I don't know what the percentage is, but I suspect that the large majority to the point of near total work we do as a species, is busywork. It doesn't need to be done for our survival. It also probably doesn't add much to our wellbeing in life, and might even detract more from it, because it isn't really that important. There are probably exceptions, but pretty much everywhere along the supply chain of all industries, nothing really needs to get done. The reason we do it though, is that we believe that making money is the way to a better society, even though the evidence doesn't really support this. Even a lot of the jobs that people would assume are beneficial like being a doctor, are largely treating symptoms of our own inability to improve ourselves, our environment, and our behaviours, with many of the many ailments caused by the for profit economy, including healthcare itself.
Money doesn't equal wellbeing.
And while I believe that most of what we do is pretty useless, I also think that it is necessary for us to work, because it is how we have evolved as humans. To be social, to solve problems, and to work together to do what we can't do alone. It doesn't really matter what we work on, which is why "busywork" has become the mechanism, but it would obviously be far, far better for us as a species if we worked on projects that advanced us for common and individual good. Working together builds community, and working together on what is valuable to us, builds a healthy society.
For instance, you might believe that climate change is man-made, or you might not. But it is likely that you believe that pollution of all types that make it harder for us to live good lives and introduces unnecessary stress on nature and therefore our food supply, is a bad thing. If we could start cleaning up the pollution we create, we could have significantly better quality of health and lives in general.
But often, the things that would make our lives better are going to cost money, and are "too expensive" to implement at scale, or with any speed. Yet, this is a nonsensical argument, because an economy isn't driven by what is being produced, it is simply supply and demand. Moving demand over to other industries that either pollute less or produce goods and services that reduce pollution or clean it up, doesn't take money out of the economy, it redistributes it within the economy. Because that is how economics works.
As I was saying in an article the other day, most people's "resilience" is actually resistance. They aren't open to an uncertain future of change that might not work, and are instead trying to hold onto the status quo conditions that are definitely not going to work. We are more comfortable failing with what we know, than failing at what we don't.
As I have hypothesized for many years, if we could stop all the nonsense of war and conflict and greed, and all the profiteering actions to maximise wealth for a decade or so, and diverted all our energy in unison to tackle the problems that really have impact on our lives and the products and services that facilitate a better outcome, we would likely have such an extreme amount of innovation in the "too expensive" categories, that we wouldn't be able to reconcile how we were able to do without it before. And the reason we can do without it now, is because we are settling for the things the way they are.
That is not our nature.
We are conditioned to settle, which means it is a nurture component. But nurture makes it sound like we are lovingly held in a mother's arms and rocked to sleep. Which is not the case. This is not out of love, it is out of greed and is abusive to our nature and our wellbeing at individual and societal levels. We are worse off as a species in a for profit environment that doesn't have checks and balances on what is being sold. Leaving it up to a manipulated and conditioned marketplace, doesn't make it okay. We like to think we make our own choices, but that really isn't the case in the current economy, because we are constantly being nudged to do what is not in our best interest, or the best interest of society
Busywork.
It keeps us busy, but we are more like cows being fed to be milked, rather than people who are part of a society that is looking to improve. The thing is though, that even if we do nothing, the result of failure is the same, because the trajectory is heading to catastrophe. Just to have a chance at survival as a species, we need to do radically different than what we are doing now, but there is no appetite for that level of change. It is too "risky" to have so much disruption, so there is resilience resistance in order to maintain the current devil we know.
It would be an interesting thought experiment for another day perhaps, to look at what might happen if we were able to fork this world into two worlds, running one chain "as is" and the other in conditions where people are putting their efforts into real improvement, rather than looking to take profits first, and then paying others to improve. My suspicions are that one earth will die a painful death, and the other would come up with a lot of cool stuff that people feel good about.
Ultimately, both might fail.
Which world would you want to live in?
Taraz
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