What If We Just...Stopped Working?

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to what if we stopped working is we can't that begs the question how close can we get and that question well that question has some pretty interesting answers let's back up if you go to parties you've probably been asked the question what do you do if you answer i make youtube videos no you don't who would ever give you the chance to give that answer see the joke here is that youtubers have no friends like no one at all like bottom of the barrel trapped in a pit of loneliness anyway the fact that what do you do is the default punch bowl question demonstrates at least one thing about our current society work is one of if not the biggest part of our lives but it doesn't have to be already multiple countries are trying out things like a four-day work week how does this work in countries like new zealand spain and iceland they ran experiments with shortening the work week to just four days and then they wrote down the results and now we're looking at them one of the better known cases here is iceland which ran a couple experiments between 2015 and 2019 after unions started pushing for more time off for a lucky 2 500 icelandics icelandists for a lucky 2 500 people time on the job was decreased to just 4 days going from 40 to around 35 hours a week crucially without salaries going down even a single frozen fish or whatever they use for currency over there unsurprisingly it worked really well people were happier less likely to experience burnout healthier overall they just had a better life and thanks to the successes of the experiment and the strength of trade unions over 80 percent of people in all of iceland shortened their working hours or gained the right to after these trials were run even fancy business people in suits were happier because they got to save on some of their costs and didn't see a dip in productivity because as you might not find very surprising productivity has a diminishing returns curve the longer you work the less productive you are each new hour of time on the job brings less and less benefit and is more and more justified in being lopped off entirely and these sorts of experiments are all well and good but what if we went even further this week's episode is a little different usually videos on this channel focus on the bad stuff we hate bad stuff sorry ignore him i don't know how he got in here and no doubt about it this video is still going to have some of that with a side of political theory to appease the nerds but for the next 15 or so minutes we're mainly going to answer a couple questions about work what it is why it's such a big deal for some people and why it could just not be because it could we don't need to work so damn hard you'd think that that fact would make for easy political points just right there for the taking who wouldn't vote for the candidate or the party that's going to make their lives more pleasant less constrained more free of work and in some countries they do have that kind of politics but the reality is that neither major political party here in the u.s is trying to reduce the time we spend at work we have to get back to work our people want to work they want to go back they have to go back a job's about a lot more than a paycheck it's about your dignity it's about respect it's about your place in the community neither party is trying to meaningfully reduce our working hours despite enough people hating their jobs so much that forbes of all magazines can run a listicle with 15 ways to quote rise above resenting your job with such helpful tips as get over it that's not to say that the sentiment doesn't exist at all in our government democrat mark takano is trying to get a bill for a 32-hour work week through congress but by and large neither party is anti-work should they be okay let's go over some definitions despite being an illegal wordle guess work is actually a word work is the effect we have on the world it's using your physical or mental effort to achieve something without any work at all by anyone we'd all die without nurses electricians teachers people getting out of bed to make breakfast society would crumble pretty quickly we would be completely idle and not for long some amount of work always needs to be done nowadays some work gets paid with money and some work gets paid with no money or barely any money and also disdain being against work or anti-work if you spend any time on the worst place on the internet isn't ignoring that fact it's recognizing that some work always needs to be done but that the conditions that shape that work should be different than they are now it's saying that the goal shouldn't be to work as much as possible but as little as possible to achieve what we want the goal is to maximize leisure and the quality of that leisure by balancing that interest with the necessity of work the goal isn't to not work at all but to work for things that matter and on good terms this is gonna sound really obvious but for most of us that's not how work goes work is something we need to do to get access to the things we need to live like food shelter and health care under capitalism the only way to get these basic necessities of life is to work in some way or another and get a wage at the end you work or you starve seems pretty coercive while at work you have no or very little input on your work conditions sometimes they're okay other times not on top of that our whole lives are conditioning us for that reality and imbuing it with value work will set you free no pain no gain or there's no such thing as a free lunch are some examples of the ideological discourse that accompanies the material reality of coercion and makes it seem more natural more palatable our necessity to work is accompanied by a psychopolitics trying to enshrine work in the largest possible sense as a value but it doesn't seem to work as well as the benefactors of that discourse wanted to when you consider how much of our time we spend thinking about not working whether it's dreaming up a vacation we want to take fantasizing about winning the lottery and quitting or buying an ironic garfield mug it seems like we all want to stop working pretty badly and yet when we're given the chance a good chunk of us keep working even when we don't need to some billionaires still work as do many lottery winners retirees often volunteer or continue working in some capacity even when their needs are met and they're supposed to be in the part of their lives where they stop so do we like to work or do we hate it the