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Society is getting sick of selfish "Conservative values"
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Wanting a job for income and wanting to work are very different indeed but your point stands.
I believe most people want to contribute, but our society isn’t set up to align individual interest and aptitude with need.
If we’re asking the majority of people to grind their own bones into dust doing something they hate for a pittance, that’s a large part of the problem. Some people love cleaning (like my sister), others love woodworking or cooking or streaming. But we’re forcing square pegs into round holes because we give no thought whatsoever to how people’s skills, aptitude, and interest might align with society’s needs, then we’re shocked pikachu when most are unhappy and thus unproductive.
Work in the context I meant was definitely the type that results from the current hierarchy resulting in the categorical failure you're pointing out.
Contributing to someone you meet and relate face to face to feels good. Contributing to the concept of company or the "stakeholder" not so good.
Personally i like to do a little of everything but forced myself to learn a specialty to earn a livable wage.
In that case, I guess I agree with him that most people don’t want to ‘work’. Wanting to be a wage slave would be bonkers. Most people want to contribute meaningfully to society and don’t want to starve, but that’s not what ‘work’ means.
Right, it should just mean paid labor, but the people complaining about this would prefer it unpaid.
I'd prefer pay to be unnecessary and the labor voluntary. At least I think that's a good ideal to work towards.
I have never, and I mean TRULY NEVER wanted to work.
But I am not stupid, so I know I NEED to work in order to live.
Not wanting to give the majority of my day to a company that makes more in one second than 10,000 minimum wage employees make in a month is not "being lazy".
1/3 is already taken by sleeping, and you fucking want me to just give up another 1/3? For THIS shit pay? Entirely Fuck Off.
Plus it costs me money just to get to work.
Preach!
I used to be able to do math problems and get paid well to do them. It wasn't ever "fun" or particularly rewarding but I could do it and not be completely exhausted or in pain at the end of the day.
Now my pay is cut and I've been doing brain-rot marketing for months thanks to trump's cuts. My brain fog is so bad and motivation so low that the email that used to take me 30 seconds takes at least 20 minutes if not an hour these days. It's just meaningless and I feel like I'm working at a telemarketing call center for a company that doesn't sell anything. It's even hard to apply for new jobs. I don't know how the fuck I'm sober especially now of all times...
Just luvky I managed to get a couple promising interviews lined up, have some friends, and relatively low expenses.
Depends on your definition of work. I don't think we should let ourselves be convinced that work can only be selling your energy, your time and your skills to a company that will pay you as little as it can get away with. If you have creative hobbies, practice some craft on your free time or help other people free of charge, that's still work: you're creating something of value for others and/or for society. It just doesn't feel like it because it's something you actually want to do instead of being forced to do.
Honestly I put "NEED to get paid in order to live" but changed it to "I NEED to work" because of this. Even if I just decided to find a forest in the middle of nowhere to claim as my own, build a house, raise animals and farm the land I'm still working.
But since I do enjoy my hobbies of carpentry, metalworking and leatherworking, I don't really consider them work in the same sense. You're 100% correct.
I make stuff for people all the time, but it's on my own schedule when I feel like working on something, and I only accept orders when I feel like it. If I tried to do that full time, it's now not really up to me if I go work on something today. I have to or I get backed up, the customer gets pissed, and I'm losing money. Or the equivalent favors/barter.
‘Do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’.
I’ll bet there are things you love to do that would have value to others in society, even if you wouldn’t consider that a ‘job’ or ‘work’.
That’s kind of my point. If our society weren’t so broken, you could contribute without having to do what we currently consider ‘work’.
e : this sounded wrong, sorry. I meant if we could let go of capitalism, this is how things should work. We can’t have nice things, though.
It's a nice sentiment, but sadly the moment you depend on it for survival, it becomes work.
In another comment just now, I mentioned my hobbies include making knives/swords, leather work, and some light carpentry.
I love all these things. I make a pretty neat and simple metal rose that I can do different things with for coloring, and those sell like hotcakes around valentines day. But every year, I only make a handful for a few people here and there, and almost always as gifts. I never make a bunch of them beforehand with intent to sell "to someone", that's work. That's unenjoyable for me.
I could make bank in my area if I invested my savings into metalworkingnstuff stuff and focused on custom knives for hunting and camping, but the thought of that makes me want to kick my anvil and forge into the lake.
I suppose the response to that should be "well I just haven't found the thing I truly love" yet, but I just don't believe there is anything of value that I could provide to anyone that I would enjoy so much that it never feels like work and pays all my bills.
I long for the utopian future of post-scarcity...
Right, but you’re still assuming a capitalist society. Without that cutthroat marketplace and the need to compete, it wouldn’t necessarily be like that.
It’s really hard to imagine, I know – and especially because I get it, I have a very niche hobby (period corset making and couture tailoring) that I could potentially make a lot of money doing but when I tried, it sucked all the enjoyment out of it to the point I had to stop for a few years.
I’m talking about doing what you’re good at without the backdrop of a capitalist system that sucks you for every drop of blood you have.