Work (or, the 5 jobs I had before YouTube) | Philosophy Tube

i think i finally went and worked myself to death thanks to the pandemic people all over the globe are out of work and politicians are scrambling to get the economy back on track but don't you feel like there's something wrong with work even before the rona did you sense it like an invisible chain wrapping around you forged link by link and yard by yard it was like it was radioactive like i would take construction jobs it was like i was being poisoned yeah you know it was like it was like literally like i was getting radiation you feel like you're dying you're young and you're awake and you're like i'm dying this is killing me i think learning about work has the potential to cut across political divides in these polarized times because a lot of people feel and i want to explore why currently i have two full-time jobs i'm a professional actor and i also do whatever this is but i want to tell you about the five jobs i had before this one so put on your night cap sup your meager plate of gruel and allow me to play the ghost of christmas my first real job when i was still a teenager was doing data entry as an office temp for the nhs technically i worked for a private temp agency who were hired by the nhs but it was my job to take paper copies of patient records and type them into the computer i was usually hired during a busy period to clear a big stack of papers and then after a few weeks i'd be moved to a different department maybe in a different hospital thing is people only requested a temp when the records piled up too high for them to handle and the process of requesting an arranging one took a couple of weeks so by the time i got there they'd usually managed to clear the backlog themselves my boss was some agency dude on the phone who i'd never met nobody in the office had any authority over me and unless i really pissed them off it wasn't really worth the effort it would take to get rid of me the only time i never got tense was when i used the office microwave to make fish soup which in fairness was a dick move so most of the time i was paid to sit around doing literally nothing and you might think that sounds like a pretty sweet gig but it was miserable i still have to get up early put on a tie go into an office which was usually in a horrible cramped old building with the heating turned up way too high and those white styrofoam ceiling tiles only they'd all go yellow with age and sit there all day doing nothing when i could have been doing literally anything else i was never in an office long enough to get to know anyone or share in the banter i just drank lots of tea and read a book and did pointless mental exercises like figure out exactly how much i was being paid per second just to sit there you could probably put the whole nhs on one computer system and give the doctors those pad things from star trek and then there wouldn't be any paper records and i could have just made fish soup at home and it turns out that a lot of people feel that way about their jobs the anthropologist david graber was famous for his analysis of so-called [ __ ] jobs not just hard jobs those are something else and i've had a few of them too in order to qualify as a [ __ ] job the person doing it has to believe that there isn't really any point but they have to pretend like there is according to a 2015 poll by yougov 37 of british workers believe that their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world and maybe that's not surprising because the main products of the british economy since the thatcher years have been sarcasm and transphobia but it might not just be cruel britannia supposedly in the netherlands it's 40 we might want to take those numbers with a pinch of salt that poll asked 849 adults which is hardly every working person in britain but when graber wrote a little article about [ __ ] jobs it went viral and got translated into over a dozen languages he got a ton of emails from people being like yes my job is nonsense which suggests that it might have struck a chord i certainly found it relatable that data entry job was pure [ __ ] it was just a test of my mental stamina how long can you sit here pretending to do something before you give up and it's the pretending that's exhausting which is kind of a weird thing for me to say because now pretending is my job there's quite a lot of pretending that goes into making this show plus like i said i'm also an actor and that is literally just playing pretend diary of a workaday actor dear diary today i did a commercial for a product i've never used i had to pick up a jug of water and put it down in front of the camera 27 times then i had to throw a bottle into a bin 17 times missing in exactly the same way every time i've never used the product before i don't expect i ever will and i wasn't paid very much to do it all in all it was a great day when i'm acting though i'm pretending on my own terms my first job out of drama school was doing voice over for an accounting firm's internal corporate video and it was a blast i had a great day i didn't write the script or direct it but i had creative control over my performance and that counts for a lot [ __ ] jobs require you to pretend for your boss even if you know and they know that there's no point in you being there you still have to do it someone else owns your time so you just have to sit there and use it up on pointless tasks till the end of the day it grinds down your self-esteem until you just feel like crap but you can't admit that you can't say out loud this job sucks and i hate it because if you do you might lose it so you have to be like oh yeah i am really passionate about data entry i i just love getting data and entering it i j sometimes i do data entry on the weekends i'm just weird like that like i got a dog i named him data entry like what no i don't mind that the office smells of fish soup i love it this is closely connected to an idea you might have heard of called emotional labor it was thought up by a sociologist called ali hostchild in the 80s who famously did a study of delta airlines flight attendants they had to manage the emotions of their passengers always having a smile and a helpful attitude and a smile and a comforting presence and a smile and a smile and a smile and a smile and a smile technically speaking my data entry job didn't involve emotional labor even though i did have to pretend like i was working in order for it to count as emotional labor the job has to be public facing and the performance has to be something your boss can monetize the smile on that face is part of what keeps them coming back to delta