I find the most clarifying thing in these types of discussions is to distinguish between work and employment. No one derives meaning from working at McDonald’s or at Walmart. I have a good job, and I don’t derive any meaning from it, either; it is a strictly mercenary arrangement with the side benefit of being able to learn cool things at the same time.
I would rather have the bandwidth to solve problems in my community. But I don’t and neither does anyone else for the most part, so they limp along below crisis levels.
Be very aware of https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy for discussions about what people do or could find meaning in. I know at least a few hourly retail employees who do get some self-worth from helping customers. It’s mixed with drudgery and annoyance, but not completely meaningless.
The good thing about employment is that it’s guaranteed that someone (your employer) thinks you’re providing value to other humans, and there is (outside of government, or government-sized behemoth organizations) a feedback look for that to be a true belief. If you weren’t providing value, you wouldn’t be paid.
That’s not true of unpaid work—it’s still the case that you can do good and provide value to others, but there’s much less feedback about whether and how much.
I predict that there will be no true post-scarcity world. We’ll reduce scarcity, we’ll make many unrewarding and low-paying jobs unnecessary, so that one can likely live a minimum-wage lifestyle without actually working. But we’ll still have a large amount of luxury available only to the lucky and productive (rich), and a larger amount of semi-luxury available only to those who are employed by the rich. In this reduced-scarcity world, those who find meaning in employment can partake, and will enjoy a bit of luxury as (part of) the reward.
I am confident that the percentage of people who work in fast food and retail that derive meaning from it is ~0.
I know at least a few hourly retail employees who do get some self-worth from helping customers
This speaks to the work/employment distinction I raised. Do they suddenly stop helping people when they aren’t on the clock? I very much doubt it; they are probably the same kind of people who are happy to give strangers directions on the street. The meaning likely comes from helping people, not from helping people at their retail job.
This can be contrasted with something like being employed as an EMT or a 911 call operator, where the ability to help people is conditional on the resources and organization that comes with the employment relationship.
But your point also indicates a central challenge that reduced employment would produce: we have invested much of our social expectations and effort in employment. I would go as far as to say a hard majority of contact with other people, excluding family. It would be hard to replace that on short notice, which is to say on the order of years. The costs of social isolation accrue faster than that.
FYI, while I worked at a grocery store as a clerk, janitor and sometimes baker, I...
wrote multiple songs about it (always a bit ironic and self-deprecating but not entirely so, and some functioned as pseudo-anthems).
had a lot of fun talking to customers, and talked to like 1-2 orders of magnitude more of them than I would have talked to random strangers.
got a lot of physical exercise by default.
In my case I also had other longterm goals and aptitudes that made me not want to work there forever, but ever since then I’ve considered it surprisingly hard to beat “have a part time job that involves talking to customers and a lot of physical labor”, as a way to make sure a lot of basic needs are met at once, including certain kinds of tribal resonance.
(Up until starting work at LessWrong, I think I was generally less happy, or approximately as happy, at the programming jobs I worked at. I was also happier at other jobs when I intentionally shifted into “find meaning in the situation” stance)
This is largely because I have a property of “able to make meaning wherever I go”, which has pluses and minuses. I also did art and stuff that provides a lot of meaning, but I think at the time the meaning I got from my grocery clerk job to be… I dunno ranging from 10-60% of the meaning I was getting at a given time, depending on what other projects I had going on.
So if you got the same amount of exercise and talked to the same amount of people as you did working at the grocery store, but you did it not at the grocery store, do you think you would have gotten less meaning, more meaning, or about the same meaning? My expectation is about the same, and if correct that implies the meaning gained from being employed by the grocery store is about zero.
I assert that this:
This is largely because I have a property of “able to make meaning wherever I go”, which has pluses and minuses.
is a default trait of humans. The meaning almost invariably comes from actions and experiences (like exercise and talking to people). The reason that people attribute meaning to having a job is because every systematic generator of actions and experiences has been converted to an employment relationship, or died. Employment doesn’t cause meaning, in general—it is just the dominant context in which it occurs. I think disentangling these things is important for thinking about this and similar problems (like automation).
Another counterpoint to the McDonald’s/Walmart example I used above might be people who are invested in the status that comes from working someplace prestigious, like Apple or Google, or anyone who is towards the top of their profession. Then people would derive meaning by the mere fact of the employment relationship. But I also think that such meaning is not threatened by making employment optional, because such people will simply choose to remain employed.
