Quote about Diogenes:

“The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' I haven't read anything about Diogenes, but listened to several podcasts of philosophers talking about Diogenes.

Also going to advise reading Bullshit Jobs by Graeber. Add "In praise of idleness" by Bertrand Russel. The Abolition of Work by Bob Black.

The subreddit /r/antiwork is quite extreme but has good info on their wiki https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/wiki/index

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue.

Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation.

On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administration not have become more efficient because of computers?

A factory's productivity, which has legible inputs and outputs is really different to something which doesn't.

Software is management technology, perhaps, but only in cases that management technology is pretty efficient already. Modern warehouses, ports and stuff are more productive because of software. But, they we already pretty efficient. They already had pretty well formalized, legible processes.

That said, software is also a tool. Say your job is to receive applications, payments or such. You process them. File. Respond. Software is undeniably a good tool for such things. We can't abstract that away by looking at the top level trends. It is a productivity tool for administrative tasks. Top line trends don't suggest a productivity gain, but I'm not willing to conclude that software is not an administrative tool.

On the face of it, banks, universities, government departments, the legal sector, accounting, perhaps the whole finance sector are bigger today, not smaller. They have computers now, which are productivity tools. WTF is going on?

Do we have more justice, better records? What is "productivity" anyway, outside of legible productivity like a factory's?

> Who should pay for someone to live?

Why should anyone pay for anything? The simple fact that you have to pay to live is a pretty modern invention.

> Houses (and utilities) don't build themselves.

True. It's a good thing then that some people are interested in doing that. And if there's a task that noone wants to do (washing dishes?) we can share the burden in a fair way: i'd be happy to collect trashes for my community once a year or once a month, if others do the same.

Also, while houses don't build themselves, you'll note that money doesn't build them either. It's intended as a motivational force for people to work. However people can "work" (if we can call it that) out of conviction/ideals as well.

We could collectively abolish money from one day to the next and housing would still be there, fields would still grow... Life would go on, except the capitalist bloodsuckers wouldn't know how to extract value from their wage slaves anymore.

(Also, most people would probably quit their job because it doesn't make sense or actively hurts others/nature. See David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs on this phenomenon)

> why should ANYONE pay for music?

Well as long as you pay for housing and food you probably should pay for music, too. But money doesn't make any sense to "ensure fair compensation". It does make sense to extract value from the poor to the rich in a very abstract way... it's basically "grow food for your king all year long and they'll come with soldiers and take 90% of your production" but with layers of subtlety added over the centuries.

> It's also a fact that only few seem to demonstrate interest in creative/selfless pursuits at any point in time if you see in our history.

That's not a fact, not at all. Nearly everyone has had some creative or selfless hobby; that they didn't all change the world (and enter the history books) is quite beside the point. It's a very low view of people to take, quite superior and baseless, to be honest. Look closer.

> For most people, the worthwhile activity had been working to survive – to make ends-meet somehow. (You'd not hear people in poor places even today having these mental problems of depression/etc.)

Working to survive is no longer necessary. Only forced inequality makes it so. We have the technology and resources to provide for everyone. The vestigial cultural propaganda involved in making people afraid to not work is a major reason why people tweet blind bullshit, instead of living fulfilling lives.

I agree that meaningful activity is important; but have a read of Bullshit Jobs to see the kind of busy-work people are given. Look around and realise how bad inequality has gotten, for no other reason than because Extreme Wealth is a vicious feedback loop in unrestricted capitalist society.

> the struggle for the basic stuff, which used to consume one's life for most people, is simply no longer there.

It seems you're invoking that horrible and untrue myth; that creativity comes from suffering and deprivation. It's not true.

Holding on to anger, suffering, greed, pain etc, is not necessary to be creative, fulfilled, free.

> A conditioned mind without meaningful activity is a devil workshop. It rejoices in negativity, gossips etc naturally then. Social media has given a platform to such mind and with follows/retweets/likes as added bonus that give social justification and encouragement of its negativity.

You're not entirely wrong, but I don't see how you can seriously propose "working to survive" as a superior alternative. We are very luck that Da Vinci, Tesla, Fuller, Ramanujan, Van Gogh (...insert literally millions of more examples here) didn't need to "work to survive".

> The development manager immediately shot down that idea: "If we do that, they'll leave us once they have the certification."

This one is so common, it's a staple. Very few places I have worked will pay for certs because after that the employee is worth more so there's no budget for the cert + the requisite pay bump that having such a cert deserves.

I don't know how to fix it, but I wish one day I can convince other people that training is the path to unlocking better teams versus just more headcount. The salary for one senior dev can be split 5 ways into an existing team and given enough knowledge can make you more than having an extra dev.

I read Bullshit Jobs and realized why this might be the issue... reports are a sign of power, the more you have, the more power you have, so in order to advance your career, you must be willing to sacrifice the place you work at by hiring more and more people under you.

Graeber's weakness of not being a bean counter (and maybe at a deeper level also not a "systems" thinker) was also his incredible advantage: to be able to sense and interpret the current "reality" of much of the western world but not be transfixed by it but rather place it the context of the far more diverse historical human experience. Have not read Bullshit Jobs but was deeply impressed by Debt and his debunking of centuries of ossified, self-serving dogma. The current low signal to noise cacophony around cryptocurrencies is just another validation of how deeply illiterate we are (collectively) about fairly fundamental aspects of how our societies function, even something like money that all of us handle daily and most of us think quite important. This is not just the confusion of the "common man", until 2008 all mainstream, Nobel prize winning, economists did not think the private banking system was important in economic development - being just "an intermediary" that can be factored out of the "equations".

In the many comments to this post (which in itself is a good thing - may it inspire some smart cookies to carry Graeber's torch) the discussion quickly degenerates in the "markets versus state" caricature in a manifestation of the same inadequate interpretation framework. "Markets" existed since the first three-way encounter and exchange of some goods and associated exchange rates. However corporates (expressing the enforceable interest of an industrious subset of humanity) and states (purportedly expressing the interest of "all", at least within a "nation") did not. Markets have no morality: its an information technology that can facilitate trade in slaves, human organs, human labor or human personalities (=adtech), or nuclear and chemical (=CO2) waste. Who is the gatekeeper of the morality of what and how is produced and traded? Oligopolistic corporate interests corrupting puppet state entities? Entrenched autocracies with the organized private sector simply a puppet satellite constellation? We need to get to a better level of discourse before we hit terminal planetary and societal boundaries and that, my friends, is no bullshit job.

> look for dysfunctional companies

This theme is common in the thread and is wildly wrong.

First I recommend reading Bullshit Jobs to get some perspective on how others have fulfilled your goals.

Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time.

Process is the toxin low-effort thrives on.

An admin role at Google pays more and works much less than an engineering role at a dysfunctional company.

If you look at (rich) university departments the admins are impossible to fire and work very little despite being paid only about 30-40% less than a professor with multiple postdocs working five to ten times as hard.

Anything in government: remember, process is where you thrive, and big rich city and state governments have incredible amounts of process.

Jobs are just one way of living. I feel like there are more efficient ways to implement prosperity. Or have less suffering keeping the level of prosperity the same.

What is a job? Is it really beneficial? This reminds me of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs lecture. Too many people are suffering because of their trust in systemic inefficiency.

David Graeber talked about stuff like this sometimes. His book Bullshit Jobs [0] is one place. He talks about the history of work in the U.S. (going back to medieval guilds, puritans, industrial revolution, consumerism, etc), amongst other things.

[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...