Comment by foltik
1 day ago
A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
1 day ago
A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
This is untrue. You cannot imagine a world where people, without changing the definition of people, don't need oxygen to breathe.
"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
Humans are socialized to want purpose and meaning in life. Modern humans are socialized to put a lot of that meaning into their employment. Many humans have a lot of trouble with unemployment and even retirement, because they feel a lack of purpose.
I think imagining a world where people are universally able to find purpose outside their employment counts as "changing the definition of people". Perhaps less difficult of a change than making us not dependent on oxygen, but still a big enough change not to clear the bar.
> Plenty of people live without working.
A minority of people live without working. And many people who do not work are profoundly unhappy with that state of affairs.
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
That's a cute thing to say, but isn't a serious rebuttal of anything.
You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
3 replies →
I don't think that's how "evidence" works. I can imagine a lot of things in a lot of domains, but that doesn't make it real.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.
> many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
Men, or women?
Not trying to raise gender role controversies. It's just been my observation, throughout my life experience, that men, as the primary public-sphere producers and providers, are much more tethered to public-sphere occupational identity than women. This seems validated in the experience of the structurally unemployed, e.g. in the former industrial regions.
As women are 50% of the population, give or take, I expect the politics of this might flow differently for them than for men, as a bloc.
We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.
Who is "we?" A utopian society is what we should ideally be aiming for at all times, not some dirty word like you seem to think it is.
Who is "we"?
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the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
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There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
How are we sure about the direction of cause and effect here? I'd expect more healthier people to self-select the working cohort, all else being equal.
In practice it doesn't really work that way. It isn't like "I am ill bodied, I ought to retire." It is more like "I am ill bodied, but I can't afford to retire, so I must work in some capacity." People who retire early are probably far more likely to be wealthier, and that is correlated with healthspan.
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Yeah this seems like an obvious confounder.
Yeah no shit people who are forced to retire because of health reasons are going to die earlier than the ones who aren't.
Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.