Why do people like work?

Why do people like work?

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monthlyreview.org/2017/09/01/the-meaning-of-work-in-a-sustainable-society/
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Well my mother loves being a nurse and my father loves being electrician. My one 'pal' is workaholic and his wife loves to cook,

Humans naturally feel a sense of accomplishment from self-directed (or at least what they believe to be so) labor. If they didn't, humanity would have offed itself the second it gained self awareness.

To keep myself busy. If I didn't I'd go /r9k/. Gotta keep moving. Can't let my demons catch me. Can't let myself get comfy…

I like how you spoiler'd "naturally".

Learned helplessness, people spend most of their formative years being told what to do, they have a hard time even imaging how to spend their time without the structure provided by work. It's kind of like how many people believe that they can't learn anything without a teacher explaining it to them.

Some people have cool jobs like scientific research, some people like the camaraderie. Most people I know who work in bars like the social aspect a lot although most of the social aspect is just bitching about work and work people

my job is my only way of socializing with people and i get depressed on my days off, not because I want to work but because I get lonely. that's just me though

What happens if you don't get any sense of achievement from work?

why wouldn't you

I liked school but I really hate work. School is 100% just learning interesting stuff and hanging out with your friends. I don't get why people didn't like school.

Depression. I’m not OP but battling depression for years and not really enjoying shit has made my life kinda gay.

This is one of the reasons why unemployed people spend so much time at home.

I like the sense of creating something useful.

I like work, because I mainly work hands-on repairing things. I'd like to be compensated fairly for my labor, but the work itself is nice

Emphasis on self-directed. I think you're right, but the work-fetishism among some leftists is wrong.


fucking saved

Then they don't do it, or they try not to do it. In my opinion this is natural, too.

;^)

Do you not have any hobbies either? Hobbies are usually labour undertaken for one's own enjoyment/for a sense of achievement in your own work.

The foregoing suggests that the essence of a future sustainable socialist society must be located in the labor process—in Marx’s terms, the metabolism of society and nature. Visions of a post-capitalist future that pivot on the expansion of leisure time and general prosperity, without addressing the need for meaningful work, are bound to fail.

Yet today most depictions of a future sustainable society take work and production as economically and technologically determined, or as simply displaced by automation, and focus instead on maximizing leisure as society’s highest aim, often coupled with basic income guarantees.41 This can be seen in the works of theorists such as Latouche and Gorz. The former defines “degrowth,” of which he is a principal proponent, as a social formation “beyond the work-based society.” Dismissing left arguments for the development of a society in which work takes on a more creative role as “pro-work propaganda,” Latouche instead argues for a society in which “leisure and play are as highly valued as work.”42

Gorz’s early ecosocialist analysis adopts a similar stance. In his 1983 Paths to Paradise, subtitled On the Liberation from Work, he returns to Aristotle’s aristocratic notion that life is most rewarding outside the mundane realm of labor. Gorz envisions a vast reduction in working time—”the end of the society of work”—with employees working only a thousand hours annually over the course of twenty years of employment. Gorz’s idea of the reduction of formal work, made inevitable in a future society, is in effect that of a society in which everyone is petty bourgeois—a gift of the “micro-electronic revolution” and automation.

Standard work relations, as conceived in Paths to Paradise, would be dominated by automation, and the resulting reduction in working hours would allow the most enjoyable, professional jobs to be shared out among more people. Yet all of this takes second place to the promise of a vast increase in free time, enabling individuals to engage in all sorts of autonomous activities, portrayed as individual leisure pursuits and home-based production and not in terms of associated labor. The normal capitalist workplace is left essentially to Taylorist scientific management, while the more complex questions surrounding automation and the degradation of work are scarcely examined. Freedom is seen as not-work in the form of pure leisure, or as home-based or informal production. The alternative socialist view, which centers on the transformation of work itself in a future society, is flatly dismissed as a dogma of “the disciples of the religion of work.”43

