Happier Abroad Forum Community

In the Shoutbox at the top of the forum index page, @Outcast9428 started a discussion about the ethics of working or avoiding work. I thought I would turn the discussion into a thread for further discussion. Here is the conversation below. The shoutbox messages only last for 30 days so they may be gone by the time you see this.

Outcast9428

Its one thing to say "work is not my life." That's healthy, I mean, work shouldn't be your life. But its another thing to try and just not work at all. That's too extreme. I don't want work consuming our lives but we shouldn't encourage people to just parasite off of society by living in section 8 housing and collecting welfare stamps/payments.

Winston

yeah but outcast, you should have free will and freedom. if you don't wanna work, then there's nothing wrong with finding a way out of having to do so. shouldn't one have free choice? why tell people what to do? I agree that there should be a healthy balance. however, the american and asian lifestyle is to work work work. we all know that. you aren't supposed to question it. only conform to it.

I don't encourage welfare either. just living off the grid or out of america.

Also even if you should do some work, it's best to work for yourself, not an employer. it's not natural to have to become a corporate slave just to pay your bills. that's stupid. there should be choices and ways out of that. especially if you are a freespirit. some people prefer being slaves though and do not know what to do with freedom. so not everyone is the same. but my point is that we all should have a choice of whether we want to be slaves or free. it shouldn't be forced on everyone. do you see my point?

Outcast9428

if you don't wanna work, then there's nothing wrong with finding a way out of having to do so. shouldn't one have free choice?" Because Winston, if you give people that free choice, most people will choose it, and then society will collapse. If people stop working you don't have a functional society anymore. You can't give people that sort of choice and expect a tiny minority to choose it or that it will have some perfect, moderate, balanced solution. People never behave that way. If you give people that choice, most people will simply not work so the only way to prevent society's downfall is to force everybody to work at least to some degree.

Cornfed

What if we don't need all that much work with all the labour saving devices. Arguably most work now is pointless busywork to justify people's largely worthless existence that only wastes resources.

Winston

But Outcast, isn't society collapsing a good thing if society is based on enslavement and is parasitic? An artificial society requires artificial people and lifestyle. Cities require workaholics. But if the society is bad or unnatural to begin with, isn't collapsing it a good thing? Many societies have collapsed before but people always rebuild a new one. Haven't you seen the Zeitgeist films? About a resource based economy? Also many sci fi dystopia movies show the dystopia world collapsing at the end, which is a godo thing and an end to tyranny. For example Logan's Run or that one with Christian Slater. Once the dystopia collapses, people are free again. Isn't that a good thing? A bad system should collapse or be made obsolete. Benjamin Disraeli said that the best way to get rid of a system is not to destroy it but make it obsolete.

Also Outcast, keep in mind that getting a job is not something natural. Before the 1700s everyone was self employed, they didn't have to work for others. Getting a job is a modern concept and a form of enslavement in order to pay the bills. It's not natural. Watch the documentary Zeitgeist Addendum and you will see how wrong and unnatural the economic enslavement system is.

Yes Cornfed has a point. In Howard Zinn's book "A People's History of the United States" it says that people can work only 4 hours a day and there is plenty of production to feed the world easily. But the elite don't want that because they won't want you to have free time to think too much, so they want you to always work long hours no matter how good production is. That's why no matter how good mass production is or technology is, they never want to reduce your working hours. That's not an accident, that's by DESIGN. Think about it. Automated production could easily make life good for everyone, along with free energy. So that prices can be lowered and people only have to work part time. But that's not what the elite want. They could make it that way if they wanted to of course. It's very possible. Prices need to go back to what they were in the 1950s. If they did that then life in America would be good again. That should be the central topic discussed in the media, not racial or gender equality which is meaningless and a waste of time and irrelevant too and has nothing to do with freedom or liberating people.

Outcast9428

If the discussion revolves around working hours, then I'm all in favor of reduced working hours. And yes, to a large extent I do think our current society deserves to collapse. But rather then acting like its a free choice that people should always have, you should be doing it as a deliberate act of rebellion because the social contract has been violated by the elites. Its not because people have a right not to work under a fair contract, its because the social contract laid out to us has been violated by greedy elites who seek only to constantly enrich themselves further.

Also, being self-employed is still working. It just means everybody was working for themselves.

It is immoral to not work if you are able. There are times to work and times to rest. It is not good to mooch off of others. There are also many, many different kinds of work.

It is not immoral to pursue and avenue of honest work that does not involve working for someone else or a corporation, and some types of work may not pay you a salary.

If I retire some day, and I am able, I plan to continue some kind of work, whether it is volunteer work, serving on non-profit committees or whatever.

