to have to work to provide food. That’s not free.
Also even if our whole population could be sustained by hunting and gathering alone, that’s still a shitton of work. Don’t come at me about that before you’ve spent 5 hours in the woods crouching over bilberry bushes getting stabbed by twigs and stung by mosquitoes to earn less than a liter of berries.
lucky we’ve been doing this woke agriculture thing for a few thousand years and have gotten rather competent at it.
That doesn’t mean the work doesn’t exist. If nobody went out of their way to do the undesirable and menial labor involved with mass agriculture then we’d all die. If you’re not in a tiny, hunter-gatherer proto-society then you really do have to put in work to live. It’s just our modern distribution of labor and reward that’s fucked.
Some people have. the vast vast majority don’t know shit about farming.
Agriculture is a fuckton of work, have you ever grown anything?
yes, my whole life
Welr, you can change jobs
/s
But for real this has helped me many times.
I genuinely like what I do, but only when I have the freedom to do it right.
Exactly. You need a level of autonomy to be trusted to solve things, and to be given the permission to try.
No matter what I’m being paid to do, I’m going to try to do it as best I can. Gives some minor goals, pride, and accomplishment. Helps the drudgery go faster.
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First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
– Marx
In fact, one must not imagine Sisyphus happy, for the labor he does does not belong to his intrinsic nature.
Well said!
I actually enjoy my work, most of the time, sue me.
I guess getting an education in what you like and are good at while it’s in demand by the market is kinda lucky though.
Yeah, this exactly. I actually really love my job, most of the time, and it pays pretty well, with a strong union and an excellent work/life balance. But I look out at the market, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize, boy was that a miracle. I’m not so blinded by my own anecdotal evidence to not realize things drastically need reform, and that everyone deserves a job as fulfilling as mine.
This person has never heard of the tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons is ahistorical bullshit used to prop up bad policy, and it is completely detached from any resemblance of how the commons actually functioned. Garrett Hardin had no idea what he was talking about. Elinor Ostrom literally won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work studying how common-pool resources are collectively managed in real life.
Isn’t the whole point of the “tradegy of the commons” narrative to draw attention to the fact that the “commons” need governance?
The image you posted seems to be in support of non-goverance, which would be the opposite of what people like Elinor Ostrom advocated.
The tragedy of the commons, as Hardin put it, supported the need for government to impose regulation to prevent “rationally self-interested” actors from depleting the common resource. However, the scenario he imagines in which that’s necessary does not mirror the real world. What Ostrom found was that when faced with a dwindling resource, communities find ways to cooperate and develop rules to manage those resources without requiring a central top-down authority.
I actually don’t find all that much connection between the image I posted and the tragedy of the commons argument. (I just really hate Garrett Hardin.) My interpretation of the post is less an advocacy for no rules in managing common pool resources, and more a complaint and pondering of how work seems to lose meaning when it is on behalf of someone else
I don’t have any issue with the bottom part of the image, it’s the top part that seems to be oblivious to how the world works.
and you have never heard of the book “governing the commons” by Elinor Ostrom, which is a book explaining in great detail and with the use of real examples how the tragedy of the commons can be avoided
Looking at her work, the first stipulation on pooled resources is:
Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
That seems like she is aware that commons can be misused and simply calling out that societies have found ways to manage them, which in turn kinda refutes the arguement being made in the post.
no it doesn’t? these are people working together in order to all use something, not someone who guards something with weapons and takes a cut of the value of your work
You’re adding in additional concepts that change the arguement. The original post talks about fences and guarding resources, not about someone taking a cut of other people’s work.
Additionally, even in the self-governance principles mentioned above there is a need for:
- Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
You could argue that “sanctions” and “weapons/violence” are separate things, but ultimately even the economists mentioned above call out there is a need for enforcement on how “commons” are used.
Edit: quotes are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom
Work does feel good and I dont even like.my job that much. When i put in a good day at work or finish a project or something i feel good. If you dont thats a personal perspective issue. If you are so mad about other people preventing you from stealing food off their land you can get land for less than a bag of chips. There is so much rural land available where you can “work” till your hearts content.
It could be ADHD too. It, other neurodevelopmental disorders, and affective disorders can affect how one feels about just about anything.
I have ADHD and I derive nearly no pleasure from “a job well done” unless the outcome is directly and fairly immediately beneficial.
Project completed at work? At most I’ll be relieved it’s done unless it shows off my skills, which I like - dopamine!
