Post sponsored by:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/why-work-livingston
My parents, having spent most of their lives building socialism... well, working hard and honestly in the system that promoted the same thing: hard, solid work, that was supposed to contribute to bring about glorious future, they always said, directly or not, that work and achievements are the point of life. The meaning of life. Study, work, don't think too much about what future you are building.
From the perspective of time I learn to treat this kind of thinking as a trap.
There are two things here. One is that what we do actually matters. What we do makes changes in the world, and it's quite important to be able to recognize what kind of change we're introducing or helping. Think teachers and doctors, real work and great potential for good and bad change. Accountants? Lawyers? Advertisers? What they do is less real, but effects can be very much real - for better or worse. So, individual conscience matters much. It needs to be trained and used. If we had ethics built in in higher level, in the operating system of our civilization itself, it would be easier. But when profit is the only metric, morality gets thrown out the window and unless we chose to hear our internal moral compass we can be Santa's or Satan's little helpers - and it's not up to us. So, I understand working hard, I've been doing it for my whole life so far, but certain career path were clearly wrong to chose, so I didn't.
Second thing is what we not do instead. The system evolved to be efficient in managing our time for us. Evolved or was designed, it doesn't matter much, what matters is that it is not going to give up easily on our potential. In an on-going battle for our souls it can't stand idle hands (the devil's workshop), for two reasons: as mentioned before idle hands are a threat to the system, and idle hands are potential profit going to waste. Therefore there's no milestone, no achievement great enough that could slow the system down and grant us another free day - who would not like Mondays to be part of weekend? It would be awesome to have 3-days weekends. For starters. But then again... It's not how long the work week is. It's what we actually do.
Neither socialism not capitalism expects the worker to have an opinion on the work being done. Socialism expects one to work for the greater good, capitalism just for the money. "We do great things", say the both, but what the worker gets, in most cases, is the ability to survive until the next paycheck (it's not relevant whether the next check can barely pay for food, or for new car). Sense of pride is... well, I'd say that it's mostly artificial. Meetings deadlines and increasing sales - are those achievements? On small, insignificant scales, little victories, personal wins... But the big questions is always "does it make the world a better place?". Lucky are those who can say yes to that.
It would be awesome if we could be free from profits, money and projects sent from "higher levels". It would be awesome if we could choose to participate in a system which has one goal of making the world better and improving conditions for all of us (and all life on earth as well). It would be great if we could create a new system, which would serve us, instead of being servants to the existing structure. Where "profit" is understood quite differently than today...