it is literally what you are being paid for not all emotional labor is bad a nurse for instance might need to comfort a patient as part of their job and that's okay the question hostchild asks though is if delta airlines is paying you to smile in what sense is that smile really yours if your job is to produce an emotion and your boss owns everything you produce at work and that emotion isn't really yours it's theirs those flight attendants had to stuff their own feelings of boredom and resentment down inside and ignore them because it wasn't what they were being paid to experience and it really affected their feelings they felt like work robots in a similar way if you have to pretend like your job is meaningful when deep down you know that it's [ __ ] that's your employer laying claim to the lens through which you view reality to your values and what you think constitutes meaningful work so no wonder it's upsetting the opposite of a [ __ ] job is a hero job a job that absolutely has to be done no matter what if you're talking about a hero job you would better be praising it and the people doing it the two that spring to mind are the military and the police it's considered bad form to question those institutions even though if you ask any troop or cop they'll tell you the job involves a fair amount of [ __ ] here in the uk we're starting to see the idea of hero jobs used as a tool of workplace discipline when the pandemic started we were all encouraged to stand on our doorsteps and clap for the nhs there are big banners up in london now thanking our heroes but many of the people cheering on the nhs now were absolutely land-based in junior doctors when they went on strike in 2015. healthcare staff have for almost a decade pointed out that austerity and public sector pay freezes have left them dangerously overworked and underpaid but the government still won't give them a pay rise when teachers unions which is to say teachers expressed doubt about the safety of opening schools again the daily mail ran the headline let teachers be heroes if your job is a heroic one then anything that stops you doing it is villainous if you're a hero you're not a worker so you don't get control over your workplace you get a heroic cause to die for i could have gone on getting paid for nothing pretending to work in that office and eventually i could have started stealing nhs valor like yes i did data entry for the nhs please ladies there's only one but i couldn't handle it it wore me down with its sheer pointlessness so i quit as i soon discovered though the only thing worse than a [ __ ] job that does nothing is a [ __ ] job that hurts people this probably doesn't count as a job since i was technically never paid but a few years ago i went to live in new zealand for a few months over the summer i spent most of my savings on the flights so i thought i'll get a job for a few months make a bit of money and then travel around having fun but you know me i had to try and be clever about it i thought that if i got a job where i wore a tie i'd make more than all those suckers working in a bar or picking fruit so i signed up with a dodgy company selling door-to-door insurance i honestly couldn't tell you what kind of insurance we were supposed to be selling i think it was for some very specific financial thing but in any case the real business was getting people to sign over their contact details so we could sell them on that's why the most important bit of the form was actually the little box they had to take to say that we were legally allowed to do that which we were encouraged by the way to just gloss over like yeah that's nobody just go and take that there and sign that at the bottom yeah in blood if you can the work was on commission and i was told that i could make a few hundred dollars a day if i was good at it i was pretty good at improv and i liked talking to people so i thought what the hell they sent me out with one of their best guys to learn the ropes covering a fancy neighborhood in auckland and it sucked we only signed up two people all day the first was a guy who didn't speak english and the second was a heavily pregnant woman who clearly just wanted us to leave my colleague pressured her into signing the form and i honestly just felt ashamed of myself walking back alongside a motorway after a long day of trying to sell pointless insurance tired and dehydrated i wondered how many other people did [ __ ] jobs like this one why did they exist in the first place how come so many people were stuck doing useless things or unemployed completely when there's so much work in the world that needs to be done we've got a hell of a lot of climate related stuff to do feels like we could squeeze a few jobs out of that we need nurses we need teachers we need carers some people like to answer that question by saying that young people aren't doing those jobs they're all doing useless degrees in media studies and critical race theory and starting patreon campaigns and inventing five new genders when they should be doing stem either that or it's all these government regulations tying us all up in red tape bloody brussels bureaucrats telling us how bendy the bananas have to be i'm british i like my bananas straight hard and green like the hulk's dick but at the very least that can't be the full picture because [ __ ] proliferates even in so-called real jobs graber talks a lot about the increasing amount of [ __ ] the university lecturers have to do instead of actually teaching and the private sector isn't necessarily any better my job selling pretend insurance was completely private and completely pointless so why do these jobs exist now in fairness maybe i thought that was a [ __ ] job but i'm not a big brain finance genius maybe we were really helping those people maybe there's some dude in new zealand now who's like ah the global economy seems to have collapsed good thing i bought all that insurance for this exact situation maybe you don't know how your job fits into the whole company but you must be doing something useful otherwise why would the people at the top have paid to hire you graber's thought of that though he says yeah if your boss ever came to believe that your job is completely useless you'd probably be sacked so when the boss comes around you'll pretend like you're working on something really important and when your boss's boss comes around your boss is going to pretend as well so the higher up the organization you get the less of a clue you're gonna have about what everyone below you is actually doing all things he also says that if you tell mid-level management types that a lot of the people under them don't really