Yet the kinds of total automation and robotization now projected for advanced capitalist society, which are frequently treated as representing inevitable, teleological tendencies—prompting discussions of “a world without work”—do not sit well with a conception of a steady-state economy and society, where human beings would be neither appendages to machines nor their servants.44 Nor is today’s dominant fatalism sufficiently grounded in a critique of contemporary capitalist contradictions. In today’s political economy, it can be argued, productivity is not too low but too high. Mere quantitative development—measured in output or GDP growth—is therefore no longer the key challenge in meeting social needs. In a more rational society based on abundance, as Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols argue in People Get Ready, the qualitative aspects of working conditions would be emphasized.45 Work relations would be seen as a basis of equality and sociability, rather than inequality and asociality. Repetitive, deskilled jobs would be replaced by forms of active employment that emphasize all-around human development. The joint stock of knowledge of society that constitutes technology would be used for the promotion of sustainable social progress, rather than for the profits and accumulation of a very few.

Not only do human beings need creative labor in their roles as individuals, they also need it in their social roles, since work is constitutive of society itself. A world in which most people are removed from work activities, as pictured in Kurt Vonnegut’s futuristic novel Player Piano, would be little more than a dystopia.46 The wholesale cessation of labor, as represented in many post-work schemes, could only lead to a kind of absolute alienation: the estrangement from the core of “life activity,” which requires that human beings be transformative agents interacting with nature. To abolish work would constitute a break with objective existence in its most meaningful, active, and creative form—a break with human species-being itself.47

The failure in some visions of a sustainable prosperity to confront the full potential of freely associated human labor only serves to undermine the often courageous critiques of economic growth that characterize today’s radical ecological visions. The unfortunate consequence is that many of the arguments for a prosperous no-growth society have more in common with Bellamy than with Morris (or Marx), since they focus almost exclusively on the expansion of leisure as not-work, while downplaying humanity’s productive and creative possibilities. In truth, it is impossible to imagine a viable future that does not focus on the metamorphosis of work itself. For Morris, as we have seen, art and science were the two “inexhaustible” realms of human creativity that all people could participate in actively within the context of associated human labor.

In a prospective socialist society characterized by sustainable prosperity that recognizes material limits as its essential principle—in accord with Epicurus’s notion that “wealth, if limits are not set for it, is great poverty”—it is crucial to envision entirely new socially and ecologically reproductive work relations.48 The received notion that the maximization of leisure, luxury, and consumption is the primary goal of human progress, and that people will refuse to produce if not subject to coercion and driven by greed, loses much of its force in light of the deepening contradictions of our overproductive, overconsumptive society. The prevailing view goes against what we know anthropologically with respect to many pre-capitalist cultures, and falls short of a realistic conception of variable human nature, one that takes into account the historical evolution of human beings as social animals. The motivation to create and to contribute in one’s life to the social reproduction of humanity as a whole, coupled with the higher norms enforced by collective labor, provide powerful stimuli for continuing free human development. The universal crisis that marks our time necessitates an epoch of uncompromising revolutionary change; one aimed at a harnessing human energy for creative and socially productive work within a world of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. In the end, there is no other way in which to conceive a truly sustainable prosperity.

Full article: monthlyreview.org/2017/09/01/the-meaning-of-work-in-a-sustainable-society/

Honestly hate working maybe it's because I've had nothing but shit jobs. Sadly I have to keep doing what I hate because I don't know what I like to do besides shitpost, wank and watch youtube all day. The life I guess.

Because my job involves being yelled at by self-entitled pieces of shit on both sides all day?

Go pirate some books and learn how to do something that's not complete shit.

Shitty teachers, shitty students, and for one reason or another, not grasping the concepts delivered to you. School was mostly good for me, though I couldn't into math.

Language is the thing I'd like to study, move abroad and do ESL. If I didn't have to work I'd probably be a groundskeeper or a maid at a hospital or rehab/group home.

