“Imagine if we worked less. Imagine if we walked around our communities, talked to our neighbors, spent time in nature, played. Imagine if we could read, write, fall in love, without that nagging feeling of ‘needing to do something’; imagine if your life was your own.”
Imagine if society gave intrinsic value to life and didn’t judge people solely on how useful they are to ourselves.
“Oh you’re an unemployed homeless person? Guess your life isn’t worth much then because you’re not working in a way that I can benefit from. You don’t deserve food, or shelter, or decency.”
I’m lucky enough to do that currently. By having cut out consumerism completely, producing a lot of my own food, not wanting to go travel much and enjoying my surroundings instead. I guess it’s not for everyone but works for me. I feed three humans and a few animals with an online job and work only two days a week, when I want. I still wish I didn’t have to do that, as most of what I do doesn’t add to a better world for anyone, but really useful work doesn’t pay as well. My neighbors are a bit rough around the edges but they are very friendly. I choose to not mention politics, just live practical solidarity with them - they’ve given me plenty of food when we moved in, and we’ve helped them out whenever needed. I wish we could build more of that, but most people are too shy or too arrogant, or both. I know I’m a bit of both sometimes.
If it’s not too personal can I ask what your job is that lets you work online only 2 days a week / how much it pays?
I work as a freelance translator. The pay is between 0.5 and 0.20EUR per word depending on language. If ChatGPT steals my job I’ll have to do real work again. (Translation can be real and valuable work but within the confines of capitalism most of what I translate is bullshit that never needed typing out.)
What is this expectation that I either need or want to talk to the people that live within a particular proximity to me? No thanks.
Almost certainly you feel this way because you have to interact with people you didn’t chose to interact with on terms that aren’t your own. In the nice version of reality you get to chose your community, one that fits you and one that you fit in
My neighbour is an Australian Trump Enthusiast. Do I have to talk to them?
Hey at least reality has trains.
Nice sentiment, not a meme.
Only if you live in phantasy world … Where do you think food and other stuff that you need comes from?
This is just “I wish I was rich” but expressed in some stupid socialist way.
If you cut out consumerism, this is entirly possible with modern technology. Even better, if you are from a rich country, it is possible to do this today, if you are willing to be unconventional. The key to this is to lower your expenses drasticly and have or had a well paying skill(you can do it with investments as well). This works as we did have pretty good economic growth in terms of efficency since decades. So if you are fine with a US 1960s lifestyle the average US-American could lower their spednign by 2/3s. Obviously most of the growth went to the upper class, but it showswhat is possible. Even crazier GDP and primary energy consumption are fairly closely linked. Currently 19% of US primary energy come from low carbon sources. So if you would lower US GDP by 2/3 you end up with a third of energy consumption. If you are able to keep all low energy sources running and are reduce energy consumption by 2/3 you end up lowering fossil fuels cosnumption by over 80%. This is more or less true for all high income economies, but obviously requires a lot of planning on a national scale. On a personal scale it is certainly possible to have more free time, if you go for it.