need to be there they get hostile [ __ ] jobs are often just there as a status symbol if you've got people working under you then that means you're important you're the head of the team and that feels good even if you and the team just take turns microwaving fish soup all day another reason might be that [ __ ] helps us avoid doing things that we don't really want to do [ __ ] gives a false impression it ticks a box so somebody has their ass covered but it's not actually supposed to change the world for example in the uk the equality act of 2010 gives every public body a legal duty to promote equality the way that's often cashed out is an organization like say a university will publish a document talking about their goals and their policies and their values but scholar sarah ahmed has pointed out that a lot of organizations like universities will publish say a racial equality action plan but then not actually do anything to combat racism they'd be like we are committed to to fighting racism and that's why we've commissioned a commission even as we continue concentrating power and money in the hands of white people and people can tell they can tell when you don't really mean it some of those people then go this racism stuff is all a lot of box you virtue signaling snowflakes they have correctly identified a problem of [ __ ] but they haven't realized that the [ __ ] work is being done specifically to hide the actual problem which is very real and i bet if you look around you'll find people whose job it is to produce documents like that whether about racial equality or climate policy or health and safety rules documents that are there just to exist just to look like they're doing something documents become forms of institutional performance there are ways in which universities perform an image of themselves and there are also ways in which universities perform in the sense of doing well if we're committed to anti-racism and we've said that we are then how can we be racist speaking of pointless documents i didn't think that selling door-to-door insurance was really my calling in life it wasn't meaningfully impacting the world in fact it was making the world worse and i didn't want to lie to people i did that one day's training and then i never went back instead i got a job doing something much more humiliating having failed to find a clever way around it i took a job in a bar and it was okay i chose that bar in particular because i fancied myself a stand-up comedian at the time and they let me tell jokes on little stage in the corner it did not go well because i was 19 and i was not funny and then after my set i had to put on my work shirt and clear the glasses of the people in front of whom i had just bombed so that was humiliating the bar was owned by a guy called bruno and he paid me the new zealand minimum wage which back then was about fifteen dollars an hour the cost of a pint in that pub was about eight or nine dollars so as i was working i got to thinking by pouring just four pints i've made bruno double what it cost to hire me for the whole hour and in an hour i can pour 50 100 more pints if there's a rush on so he must be raking it in although actually that's not all profit because he's got to pay for the beer and the cleaning and the electricity and the food and stuff but still he must be doing pretty well and actually the only way that he gets money to pay for any of that stuff is because i'm here doing the work behind the bar and then the customer was like can i have my plan or not and i was like yeah sorry if bruno didn't come in as he frequently didn't we'd have just kept going if the bar staff don't come in no money gets made as we've seen with the pandemic ceos hedge fund managers landlords they can all stop working and it's basically fine if supermarket assistants stop working or bus drivers or cleaners then everything falls apart the profit doesn't come from the people at the top it comes from the people at the bottom that job working in the pub was the first time it really struck me that there's a world of difference between somebody who works to produce something like a pint or a chair or a microwave or a delicious kind of fish soup and the person who owns and then sells it i had heard the term working class before but that was the first time it really clicked like a lot of people i thought class just had something to do with how much money you had or where you went to school or especially in the uk what sort of an accent you've got but working there i was like that stuff's mainly just aesthetic isn't it the real divide is between people who get money by owning stuff like bruno does and people who don't own anything so all they have is their ability to work the image i had in my head of a working class job was like a man in a factory but that's just because historically men working in factories were easier to organize into unions because they were already in one place even in marx's time there weren't actually that many people doing factory jobs compared to the number of boot polishers cab drivers nurses teachers sex workers and so on a lot of those jobs were historically done by women or people of color and so they tended to just get overlooked and they still are i've heard people say today that we are all middle class now because the factory jobs have gone overseas as if our uber drivers and baristas and cleaners are all just invisible speaking of people who usually got overlooked my co-workers were a pretty chill bunch especially this one guy javier who was the hardest working person i've ever met he cleaned and stacked those glasses so fast it was a blur it was like watching someone do dragon ball z on crockery he was from brazil i think and he was working a minimum wage job in new zealand to send money back to his family i didn't ask how he ended up in that situation but i felt kind of sorry for him because the way the managers and the customers looked at him and spoke to him compared to me a white person with an english accent was really obvious what i came to realize is that he had to work that hard in order to be allowed to stay and yet cruelly he would never be recognized for his hard work the promise is that if you work hard you can get ahead but in javier's case that just wasn't going to happen there wasn't a specific rule barring him from a promotion or a raise but he just obviously wasn't gonna get one no matter how hard he worked he was gonna stay working class maybe for the rest of his life and presumably his children would too which would affect their chances of being in the right room with the right people or getting the right education to escape the poverty