obvious answer is that it depends what does it depend on meaning when we find work meaningful we're more than happy to do it and there are a couple ways that work can have meaning there's the most obvious one which is that work which allows us to develop our talents and interests to self-actualize then there's work that grants us autonomy and control over the work itself and the product of that work and of course there's work that produces something of importance these kinds of really obvious factors give work meaning and help explain why people work on things even when they have no need to and could live in complete and total leisure but unfortunately in the us and the uk around a quarter of people feel like their job is completely meaningless and a big chunk of people on top of that aren't really sure don't really know if their job is meaningless they just don't know they can't figure it out which is really to say that their jobs aren't evidently meaningful either that doesn't mean that every single one of their jobs is entirely pointless meaning and purpose are different even if there's bound to be a big overlap in that group between pointless and meaningless work but it definitely means that at the very least those jobs are alienating they're jobs that feel bad to do they're jobs that aren't imbued with meaning and that's not even the whole picture of the eight to nine hours spent every day at work by millions of people between 1.5 and 3 of them are spent on private activities we might call this wasted time not in the sense that it's not good it's totally fine by me but in the sense that it's not really the purpose of being at your job but as you might expect or are doing right now watching this video in which case nice workers spending that time on personal things are still pretending like they're being productive during these hours of work that aren't quite downtime but aren't quite work either it's ridiculous while part of this rightfully stolen time is a form of worker resistance the clear majority of it comes from having nothing to do but being stuck at work forced to keep up the appearance of click-clacking away or calling people who really don't want to talk to you just because that's what your boss expects you're not really free to do what you want but you're not really working either and when people are working not committing quote time theft and even bigger number of them are working on pointless mind-numbing tasks like moving data from one excel spreadsheet to another responding to emails or writing reports for someone to throw in a drawer and never look at busy work the point of all this is that there's a tremendous number of people who do nothing at all all day by their own admission but still have to do it there's a true army's worth of people wasting their lives behind computers standing up for long hours in the same two square feet working through the night and for what a great many of them just for the appearance of productivity or the appearance of luxury or the appearance of importance to make someone else feel good and pad their wallet just that little bit more by making sure everyone else knows how very important they are after all why would someone who's not important have all those underlings the cost of this economy is tremendous workers are being robbed of a life and we have a terrible response to this fact of modern society in liberal circles the idea is to redirect everybody to public works projects achieve full employment bringing money into people's hands so they can spend it on goods that recirculate that money into the economy and produce more trying to give quote dignity to jobs that are clearly just exploitation turned up to 11. on the right the idea is to pump more money into businesses on the foolish hope that they're going to just create more jobs or deregulate workers rights to the extreme so that they can fire everybody into the worst kind of poverty we can conjure up and pay the lucky few still employed next to nothing run the leanest operation possible uberize everything and sell the precarity of unstable low paid work without a safety net as choosing your own hours or being your own boss very few people are willing to embrace the most obvious conclusion a lot of this is unnecessary we're working too much if we distribute the workload and the benefits more evenly we can work a lot less politics isn't the only place where myopic conclusions about work are reached when we get out of the realm of explicitly political discourse and into the space we arbitrarily separate out as social the same tropes and attachment to work aren't hard to find hustle culture the rise and grind set whatever you want to call the ideology juice that gets a millionaire to spend his free time flipping garage sale toys for 15 bucks this modern phenomenon is another way in which this political attachment to the protestant work ethic gets absorbed into our everyday lives another way to try to attach meaning to exploitative work rather than limit labor to work that is already meaningful and practical instead shaping people's entire identity around turning idle time into another buck clearly we have an abundance of free time right there for the taking so many people wouldn't feel like their jobs were meaningless if there wasn't some truth to it so much time at work wouldn't be spent slacking if it couldn't be the truth is we've made tremendous progress in terms of productivity over the last 100 years automation and industrialization alone have taken some of the more laborious activities we used to call work out of human hands entirely but in over 80 years the 40-hour work week hasn't budged it's not laziness to ask for more time for leisure it's efficiency it's purely pragmatic we accomplish the same amount in a couple hours as it used to take a full day more on a monday than used to be possible with most of a week we automated away many of the things we didn't want to do so that we had the time to do the things that we do want to do spending that time we earned creating new jobs where we feel stuck at work for hours on end just because we have no good mechanism to distribute work and protect the unemployed means failing to realize the goals of automation it is wasting all that progress and yes it's undoubtedly not so black and white some of the industrialization and automation of the past century has allowed us to take on new work that does actually improve our quality of life but focusing exclusively on that to justify useless jobs with the sole purpose of padding some higher-ups wallet and satisfying the doctrine