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Comment by hughw

18 hours ago 

  The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it.

Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?

9 comments

hughw

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chucky_z  17 hours ago

The people you know who love it, love it. How many times have you seen a retired age person working? It’s not always because they require it financially. I worked with a gentleman from Bulgaria when I was young who worked 70 hours a week because he was immensely bored otherwise and work brought him purpose. When you become adjusted to working all the time, the work becomes the purpose, and not working becomes death. I watched this happen with one of my grandparents. He retired and died of a heart attack within a year. All signs pointed to him living longer had he not retired. My point is that freedom to some people is work, because work is their purpose and having a purpose provides freedom to enjoy other things.

  • mullingitover  17 hours ago

    The research on UBI is pretty slam dunk, really the main downsides are inflation (which, if we're in a deflation spiral due to everyone being laid off and replaced with bots, is a plus) overall expense (again if we're basically printing labor, the robots can cough up the money), and politics ("I don't want to see people I hate be given nice things!").

    Politics will be the ruthlessly exploited wedge when the chips are down, not "Having my basic needs met is oppression, I need to be forced to work."

ticulatedspline  17 hours ago

Good bit of survivor bias in the retired population. If you can put in 30-40 years of full time work and then afford to retire you probably don't have a propensity for substance abuse.

kelnos  14 hours ago

> The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it.

The retired people who you know are happy love it. The retirement-age people who didn't love it went back into the workforce. Or they didn't stop working in the first place. And c'mon, the "retired person struggling to find purpose" is basically a societal trope at this point.

> Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?

I really really really don't want that to be true. I don't think it's really true for me (though I know, job or no job, I need to find self-defined "productive" things to do with my time), but I do think it's true for a lot of people. I don't know if it's just decades of social conditioning throughout life, or fear of change, or... whatever it might be. But it does seem like a lot of people really do need the structure/purpose of employment in order to find meaning in life and be happy.

There's plenty of research showing that older people without a feeling of purpose tend to die sooner than older people who do feel they have a purpose. Employment is that purpose for a lot of people, and for some, they don't really know how to adequately replace it if they don't have a job. That makes me profoundly sad, but I don't know what to do with that, really.