trap and this isn't me disparaging him or calling him a victim or anything on the contrary he was a legend and a damn good classy but undoubtedly he was forced unfairly to live that way because he wasn't white so that bruno could make money off him and bruno wasn't a bad guy he was actually kind of nice on my last night working there a female customer sexually assaulted me in a corridor as he happened to be walking past and he actually told her off on my behalf which was cool of him but that was just the way the place ran me and javier were on the same team because we had nothing to celebrate our labour even though we were from really different backgrounds different countries even and bruno he just wasn't on our side after my adventures in new zealand i came back to the uk i got a first class degree in philosophy from one of the best universities in the world and then i moved back to my hometown and got a job in a pub because economy should have done stem instead of inventing all those extra genders the manager who i'll call dave was about seven feet tall jacked and very accustomed to getting his own way you know one of those managers who likes to think that he's one of the gang but has no idea how intimidating he actually is the chef was one of the biggest [ __ ] i have ever met in my life when talking to the female staff members he had two modes sexual harassment or shouting most shifts he managed to make someone cry one time me and some of the other staff complained but dave couldn't fire him because then we'd have to close down for a couple of days and get another chef and get all the menus reprinted by the way pro tip if you ever go to an english pub for food either get a burger or fish and chips because they're just about the only things that are actually cooked on the premises the sunday roast arrived pre-cooked on friday night and was heated up in the microwave the owner of the place who i'll call ebenezer scrooge was also an [ __ ] he would come by maybe once a week wave to the regulars pull a couple of pints then find some excuse to steal the contents of the tip jar he also had a security camera specifically to watch the staff on the till and that got me thinking if he wanted to steal the tips there was nothing any of us could do he had a camera watching us but we didn't have a camera watching him he kept a record of every transaction to make sure we didn't steal from him but when he gave us our paychecks at the end of the month yeah we just had to trust that it was right we didn't want to work with the chef but we had to because scrooge who didn't have to work with him said that we did when dave gave us our shifts we just had to trust that he hadn't booked us for illegally long working hours the onus was on us to check the law and to try and persuade him to change it if he had i used to dread going into work in that place the powerlessness made me feel humiliated less than a human being i felt sorry for my co-workers i felt sorry for anyone who had to do a job like that i even felt a little bit sorry for dave who was ostensibly on our side but had been turned into a lap dog for a man who would surely sack him the second he stopped being profitable i felt sorry for the millions of people for whom that job would have been a godsend but who would be left to die in the streets because the scrooges of the world couldn't find a way to squeeze money out of them over time i stopped feeling sorry for anyone and i just resented everybody in there including myself both for landing in the job and for not being tough enough to hack it when i looked at the tv and i saw people talking about freedom and democracy and choices i got angry because i felt it was just a bad joke work makes a mockery of freedom the official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states these victims obey orders or else no matter how arbitrary the authorities keep them under regular surveillance state bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life the officials who push them around are answerable only to higher ups public or private either way dissent and disobedience are punished informers report regularly to the authorities all this is supposed to be a very bad thing and so it is although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace but i don't like to be negative i thought that before i painted my face in joker makeup and emptied the cash register i should try and think about it from scrooge's position wasn't he doing me a favor by giving me a job hell didn't i literally walk in there and ask for one wasn't i technically free to leave at any time was it possible that i resented him more for his success than the control he had over me would i feel better if i just worked really hard and then i'd be able to go home at the end of the day feeling proud that i had made the customers really happy what if i try to look at the whole situation from the point of view of a job creator hola amigos i have a proposition for you i represent the interests of an investment fund who represent a bank who represent another bank who represent a foreign government who pretend to represent their people but actually represent the interests of an american hotel chain and we would like to build a luxury five-star resort on cuba where you live the hotel will have a pool a spa a gym a private strip of beach 300 suites four restaurants and bars daycare facilities and a business center for corporate event higher we will create upwards of 500 jobs and attract international customers to your island relations between the united states and cuba haven't always been cordial but castro's been dead for a few years let's face it cuba could probably use some extra cash you are an island you don't have a lot of natural resources but it's a beautiful country with pristine waters and scuba diving and a fascinating history with our help you could become a hot tourist destination guests will come they'll stay in the hotel they'll spend money in the local businesses which makes cubans rich so everybody wins excuse me nihao chenchoncheng yes i'm talking with the cubans now we're very excited to build this hotel for you it's my boss would you just give me two minutes yes yes i told him it would attract lots of wealthy international tourists to the island no no of course not now no no the resort is designed to keep the guests inside by providing everything that they need on site i mean they might go into town to buy a souvenir or something but they'll spend most of their time by the pool or in the bars or the restaurants and those are all owned by you yes it is quite clever isn't it well look at minimum wage jobs out of it keeps them out