that well everybody has to work is ignoring the main way we could be improving our lives today making work a smaller part of it okay so what if we tried answering the question how close can we get to eliminating work in an unscientific way if we took the estimate of 25 of people having meaningless jobs at face value which in all fairness is a stretch we are eliminating 25 of our work hours work weeks go from 40 hours to 32 here in the us that's not bad and we don't have to accept the fact that these jobs are actually meaningless to want to reduce the time spent on them even if these jobs do have a purpose the feeling of meaninglessness they create clearly demonstrates that they are incredibly mentally damaging for the people working in them reducing those hours like we would with incredibly physically demanding jobs makes sense beyond a strict productivity maximization framework in another example what if we took that statistic about one and a half to three hours being completely wasted every day taking that into account you end up with somewhere between a 27 and a 33 hour work week that's also pretty good and if this seems like an absurd way to calculate how much time we're working i agree with you i shouldn't be plucking numbers out of this or that study doing simple divisions and calling it a day but this is no less absurd than how we determine work hours right now just a couple people at every company write your contract they set your working hours with the only limit being what the law says they can't go over pushing most industries right up to that 40 hour clock out and the only reason that number isn't any higher is thanks to decades of worker agitation revolts protests demonstrations other synonyms for people being angry clawing it from industry were it not for the gains of militant workers we'd still be punching in 12 hour days side by side with newly minted 12 year olds this is an absurd way to decide how much work needs to be done letting a couple guys make all their demands and only tempering them when society faces mass scale agitation and violence bubbling up in the streets is absurd it shouldn't get to this point the clearly better way to determine working time is to work for necessity and desire to make decisions in common about needs and allocations of resources to use governments organizations and democracy everywhere across the board to establish how much we work and how much we set aside for leisure to disentangle work from necessity so that we can really make these decisions without constantly fearing for our meals and fighting others for the scraps in short to include democracy in economic decisions to take into account our resources and desire to work without constantly fearing that every drop of sweat we don't shed means worrying about being taken over by the other sweatier worker at the other sweatier company to stop people who profiteer off the work of others by hogging everyone else's free time to not have a system that decides how much we work based on how much the guy at the top really wants a new watch missed birthdays funerals and every other life event in between be damned now this isn't about getting back to some primitive way of life idealized beyond the reality of tremendous hardship and ableism past societies encountered without the technological and social advancements we have today this is about taking stock of all the time going straight down the drain for no good reason other than keeping an unjust system chugging along this is about enjoying a life like we have now with more time to actually enjoy it if you spent a couple less hours at best buy would society be okay or autozone or making coffee or on the clock in your cubicle sure gdp could go down a bit but we already know how the gdp gets broken down between the rich and the poor anyway we wouldn't be maximizing profits and exhausting all the human labor power at our disposal but that is not the point of being human in the first place so long as we can reorganize our society towards one in which gdp dips aren't synonymous with austerity for the majority where we care more about the productive resources at our disposal than the numbers on a screen meant as a proxy of those resources we can dramatically change the nature of work and how much time we decide to put into it even without touching those structures we can still meaningfully cut our work time today burnout rates are through the roof more and more people are being pushed into holding multiple jobs people are desperate for leisure time but can't afford to take it we as human beings need time to do whatever we want for everyone art music reading going back to school watching tv shows playing sports cooking being with friends traveling volunteering farming doing literally nothing or even working just on something else it's within our reach our obsession with the ideology of work and the coercive model of decision-making holding our society captive are the only barriers to its achievement we can build a world where work is rewarding meaningful and fair i'm gonna be honest youtube has really been screwing me lately my adsense revenue is down to a third of what it was a couple months ago and subscribers aren't being notified of my uploads if you'd like to help support content like this remember to click the bell and select all to make sure you get a notification for each new upload and if you'd really like to help keep the lights on and you're able to chip in even a dollar a month consider becoming a patron on patreon every patron regardless of donation amount gets early access to every video plus access to our patrons only discord server i do a live q a for patrons once a month and it's always a lot of fun so if you'd like to join our growing community and help keep my channel afloat visit patreon.com second thought to become a patron thank you all so much for your support i really couldn't do it without you if you enjoyed this video consider dropping a like if you hated it a thumbs down you can check out my previous episodes by clicking the links on your screen thanks for watching and i'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Second Thought

Views: 2,252,360

Keywords: Second thought, second thought channel, facts about, facts you didn’t know, things you didn’t know, work, antiwork, anti-work, what if, what if no one worked, what if we stopped working, capitalism, socialism, labor, education, learning, educational videos, what would happen if no one worked, what if we just...stopped working

Id: 2i0RrGx_GrE

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022