Baked a cake? For myself, fuck yeah - dopamine! For someone else and I don’t get any? The forecast shows a light chance of a low pressure dopamine system entering the region this afternoon, depending on how much I like the person.
As someone with severe adhd, I will absolutely maintain that it’s a mindset issue. I don’t think it makes it harder to derive pleasure from a job well done. I think it disrupts the ability to connect that feedback to doing that task in a way that changes the amount of effort to do that task again in the future
I blew my dopamine circuits out with a meth addiction and have the same effects of ADHD now, which sucks because they can’t exactly put me on a stimulant for it. I drink coffee and smoke weed until I’m capable of accomplishing small tasks, and then build on those to occasionally have productive days.
You just have to push through! Willpower!
Just kidding, I hate that shit. Sorry to hear it, I can’t imagine how difficult that must be. I’ve never tried meth. It sounds like it’d be too much of what already works for me.
you can get land for less than a bag of chips.
Citation needed
Ok redditor
Oh, so you’re full of shit.
I dont understand how you can think there are no cheap plots of land anywhere in the world? Do you really think people are paying big bucks for a plot of rural non agricultural land in any 3rd world countries. Go look at a property website theres plenty of decent property available.
Lol without agriculture you would literally end up eating shit and dying.
Not true. Other ways to cultivate plentiful food that are not ‘agriculture’; adjacent practices
No there aren’t. Not at the scale that humanity currently exists. We would literally die even if we just couldn’t make fertilizer. There would be no way to produce enough food for this many people.
Your mom isn’t at the scale humanity currently exists!
every civilization around a large body of water makes this a half truth
Fair, but fishing still requires a lot of work.
it can still be feast or famine but the ocean was once plentiful in many costal areas, pacific islands have some written history from sailors / explorers of some pretty great living conditions all things considered
won’t be for much longer
Not really… No major civilization around bodies of water subsists without agriculture. Fishing just supplements the protein requirements of the population, and unless they’re fishing just mackle it’s not likely to be sustainable.
major civilization
Going the fence a name doesn’t make it not a fence.
I cannot opt out of being inside of fence, if I’m really lucky I might get to choose between a couple of them.
Anyone who misunderstands the issu, does so because they cannot accept their position as just another peon.
I actually like my job enough that the feeling of this meme is mostly background noise. I can still empathize because I have refused to allow the fences to beat it out of me. That is a never ending battle. It’s a pity so many have lost the battle but I get it, that ignorance does look blissful.
true but major is doing some value lifting here
even though farming is credited with allowing for population density supporting civilization (tech, stratification etc) plenty of peoples subsisted on the coast for numerous generations prior
we’ve been a species much longer than we’ve had farming (30x?) not really fair to toss all that out just because there is no historical documentation
we have oral traditions arguably from before farming societies
but fish ponds off the coast supported relatively large populations in antiquity, just by then farming was also a thing so there was no reason not to do both
even though farming is credited with allowing for population density supporting civilization (tech, stratification etc) plenty of peoples subsisted on the coast for numerous generations prior
Generations prior to agriculture? I don’t really see how that’s relevant to the current conversation.
but fish ponds off the coast supported relatively large populations in antiquity, just by then farming was also a thing so there was no reason not to do both
Since the advent of agriculture grain, legumes, and vegetables have made up the vast majority of calories that have supported human life. Up until relatively recent times animal protein was a relatively small part of most people’s diets.
if we managed to survive as a species for 30x our time vs farming we’re not going to eat shit a die
that was the point
bad faith argument, you can eat vegetables without farming, it just doesn’t have the same population density, hence my point about ‘civilization’
but also not every culture skews that way, just humanity at large
Real, this is a delusional slop post. All food requires some degree of labour, maintaining food supply or access to food requires even more labour.
Civilisation ≠ the natural human ecosystem, it’s something we created… To feed ourselves.
Berry picker mentality
This person is certainly not a berry picker because we know how much work it’d require to completely live off of foraging.
Because someone else is getting the majority of the spoils.
David graeber had a pretty solid go it it, at least part of it.
Housing is basically free as well. Have you seen caves!?
Unfortunately we would have a cave housing crisis on our hands very soon. Although our numbers might dwindle in the bear wars.
Yeah, if you don’t take into account the fact that it’s probably slippery and cold and wet and full of bats and bugs, caves are very good housing.
I like the architecture