of trouble uh well if you don't want to be seen doing business in cuba then that's not a problem we can set up a shell company in uh panama or the canary islands or somewhere where the tax man can't get his grubby fingers and uh then the shell company will officially own the hotel but you'll own the shell company so the profits will all go to you and that way if there's a problem with the working conditions or there's an accident or something it doesn't get back to you yes well we'll have to employ some people in the shale company to uh do [ __ ] jobs creating documents that sort of thing to make sure it seems legit yes creating jobs that's what it's all about all right zijan give my regards to the general secretary sorry about that that was my employer he's very keen to help your country become delicious on the international stage i i mean competitive on the international stage what's that why does cuba need foreign investment well be because you're poor and i'm sure that's just bad luck i'm sure that nobody's deliberately kept you poor by imposing trade sanctions on you at the behest of american oil companies don't google it what's that you say that you want to come and work in my country instead of doing a minimum wage job there no no no no i'm afraid that won't be possible unless you have what we in english call a a visa comprende see you'll just have to stay in your own country and work very hard to make it better by working for us what's that you say that this is imperialism you say that we're foreign dogs you say you'd rather own the hotel yourselves well next you'll be saying that you want to own your own country's natural resources and make sure the money from them goes to benefit the people of your country rather than the owners of foreign capital oh god one moment please good morning vice president oh madam vice president indeed i'll get straight to the point how do you feel about a war with cuba i did try but working in that pub it kind of felt like the whole enterprise was more about keeping me under control than putting money in my pocket and i don't think that was just because scrooge was an [ __ ] he could have been really nice bruno was but that wouldn't have made a difference to the amount of control he had over me consider another rich person and a famously nice guy andrew carnegie carnegie was a scottish immigrant to the united states who eventually became the richest man in the country by today's standards he was a multi-billionaire and he was also fun fact the real life inspiration for the character of scrooge mcduck i'm not making that up carnegie wrote an essay in 1889 called the gospel of wealth which is one of the most influential bits of philosophy i think i've ever read in my life i've been hearing these arguments almost verbatim since i was born the idea that the best way to help poor people is to give them a job as a ladder out of poverty that's carnegie the idea that socialists are just lazy and they resent rich people for their success that's carnegie the idea that wealth is created not by labor but by the organization and intelligence of the people at the top that's carnegie the idea that giving aid directly to the poor will make them dependent and hurt them more in the long run that's carnegie skiing down a mountain of gold coins and making christmas trees out of dollar bills okay apparently that one was actually scrooge mcduck but if carnegie had had that much gold i bet you he would have tried it a lot of these ideas he pinched from a philosopher called herbert spencer who i talked about in my video on charles darwin but carnegie updated them he brought them back and more importantly he made them seem like kindness because by most accounts he was a pretty nice guy he gave away billions of dollars in today's money and he encouraged rich people to give their wealth away for the public good rather than hoard it carnegie hall in new york city is named after him because he paid for it but here's the kicker who gets to decide what the public good is well andrew carnegie does of course he decided that the people of new york would benefit from a big fancy concert hall and undoubtedly many of them have but he didn't go to the people and say hey i've got a few spare million dollars what do you need because that would have put them in control maybe they could have voted on what to do with that money and maybe they would have voted to build a consul hall maybe they wouldn't maybe they'd have said we want you to pay your taxes andrew carnegie we want to take that money and spend it on housing and food so then we can control our own lives and then maybe we wouldn't have to work for you anymore you charming yet insidious scottish duck carnegie described himself as an agent of the poor but an agent is somebody who works on your behalf and who you can recall if you want to that's not what he's describing what he's describing is called technocracy a system of government in which the most competent people have control but they are also the people who decide what competent means and therefore in my opinion that is a dictatorship with brunch i don't care if you call it carnegie hall or the bezos academy or the gates foundation i don't want presents from rich people i want control over my own life when i play fallout new vegas i kill mr house every goddamn time and working in that pub i didn't feel like any of us were in control except scrooge there was a guy who used to come in every day as soon as we opened and he would order a pint of john smith's the cheapest tail we had and then he'd order another one and another one and another one all day counting out his change on the bar he was an alcoholic and he was killing himself he was killing himself with john smith's but i had to serve him because scrooge said i did i remember the night that i decided to quit it was late and my shift was supposed to have ended but scrooge had a policy of never asking the regulars to leave even if they stayed past closing there was this one regular eddie who was in there drinking with his girlfriend and i'd spoken to them a couple of times before so i guess that they felt comfortable enough to start saying some incredibly racist [ __ ] for context the town that i grew up in was very racially segregated there were some people of color living there but in the pub all the staff were white all the regulars were white i think i'd seen a person of color in there maybe twice so eddie starts telling me about how there's too many black people in liverpool dave is standing 10 feet away he can hear this but he doesn't say anything so i push back a little bit i'm like come on man what do you mean too many like black