I find the most clarifying thing in these types of discussions is to distinguish between work and employment. No one derives meaning from working at McDonald’s or at Walmart. I have a good job, and I don’t derive any meaning from it, either; it is a strictly mercenary arrangement with the side benefit of being able to learn cool things at the same time.
I would rather have the bandwidth to solve problems in my community. But I don’t and neither does anyone else for the most part, so they limp along below crisis levels.
Be very aware of https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy for discussions about what people do or could find meaning in. I know at least a few hourly retail employees who do get some self-worth from helping customers. It’s mixed with drudgery and annoyance, but not completely meaningless.
The good thing about employment is that it’s guaranteed that someone (your employer) thinks you’re providing value to other humans, and there is (outside of government, or government-sized behemoth organizations) a feedback look for that to be a true belief. If you weren’t providing value, you wouldn’t be paid.
That’s not true of unpaid work—it’s still the case that you can do good and provide value to others, but there’s much less feedback about whether and how much.
I predict that there will be no true post-scarcity world. We’ll reduce scarcity, we’ll make many unrewarding and low-paying jobs unnecessary, so that one can likely live a minimum-wage lifestyle without actually working. But we’ll still have a large amount of luxury available only to the lucky and productive (rich), and a larger amount of semi-luxury available only to those who are employed by the rich. In this reduced-scarcity world, those who find meaning in employment can partake, and will enjoy a bit of luxury as (part of) the reward.
I am confident that the percentage of people who work in fast food and retail that derive meaning from it is ~0.
This speaks to the work/employment distinction I raised. Do they suddenly stop helping people when they aren’t on the clock? I very much doubt it; they are probably the same kind of people who are happy to give strangers directions on the street. The meaning likely comes from helping people, not from helping people at their retail job.
This can be contrasted with something like being employed as an EMT or a 911 call operator, where the ability to help people is conditional on the resources and organization that comes with the employment relationship.
But your point also indicates a central challenge that reduced employment would produce: we have invested much of our social expectations and effort in employment. I would go as far as to say a hard majority of contact with other people, excluding family. It would be hard to replace that on short notice, which is to say on the order of years. The costs of social isolation accrue faster than that.
FYI, while I worked at a grocery store as a clerk, janitor and sometimes baker, I...
wrote multiple songs about it (always a bit ironic and self-deprecating but not entirely so, and some functioned as pseudo-anthems).
had a lot of fun talking to customers, and talked to like 1-2 orders of magnitude more of them than I would have talked to random strangers.
got a lot of physical exercise by default.
In my case I also had other longterm goals and aptitudes that made me not want to work there forever, but ever since then I’ve considered it surprisingly hard to beat “have a part time job that involves talking to customers and a lot of physical labor”, as a way to make sure a lot of basic needs are met at once, including certain kinds of tribal resonance.
(Up until starting work at LessWrong, I think I was generally less happy, or approximately as happy, at the programming jobs I worked at. I was also happier at other jobs when I intentionally shifted into “find meaning in the situation” stance)
This is largely because I have a property of “able to make meaning wherever I go”, which has pluses and minuses. I also did art and stuff that provides a lot of meaning, but I think at the time the meaning I got from my grocery clerk job to be… I dunno ranging from 10-60% of the meaning I was getting at a given time, depending on what other projects I had going on.
So if you got the same amount of exercise and talked to the same amount of people as you did working at the grocery store, but you did it not at the grocery store, do you think you would have gotten less meaning, more meaning, or about the same meaning? My expectation is about the same, and if correct that implies the meaning gained from being employed by the grocery store is about zero.
I assert that this:
is a default trait of humans. The meaning almost invariably comes from actions and experiences (like exercise and talking to people). The reason that people attribute meaning to having a job is because every systematic generator of actions and experiences has been converted to an employment relationship, or died. Employment doesn’t cause meaning, in general—it is just the dominant context in which it occurs. I think disentangling these things is important for thinking about this and similar problems (like automation).
Another counterpoint to the McDonald’s/Walmart example I used above might be people who are invested in the status that comes from working someplace prestigious, like Apple or Google, or anyone who is towards the top of their profession. Then people would derive meaning by the mere fact of the employment relationship. But I also think that such meaning is not threatened by making employment optional, because such people will simply choose to remain employed.