Home For Fiction – Blog

Labor is dead; the era of work is over. And no, just because you are still employed in a sort-of-9-to-5 well-paying job, it doesn’t mean the statement is wrong – just as having just eaten doesn’t mean there’s no world hunger, or snowing where you are doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as climate change and global warming.

Older people still entertain certain ideas about work, the workforce, youth, and all that. Part of the problem, I guess; generation gap and all that.

When they were young, and up until the 80s and likely 90s, you could indeed walk into an office well-dressed, shake a couple of hands, and be hired on the spot. Isn’t that the stereotype? In any case, it was a largely accurate description.

No more. Work is dead. The era of work is over – also thanks to technological innovations, like AI. And the sooner we, as society, understand that, the better.

The Era of Work Is Over because there Is no Need for Work

In the excellent After Work documentary, there is a segment on a public employee in oil-rich Kuwait. The young man stands in the middle of a luxurious building and, thinking aloud, asks whether it would not be a dream to get paid for a job you don’t have anything to do other than sitting on your ass all day, browsing Netflix or playing video games. Then he quickly adds, No; it would be a nightmare. One he faced himself.

Kuwait is a rich country (thanks to oil), with a rather small, homogeneous society. It would seem like the ideal testing bed for something like Universal Basic Income. The constitution of Kuwait, as explained in the film, has no such stipulation. But it does say that every single citizen has the right to have a job. There’s just a tiny flaw in the plan: it was bollocks There aren’t enough jobs for everyone.

So, the Kuwaiti authorities, in their infinite wisdom, simply hired the excess “workforce” as public employees, put them in cubicles with nothing to do, and pay them for it. Most use the time to browse Netflix, play games, with perhaps the more intellectually stimulated ones choosing to read or write a book. Obviously enough, nobody bats an eyelid if someone shows up for “work” late by four hours.

So, if there is no work, what’s wrong with giving the money directly to people?

Moral Objections, American Dreamers-Style

The Kuwaiti example would at first appear as extreme – though let’s see what’s your opinion when AI comes and renders your already pointless job obsolete. And if you’re confused, here’s a brief message – if you have a sense of humor you might even consider it a commercial break:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

By the way, notice how the video uploader wanted to make sure they won’t offend anyone so they added “Explicit Language” to the video’s title. This is so self-contradictory and inadvertently ironic (as well as enraging) that it requires an Icelandic expression: Helvítis fokking fokk!

But I digress – or am I? Everything is interconnected once you start thinking about petit-bourgeois sensitivities and conformity – so back to the topic: The era of work is over, but American dreamers haven’t gotten the memo yet. “Not to work is a disgrace!” they would yell, foaming.

And by the way, I might use the term “American dreamers”, but our capitalism-on-steroids modern reality is a global phenomenon. Just as the Southern Gothic isn’t about the US South, the American Dream isn’t (alas) only an American phenomenon.

The problem with the expression “Not to work is a disgrace” (or any of its variations) is that it doesn’t quite want to admit what qualifies as “work”. It also doesn’t explain based on what system of morality not to work would be disgraceful – in plain terms: who decides why it’s disgraceful – but we’ll leave advanced philosophy for another day.

I mean, does work – in order to qualify one as a dignified human being – need to be monetarily rewarded? Is any paid job alright, or does it have to be measurable in hours, money, etc.?

Just consider this:

• Person A: Works as a copywriter for an online casino company registered in a tax haven. His work is to basically convince gambling addicts to spend their money – perhaps money taken from friends and family – on unwinnable odds.
• Person B: Unemployed. Spends his day reading and writing literature, playing and composing music, programming, visiting museums, exercising, cooking.

American dreamers would have you believe Person A is a dignified member of society and Person B a disgrace.

Where is the point when this shit just stops making sense?

Truly, there is an Castoriadian element in all this, directly relevant to his notion of the imaginary institution of society:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

If American dreamers object to people not working, I object to the perpetuation of misery. I also object to pretending working is some sort of noble cause.

And I’m not the only one.

Moral Objections, Natsume Sōseki-Style

In his book Sorekara (それから; And Then), the great Japanese author Natsume Sōseki has his protagonist explain the moral problematics of work:

At this point, Daisuke found Hiraoka a trifle provoking and cut him short: “It’s fine to work, but as long as you’re going to work, it ought to be for more than subsistence, else it won’t be to your credit. All toil that is sacred transcends the realm of bread.”
Hiraoka studied Daisuke’s face with strangely unpleasant eyes. Then he asked, “Why?”
“Why? Because toil for the sake of subsistence is not toil for its own sake. […] I mean that it’s hard to work sincerely at a job that you’re doing just to eat. […] If you’re working in order to eat, which do you think is the main object – work or food?”
“Food, of course.”
“See? If food’s the object and work the means, then it stands to reason that you’ll adjust your work to make it easier to eat. In that case, it won’t matter what you do or how you do it as long as you can get bread – that’s what it’s bound to come down to. As long as the content and direction, or the procedure of a given endeavor are circumscribed by external conditions, then that endeavor is degenerate endeavor.”

Insightful, isn’t it? You might want to know this book was written in 1909. And overall, like e.g. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Natsume Sōseki is remarkably modern. I really like his style.

Rediscovering the Wheel

The truth is, the idea that work is demeaning is far older than us suddenly sort-of-realizing it once more. And I’m not talking about the 19th century and the emergence of what today would be called Marxist ideas:

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. […] In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.

The Right To Be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue

A couple of paragraphs below the quotes excerpt, Lafargue points out the very same thing that I did, namely that what’s a new concept is not that working for a paycheck is disgraceful, but that working is supposedly honorable.

This was already known since the time of Aristotle, who in Nicomachean Ethics (Book X, 7) affirms that “happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace”.

Compare this with Sōseki’s excerpt above.

The Era of Work is Over. So, what next?

There are several variables here, but they boil down to two large umbrella categories:

• What next practically speaking: If people don’t work, how do they “earn” money (we’ll get to the quotation marks in a moment)? How do they pay for all the things they “need” (ditto)?
• What next ideologically speaking: If people suddenly have 8-12 hours of extra time, what do they do?

The first element is by far the easiest. Some form of Universal Basic Income will have to be implemented, not for altruistic reasons but purely out of necessity. The illusion of capitalism needs to keep functioning until the next quarter for a while longer, kicking the can down the road, and this can only occur if people can buy stuff.

If people can’t “earn” money (the idea that you have to earn your right to exist is yet another imaginary institution of capitalist society) they need to be given money some other way. Not because they need to buy food (that would be too altruistic) but simply because they won’t be able to buy useless stuff and “keep the economy going”.

But what about Ideology?

Here’s where things get far more complicated. I’ll go back to the After Work documentary and one woman who worked as an Amazon driver. After she spent an inordinate amount of time explaining why it was honorable work, serving the common good, to drive around on a van to deliver useless cheap gadgets to people, she was asked, What would you do if you didn’t have to work?

Her silence was deafening. A couple of other people, when asked, also remained silent. Chances are, most people would probably not have much to say.

And this is a far bigger problem.