people can live wherever they want dude liverpool used to be a slave port for god's sake the wealth stone from black people practically built that town but he won't hear any of it and his girlfriend starts joining in and she says she won't go to liverpool because black men are all rapists she's seen it on the news and at this point i'd i don't know what the hell to say like it's late and i'm tired and i'm actually a little insulted that they think that they can share this garbage with me and like they think i'll be on their side with it so i say to him eddie unless he's ordering a drink never speak to me again in your life dave calls me over and he tells me off for speaking to the regulars like that i decided then and there that i had to take this youtube gig full time i still have to see people say a lot of awful sh but at least when they do it in my comment section i can kick them out i got a job in a cafe just across the road that was trying to transform itself into a nighttime venue for live music it was a tiny place only about 50 covers and the management didn't really know what they were doing which was great because it meant they were pretty relaxed i stood behind the till selling bottles of beer and occasionally taking food to the tables the crowd were mainly older folks just looking for a relaxed evening the musicians were all local folk artists from northumberland who played acoustic sets so it was just a really relaxed atmosphere most of the time i just stand there or lean on the backboard because the manager was chill and he'd let you do that and then he'd come by and he'd be like do you want to be here and i'd be like yeah all right so i just have a beer and listen to the music and help the customers when they needed it the philosopher bertrand russell says that the way we currently think about work is really wasteful not just a waste of resources although to be clear having a bunch of people doing jobs that don't need to be done is really bad for the climate and one of the best things we could do would be to stop but also a waste of people he says that with the aid of modern technic we could produce the things that humanity needs to survive in far fewer hours than we currently work just imagine what you could do if you worked four hours a day instead of eight well let's be honest probably more than eight you could write the next great novel or paint a beautiful painting or come up with a brilliant idea no one's thought of how many einsteins or beyonce's or michelangelo's or javiers are mopping floors right now in office buildings where other people get paid obscene amounts to do stuff that doesn't even need to be done or maybe you wouldn't do any of that stuff maybe you just play video games and rest more deeply than you've ever rested in your life and then after a few months the rest i bet you get bored and you try and do something but the point is you'd be in control of your own life you could make fish soup and stink up your flat whenever you want one thing graber thinks might help is universal basic income or ubi that's where people get paid and that's it you just get paid every month an amount of money that's enough to live on but not like obscene amounts and then if you want more money you can choose to get a job one thing people often say against this is that nobody would become a supermarket assistant or a toilet cleaner if they didn't have to and that's always seemed kind of weird to me that seems like a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that the jobs that really need to be done don't get paid enough to make them worth doing and that a lot of the economy actually requires coercion in order to work i'm like well it's a good thing i bought all this joker makeup at the moment there is an at best indirect relationship between what humanity wants and needs and what most people spend most of their time doing so why not give everyone a choice about whether or not they want a job and let the free market decide which jobs actually need to be done unless all that stuff about choices and free markets is just [ __ ] designed to keep you working i won't get into the details of how ubi might work today because i've found that when i discuss an actual policy idea in a video people tend to think the video is essentially about arguing for that policy and then a bunch of earnest well-meaning people make reply videos to me that i i'm afraid i don't watch in which they presumably own me with facts and logic but i'm not trying to write policy what i do hope i've done is demystify the world of work a little bit and maybe shown you that people like javier from different countries who speak different languages even can be on the same team as you at the very least if you think that your job is a waste of time and human potential then you are not alone my friend the cafe where i had my last pre-youtube job is now closed down probably because they paid a bunch of people to stand around drinking free beer but by the time it did i was ready to start auditioning for professional drama schools and turning youtube into something that actually makes a little bit of money this job the one that i'm doing right now is by far the hardest i've ever had in terms of hours that it takes and that's not even getting into stuff like stalkers and death threats that make it way harder than it should be but i love it because i do feel like it makes a bit of a difference and i'm in control of it well i'm mostly in control of it i don't agree that working is always good if work makes you miserable and what you're working on is pointless i don't agree that creating jobs is always helpful i do think that the world would be happier if we all worked a little bit less and so now i am going to take my own advice i am going to take december off philosophy tube will return in early 2021 with a new look if you celebrate christmas then i hope that you keep christmas well and in the words of charles dickens this video was sponsored by skillshare dear diary today i made a video that was sponsored by skillshare they're an online learning community for creatives like me with thousands of classes on all sorts of different topics i learned how to animate titles into my youtube videos from a little class called the ultimate guide to kinetic type in after effects toured by a designer called jake bartlett it was super friendly for a beginner like me and because the lessons are short i fitted in around the rest of my schedule it's less than 10 a month with an annual subscription but the first 1 000 people to use the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership yes uh foreign all right oh oh machine advances

