I think this is a problem in perspective/framing. Or phrasing, if you will.
"Being economic entities in the workforce" could alternatively be phrased, "performing a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe."
That sounds much less sinister. It's something humans have been doing for millions of years. It feels good, it engages our brains, it's helpful to others, and it's helpful to ourselves. And I can't help but feel the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is unfair in its approach of disparaging it.
Of course, play and socializing are important, too! Life isn't all work and contribution. And there are many ways to work or contribute outside of having a formal job, anyway. So I do agree with you that it's a bit sad that people don't have ideas for how to do either of these things unless it's through their long-term career.
But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.
Multi-generation households - which also can keep older people active like you noted -are mostly gone. You can't do much for your tribe from a retirement home on a random Saturday afternoon every few months in summer, so work or hobbies are the remaining activity centers, but you now which of the 2 is lionized as a virtue in American culture. Some hobbies are unfortunately only discovered in retirement, so perhaps some criticism of the economic system as imperfect is due.
Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.
I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.
I don’t think being anti-capitalist necessitates being anti “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”. To me, that’s the big benefit- under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders.
I’m pretty sure the world overall and certainly “my tribe” would be better off if the job I’m working just never got done
> under capitalism you’re not working for your tribe, you’re working for a tiny few shareholders
The first half of this sentence is false, but the second half is true.
I don't know about you, but when I look at my window every day, I see thousands of people working for their job: making delicious food that others can eat, stocking store shelves so others can shop, trimming trees so the city will look nice, driving trucks full of goods that others can have, designing good website UX for others to use better, repairing broken cars, etc. It's an intricate dance of millions of people waking up every day and doing selfless things for others in their tribe, in just the right amounts, because we've (miraculously) given them an incentive to do so.
To me what's depressing is that we can live in such a wonderful world, but with a cynical pessimistic culture in which it's commonplace to ignore the chief output of everyone's work.
The ‘little incentive’ that it you don’t do it you starve to death.
There’s tons of work being done because it feels meaningful, later today I’m cooking a meal for a potluck, etc. but if you want your Job to be meaningful that comes at a huge premium.
Good on you for cooking for the potluck! I think that's meaningful.
I don't think having a meaningful job comes at a huge premium, though:
1. I don't think it's true that if you don't work, you'll starve to death. At least, not in the west. You won't have the high quality things compared to your peers, but the state will provide you with housing, food, and resources, so long as you're psychologically capable of using them.
2. But even so, is there any other creature on earth that doesn't have to do some sort of work so it won't starve to death? Even hunter gatherers had to hunt, forage, raise kids, make tools, or otherwise contribute to their tribes, in an endless grind, just to get enough calories to survive.
3. And that doesn't seem… wrong? Many of us enjoy an incredible abundance of options for food, shelter, safety, entertainment, etc., produced by our peers in our tribes and communities. Why shouldn't we have to contribute as well if we want to partake?
4. The idea that "meaning" comes at a premium is the story I want to contradict. It's just that: a story. I know someone who delivers the mail. He loves delivering mail. He feels a ton of meaning. He says, "Yeah there's a lot of junk, but without me, people wouldn't get their wedding invitations. And they wouldn't get their bills paid." Most jobs contribute something, and contribution is meaning. The sad thing to me is we have so many voices telling everyone, "Your job is meaningless!" that people are starting to believe it, and they're ignoring the lives that their work touches.
Delivering mail is meaningful for sure! So is teaching, people want to do these things and sometimes it lines up that there’s a market for it too.
The premium is that stuff like my job where I’m fiddling on Azure is to the benefit of no one and making four times as much.
If you want something meaningful you have to accept worse conditions because all the wonderful lovely people of the world who care and want to make a difference want to work there and not somewhere else.
And it’s interesting you picked mail as an example, when at least in the USA it’s run by the state ;p
I don’t really think it’s horrible that it’s not possible to mooch off your community and give back nothing forever but I don’t think ‘a little incentive’ is the right way of putting it, especially for all the people that hate their jobs for reasonable reasons but stay at it because of the alternative.
I don't think the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is disparaging "performing a skilled role that's useful for your tribe". It's disparaging various of these things:
- being arm-twisted to perform a low-skill, low-utility, role because economic weirdness and bad luck makes it the only work that you can get. Your tribe could use your <furniture making skill>, but it's cheaper to import furniture from China, so tough. Your tribe might like your music, but you aren't as good as Adele, so shut up. You could grow decent fruit but it doesn't pay well enough for you to afford the land to do it, and farms using illegal migrants can undercut your work, so find something else.
- systems parasitically exploiting your desire to provide useful work, to extract maximum value from you beyond what is satisfying and fulfilling, while treating you as disposable waste. You like cooking? Become a chef for 14 hours a day including evenings and weekends, or get out. From Amazon warehouse workers to programmers in the video game industry; intense grind, burnout, fired. Tribes don't tend to do that to people they value.
- systems distorting skills and responsibilities, e.g. not providing good tools, Kafka-esque bureaucracy, firing people in your 'tribe' at will, having your day micromanaged so your skilled work is entirely at the behest of other people, taking away agency from your work, demanding lower quality but faster, demanding higher quality and faster, demanding higher quality and paperwork, so that even if something is using a fulfilling skill, it actually doesn't feel that way.
- removing options to do multiple things; a job is usually a reduced to one role from day start to end. There's not much room for someone who is the local baker, tends the canal lock, sells eggs in the market, and does mountain rescue or whatever.
- taking over your life; e.g. controlling your days off, providing your healthcare, owning all the land so there aren't 'commons' you can opt to live off, lobbying and bribing the lawmakers, mandating 37 pieces of flare, setting your start and finish time, making you justify sickness, demanding you be on-call or available at night.
Consultants with high-demand skills still have some opportunity to avoid this, but huge numbers of people don't.
"Being economic entities in the workforce" could alternatively be phrased, "performing a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe."
That sounds much less sinister. It's something humans have been doing for millions of years. It feels good, it engages our brains, it's helpful to others, and it's helpful to ourselves. And I can't help but feel the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is unfair in its approach of disparaging it.
Of course, play and socializing are important, too! Life isn't all work and contribution. And there are many ways to work or contribute outside of having a formal job, anyway. So I do agree with you that it's a bit sad that people don't have ideas for how to do either of these things unless it's through their long-term career.