Wow. What a bullshit worthless take. The author should literally just die. ... or maybe if he was forced to hunt his own food, he wouldn't consider that work (I doubt he'd know how to).
The basics of hunting and growing to build larger villages started over 10,000 years ago. The growth of human civilization allowed people to specialize, growing individual skills and adding value to the whole.
If we lived in the Star Trek universe of near infinite cheap energy, replicators and zero scarcity, then yes we wouldn't need to work. But we don't live in that world. Idiots like this don't understand that at one time, you worked or you died. The modern world has made people weak. They don't know where their food comes from.
This article is a pure luxury belief, divorced from reality.
Maybe you should literally just die, or be less aggressive, your choice.
I think the author's point was that hunter gatherers worked less and enjoyed their work more. Did you actually read the whole thing or did you just get butthurt over the first few paragraphs?
I mean, if the world fell apart, I probably would die. I don't grow a lot of food. My bees only make so much honey. I would have to add value to whatever society arises.
I did read the article and the rest of it is just as vapid as the opening paragraphs. I also took note of the website it was on and that the article is from the 1990s.
I'm not being "aggressive." I'm not "butthurt." I think the article makes a lot of bad points. I think it's a terrible argument. Why are you taking this personally? Just because you shared it? Disagreements with the article are not an attack against you personally.
I stand by my original statement: this is a Luxury Belief, a belief that seems rosy for the well off, who do not understand its expense on the working class.
Did you mean "would" rather than "should"?
Also I hate that idea that you mustn't be offended at something that doesn't happen to you. It was a disgusting thing to say even if you "diDN't mEAn Me PeRsONaLLy".
It wasn't directed at you. You're doubling down. I'm guessing it's because your personal identity is tied up in this philosophy somehow? Maybe you hate your job?
I've taken two sabbaticals in my life:
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/leaving-full-time-jobs/
It really cleared the mind (and cost a lot of money), but I eventually came back to my career (since I couldn't make anything else work). It's not even about realizing the value of my work, so much as using work (my value to society) to gain money, to use on the more important things (friends and family).
...but you gotta work man. At the most primal level, you have to hunt .. and if you're advanced enough, you farm (which is a massive risk btw over hunting). If you don't work, you die. I don't understand why that's so difficult to understand? It's only in an opulent society do people even have the luxury of saying, "Why should I work?" because they have no notion of where their means of survival comes from.
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> Ought ≠ is...
With all due respect to Hume... Except where needs are concerned. Needs are, and needs ought to be met. It's an emergent property of nature that living beings ought to satisfy their needs in order to remain living.
PS. Here the etymological origin of the English word "should".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skuld
@toiletpaper @djsumdog Maybe you can say that you ought to satisfy your needs if you want to live in an instrumental sense. But it makes no sense to say that you ought to die if you can’t or don’t satisfy your needs. It’s just that you will (assuming nobody helps you).
Ought, suggest there being an obligation. It need not be a moral/ideological obligation to be empirically real. Living beings are subject to meet clear obligations in order to qualify as living. To claim otherwise is to deny there being such a thing as biological imperatives or there being sensory queues which compel associated behaviour.
Call it a form of Ethical Naturalism, but in my view the moral imperatives are emergent from the biological, which belies the guillotine as being some kind of impassible black and white distinction. We feel we ought to do things because of how they negatively impact our status of living, both as individuals and through enlightened self-interest (ie. reciprocity) as groups.
Human beings typically experience those obligations and are motivated to meet them via a pleasure/pain dynamic (eg. need/satisfaction). To dismiss that as being a real phenomenon is to pretend a significant fundamental element of biological systems and conscious experience doesn't exist. It's nonsensical.
There are no exceptions to this to my knowledge. Were it otherwise life and death would be utterly irrelevant distinctions, Life would have become extinct as quickly as it arose, or it would arise spontaneously out of random assemblages of materials. It's only by meeting certain intrinsic conditions (ie. obligations) that one is deemed living or not.
Even Hume to my knowledge didn't explicitly deny a connection between is and ought, but merely bemoaned the fact that no one in his experience seemed to provide any clear reasonable explanation of the transition from one to the other. I think that deficiency of reasoning was more the consequence of short-sightedness than objective fact.
Where I would draw a distinction is between need and desire, which people too often conflate. Need is a present phenomenon which is intrinsically a biological obligation (ie. ought to be satisfied). Desire is just a mental projection of pleasure into a space-time other than the here-now, and comes with no substantial material consequence if not satisfied. Consequently desire is not an obligation, but merely a figment of the imagination.