Comment by colechristensen
4 hours ago
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.”
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
I can think of many examples.
Nobody would work if housing and food were super cheap, for instance.
Saving the economy by turning water into a luxury item. The op-eds basically write themselves.
There are overwhelming examples of people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met. Some work because they love to, some work because they have to; we, collectively, should be trying as hard as possible to make work optional (automation, etc), because the point of life is to live, not to work. Some combination of Abundance [1], Solarpunk [2], etc. The entire planet will eventually be in population decline [3] (with most of the world already below fertility replacement rate), so optimizing for endless growth is unnecessary. So keep spinning up flywheels towards these ends if we want to optimize for the human experience, art, creativity, and innovation (to distribute opportunity to parity with talent).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b...
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
(think in systems)
> people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met
There are no such things as "basic needs". If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied
In other words, abundance is a myth promoted by mentally ill cultists, and meeting the basic needs of all people is unattainable.
1 reply →
> the point of life is to live, not to work
I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable).
Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
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There’s an equilibrium. If no one worked, housing and food would not be super cheap.
Or people would do things they were genuinely interested in rather than from desperation
If people were broadly socialized for collaboration and collective good, people could and would achieve as much with many fewer hours of work, and with the many more hours available for personal creative pursuit and play. There is no innate human nature that prevents this, only a prevailing social order which reinforces individualism and competition at the expense of the many.