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 1,266,159

Keywords: work, jobs, employment, economy, philosophy, david graeber, bullshit jobs, karl marx, capitalism, anarchism

Id: c_X-812q_Jc

Length: 46min 56sec (2816 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Evelyn701]

Next time I need to introduce someone to Marxism, I'm using this video and the Video Game Industry one. It's a perfect modernized explanation.

[u/Cranyx]

This is one of his best videos imo. Lately I feel like a lot of his (and similarly Contrapoints) have leaned more towards the AESTHETIC than substantive content, but this was a fantastic return to form.

[u/JayMickey]

Pretty good video overall. The bit near the end about people that make reply videos to him that he doesn't watch seems like it might be at Unlearning Economics video responding to his Housing video. ^{or maybe it's not and I'm just over thinking it.}

Weirdly enough, this video feels quite short despite being 46 minutes long. I guess time really does fly when you're having fun.

[u/ThereIsBearCum]

ThougtSlime voiced some of the quotes, and he has also done a few "jobs I had before youtube" videos, wonder if that link was intentional.

[u/kingjulian85]

I really appreciate when we get these very simple, back-to-basics videos. They're fun to watch for brushing up on your thinking (and simply because Olly is a joy to watch and listen to) and they're a nice resource for friends who might be sympathetic toward leftism but don't have the categories or language for the core ideas yet. It's always going to be this kind of stuff that helps take people from one step to the next.

[u/GarethPW]

Vampire Olly is hot.

[u/[deleted]]

That bit about organizations stating their progressive goals as a means of promoting their image of themselves made me realize how similar these organizations are to a person who posts a black square in solidarity, or shares climate change awareness on their stories, but don't actually do shit

[u/big_mack_truck]

Hey /u/RealPhilosophyTube, how tall are you? I've always wondered after seeing a video of you at some convention where you towered over everyone else.

[u/jerseygunz]

Loved the subtle/not subtle vampire on the phone bit. Totally explaining why most of these pointless jobs exist in the first place