this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I don't fully disagree but don't you kinda believe it's embarrassing that we have to micromanage our lives to "reclaim" scraps of fulfilling time. People shouldn't have to hack their days just to have time for joy, rest, or growth. Society's standards and workplaces should be designed so basic dignity and meaningful downtime are built in, not something we beg or gamify away.
Not really, no? Originally we had to micromanage our day to secure calories and shelter, and defend ourselves. I'm fine with trading that uncertainty for reliability.
Would I prefer fully automated luxury gay space communism? Obviously. But that sort of thing takes time. The current arrangement is pretty darn swanky on the evolutionary timescale. It was barely a century ago that we bargained down to 8 hours, 5 days a week.
I can yearn , and fight, for better while acknowledging that what I've got is about the best humans have had it. Too much inequality, obviously, but still most of my ancestors would be jealous.
Reliability is still a privilege for fewer and fewer imo. For many more it’s fragile, conditional, and easily stripped away by illness, layoffs, or a single bad landlord. The fact that conditions improved over a century ago doesn’t license complacency. Those gains were forced by people who refused to accept tiny, daily violences as normal. If you think we should stop pushing once life stops being medieval, ok maybe? Not really, no. Don’t pretend that’s moral clarity; it’s settling. Your ancestors may be jealous, but they'd also argue that you maybe lost the plot.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
If you want to live a bronze age life, you can work a bronze age schedule. Sell your possessions, buy a couple acres in Bumfuck, NW, build a log cabin, and live off the land.
A huge chunk of that 8hr workday finances the difference in lifestyle between then and now. You live in a home free of pests, insulated and climate controlled, with unlimited clean water at your fingertips, and wires that fuel unfathomable feats of automation and communication. We're talking to each other on boxes of minerals painstakingly engineered to fulfill countless purposes.
Get rid of the phones, computers, video games, televisions, air conditioners, water heaters, dish and clothes washers, other various appliances, transportation, medicine, manufactured textiles, infrastructure, entertainment, food and other sundry services, etc., and you don't have to work all that long to cover your nut.
I'm a Marxist in that I don't think Capitalism is the end of human progress, and the time is nigh. I'm also a Marxist in that I think capitalism is basically an improvement on what came before. It's run its course, and will hopefully be displaced soon, but that doesn't mean I'm not getting a better return on effort than my ancestors.