"work" does not necessarily mean "job"

cleaning my apartment is work, but it is not my job

Stop working and read bob black

math programs are intentionally shitty to make people bad at math.

I taught myself math with khan academy because it was a requirement for chemistry. I had to relearn all of high school math in one semester. Its really easy. We were doing pH's and I finally understood what a log scale is.

Then I suddenly realized economies of scale and distribution of resources/population. They don't want you to know these things so they compartmentalize math into productive "formulas" instead of teaching you mathematics. Imagine the class consciousness if everyone was capable of calculating the %1. "Bad at math" is cancer. No child left behind and intentionally convoluted curriculum is cancer.

I never hated school but everything past high-school is basically just work with out pay. I did it too and which I never had. I'm poor as fuck and probably forever but my resumes at least partially impressive and at least half the shit on their is true.

I guess I spend time online. I don't really have any other talent.

Are we living in the same world? Very, very few people enjoy their jobs, the vast majority only ever tolerated them, in no small part thanks to a lot of spooks like Protestant work ethic, American dream etc.

Now as capitalism verrrrrrrrrrrrry slowly loses egitimacy, its supporting spooks start to vanish. Add to that the fact that in the Western world, especially America, subjective quality of live arguably is decreasing sensibly despite unsaid promises of inevitable progress, and more and more people are starting to actively hate their jobs. Cue the alienation and depression epidemics.

That's no doubt a problem that a socialist State will have to address too. Sure, co-owning and co-managing the dreadfully boring, unfulfilling cardboard box factory you work at will make you feel less alienation and give you more agency, and a social support network would help with healthcare, culture etc., but at the end of the day, it will remain a dreadfully boring, unfulfilling job.

I dunno, a lot of the people I talk to like their jobs.

I like work insofar as it gives me money to live on, lets me avoid the endless degrading soulsuck that is searching for a job, and is tolerable at worst.
But then again I'm pretty sure I have one of the best jobs in existence so it's definitely not common

This is truly hell.

...

It's been a nice journey, but fuck the whole thing. 99% of jobs fucking blow, at least once you've read Marxist literature and you see sneaky capitalists lurking in every shadow while you're trying to do your job. Every "job" is just a peon toiling away for their master so they can be given the peanuts they need to live. I'd rather grow my own peanuts at this point.

My state has mandatory wprk time when ypu are in school where ypu don't get paid. Sometimes people do tasks as repetitive as pressing a button in those works, and people yet say it's better than school… My guess is that a lot of people really hate not having money, and when you drop out 1 or 2 times (it's considered ok in my country to repeat 1 year) you really feel like you are wasting time that could be used to make money. It just bugs me that these people in the end MISS schpol when they fondly remember school memories and it's the "best years of your life". Is this what ideology looks like?

Would I be right if I guessed your circle of friends work in specialized or maybe even niche, relatively well-remunerated jobs?

I have always been a fan of not starving to death.

One works at U-haul cleaning out the trucks and stuff. Others are waiters or working retail.

It is sometimes enjoyable for a variety of reasons. It is sometimes bad for a variety of reasons. I don't understand the purpose of this thread.

What interesting stuff?

Cause they're not listless lefties!

Spanish Class

Move to Patagonia and become a cattle rancher.

Work is only enjoyable if you enjoy the task you’re doing.

Not really

Well then, I'm stumped. I can see some people enjoying some specific manual labor, but I honestly can't see anyone actually enjoying retail and waiting tables. Are you they haven't been replaced by automatons already?

You have a society hooked on pills and drugs to deal with the mindless droning of everyday life.

feeling good about slavering for someone's profit is unhealthy

...

So you're saying the STEM field is pathologically unhealthy?

I hated school but I quite enjoy my job actually
It would be nice if it wasn't 40 hours a week though. I could do the same amount of work in less to be quite honest.