In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it…
Excellent article by David Graeber that had been sitting on my tab stack for a few months now waiting for me to post it here. It confirms my suspicion that we don’t need to work as much as we do and that much of what people are paid to do is purposefully not useful.
Of course, it could also be that I’m looking for further evidence and support to ground my avoidance of these bullshit jobs, what has made me prefer unemployment to -in my idealistic, INFP eyes- ridding my life of meaning. Some people would call such behaviour laziness, but I suspect those people probably wouldn’t agree with the article anyway.
