alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately, wage labor as our primary labor structure has a tendency to produce Severance far more frequently than it does a meaningful marriage between work and personal purpose.
There are a lot of people that argue that if you were to eliminate wage labor, and distribute goods as equally as possible or at least take care of basic needs for free through universal income or some other means that people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true. As your post illustrates, working and producing is just as essential of an aspect of human life as consuming is—people want to produce, they just want it to be meaningful! They want to work on stuff that aligns with their own interests and beliefs. Ironically the people that claim that this isn't the case are probably the few that actually would prefer to never work (they want to keep wage labor in place so that they can extract capital from laborers while they relax and "lead" instead of produce themselves).
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no not so simple. Another underlying fear is that many people are predators. Universal income would enable unwanted predators. Of course, successful predators have already implemented long term income for their groups that is satisfactory to themselves and their chosen members. Many successful examples show that membership must be earned, showing some basic positives. Freeloading is also a fear, but it is related to gluttony. Successful people are also often gluttons, so that is not solved. Rivalry means "it is not enough to succeed ourselves, the opponent must lose" .. and gluttons tend to be rivalrous of other gluttons.
You should travel around the world (or even your own country) a bit more. There is a lot of such people in various cultures and places, but you won't see them if living in any sort of success bubble (ie SV).
One of main reasons communism always failed - it never took this basic human nature into account, rather working with some idolized Star trekkish human with strong desire to work on bettering oneself and society, incorruptible, not selfish at all and so on.
There are, without a doubt, a lot of jobs nobody wants to work. Not sure anyone wants to clean restrooms in fast food establishments, for example.
So, if we allow people to choose their jobs and don't have any mechanism that weeds out people who aren't good at what they chose to do, no incentive to work jobs nobody wants to do... we'll probably starve before the we die of lack of sanitation.
Communism had this core ethical belief that everyone should contribute as according to their ability and should be served according to their needs. I'm not sure if Marx believed this to be possible in the physical universe, or was it something that we should approach as much as possible given the constraints of the physical universe. But, countries pursuing communism so far all ran into the problem with lack of motivation, corruption and the need to build a police state in an attempt to counter the two.
So... maybe basic income isn't such a bad idea in the world where ambition can be more rewarding, but I still don't know who's going to work "bad" jobs if the alternative is to live off the basic income.
> people would get lazy and stop working...but it's not true.
Confusing especially when most people do tens of hours of work outside of paying labor already. Sometimes another 40, or more. Perhaps with UBI et c. some folks would drop to merely 50-60 total hours of work, doing wage labor for only 20-30 of it.
But we only call the other things work when a rich person's paying someone else to do it for them (grocery shopping, lawn care, home maintenance, child care to include things like night time care when they're young ["night nanny" is a thing], meal planning, cooking, shuttling people places in cars, navigating healthcare, elder care, repairing clothes, and so on) because if money's not changing hands it doesn't count, I guess.