I don't believe its unethical to want a reduction in your working hours. I don't think work for the sake of work is a virtue. I think its virtuous to work hard for a specific goal that is important to you. But I think workaholism, if anything, might be a vice. I only think its unethical to literally not work at all.

I don't think that it's immoral to not want to work. A desire to avoid work seems to me like a rational response to an irrational workaholic society.

Rather I believe that a work culture which obligates the majority of people to subject themselves to relentless drudgery and to thereby constantly sacrifice their own life energy and individuality under the guise of "earning a living" as deeply immoral, especially in this age of technology in which automation should have reduced working hours decades ago and working long hours is not even necessary for productivity.

Modern work culture with its 40 plus hour grind sucks. It's totally soul-killing and demoralizing and drives so many people to depression, addiction and suicide. I hate it for the demonic thing that it is and regard the work ethicists who defend work for its own sake as perverse enemies of the human soul. I hope that there's a special place in hell prepared for those people.

A lack of desire to subject ourselves to the modern 40 hour workweek doesn't mean that we simply want to sit around and do nothing. Many of us have our own passions and creative interests and wish to do something much better than common drudgery. It seems like the NPC work ethicists are unable to understand that though due to their poverty of imagination.

It is immoral not to work, if you are able. We should be diligent.

Those who are old and retired, if they are able, should work at something. They can help a charity, take up fishing or gardening or something like that.

I knew a retired professor, now deceased, but he appreciated the idea of one of those Russian authors, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who suggested everyone should produce more than he can consume. So he spent some of his time every day splitting logs so he was producing something. I wondered why he didn't do more research work in his own specialty, but it was also good exercise for him, apparently.

That doesn't mean that we have to get locked into the 40 hour a week system where we work as hired servants for corporations owned by a large number of owners, run by managers, etc.

Hahah, this thread cracks me up because if you're self-employed like me, many of us actually have problems forcing ourselves to STOP working, since there's no set time that work ends to make us stop.

I've heard or read the accounts of many other men with this problem (and would imagine it's the same for women who are self-employed), where they start actually getting damage to their health and have to consciously learn how to relax and set boundaries to stop working on projects if you're self-employed.

The worst is when guys with intense desires to achieve stuff try to get even more work in with substance abuse or drinking to make themselves keep on working.
Fortunately I'm more preoccupied with wanting to maintain muscle to impress women in the sack (and out of it, for that matter) than with work obsession, but for awhile I started a bad habit of starting to sip a nice drink as "fuel" to squeeze in even more work after regular hours. Drinking too much and also cutting your sleep short are both terrible for testosterone levels and muscle building, so I got my act together.

In my work-a-holic modes: I also started getting notable discomfort in the spine and also dreaded prostate areas from marathon-length sitting sessions during some start-up years where I was obsessed with getting out of a "launch" phase (or a learning phase, when it came to stock trading), and was doing work-a-holic marathons.

I eventually converted my mancave office setup into a recliner like arrangement (no more office chair sitting).

Now my actual goal is to be more like a lazy lion and take it easier, as well as lifting harder, practicing martial arts again, getting laid as much as possible, and sleeping better.

To the overall topic, not just me though:

I say it's all about your goals: Many men roped into a work-centric culture (eg as salarymen) are being virtuous since they need the money to support their families, and didn't strike out on the self-employment path.

However, if the overwork is just because that's the norm, or they blow the money on conspicuous consumption doodads that don't really make them happy, it's a pity, and I think being practically a "beach bum" who does as little work as he can, but still does something nice with your life even if it's just giving nice women massages or playing music or something, that's a better use of your life than just overworking.

I think all men do themselves a favor by building both physical and mental discipline in some ways though (even if it all comes through fun things that still build discipline, whether it's weight lifting, martial arts, intellectual disiplines, etc), because those who live only the "soft life" have a risk of not being able to endure serious hardships when the going gets tough, which I suspect it's going to for at least awhile since this feels in a lot of ways like a repeat of the Weimar period.

Anyway: If a man has no goals at all and no sense of purpose of what he'd be proud to achieve in his life, and just does like some guys I've seen who sort of throw themselves away smoking pot all the time, hangin' in bars, and playing shoot-em-up videogames all the time, I think that's a pity and he might wish he'd tried to do more for himself, even if it's his life and none of my business.

Work is for losers now. Stacy can show her p***y on Only Fans and make millions of dollars while average men get paid shitty wages to do real work and get treated badly by their dickhead boss. Why would anyone take work seriously in the sick western society? Everyone on here should join the No p***y, No Work movement.