suspected-spinozist:

My two cents on laziness, work & the robots taking our jobs: 

The idea that economically productive labor is a major source of personal fulfillment is extremely historically contingent. In the ancient world, business was something sordid and best avoided, in contrast to civic duty or otium in the positive sense, intellectually and socially productive leisure. Looking east a bit, the rabbis of the Talmud had day jobs, but there’s a reason they’re hardly ever mentioned – labor is praiseworthy only insofar as it allowed them to support themselves while they got on with their real work.

I can’t really speak to acedia and the sin of sloth in the Christian context. I do get the sense that productivity as a moral concern emerges at some point in the middle ages; certainly the positive idea of leisure never lost hold in aristocratic circles. Even then, I don’t think anyone was concerned with the effect of indolence on quality of life rather than a mark of bad character, it’s not like personal fulfillment really existed as a concept. I do know the Renaissance is generally more positive about the concept of leisure. The Reformation happens, early capitalism, I’m sure we’ve all read Max Weber on the Protestant Work ethic. 

Certainly the elevation of labor as something honorable rather than shameful has a lot to do with class politics going back to at least the 18th century and probably earlier. In the American context, there’s some really interesting work by Judith Shklar on the role of hard work in formulating a national civic identity, which she reads as a reaction to the perceived thread of aristocratic idleness with a strong racialized component rather than a secularized Protestantism. 

The point of all this isn’t to give a comprehensive history of the concept of work. I only want to point out that attitudes towards the value of labor  are all over the place, even in the West and even in recent history. Whole societies have gotten by just fine on the assumption that work is terrible and everyone should do as little of it as possible. The claim that idleness is psychologically unhealthy is in particular really new, most historical arguments in that vain focus much much more on idleness as a sign of moral corruption, or as dereliction of duty to provide for one’s family or contribute to society – obviously irrelevant in the post-scarcity society we’re positing. 

I think the absence of work is often unhealthy for Americans – and to a lesser extent, everyone in broadly Christian-inflected Western culture – because we live in a society that values economic productivity to an extreme and historically unusual extent. Most people are receptive to their culture and feel like failures when they fail to achieve the things they’re conditioned to believe are important. 

Personally, I believe our obsession with work is a form of societal stockholm syndrome. Most jobs exist on a spectrum of soul-crushing to merely frustrating and undignified in ways it’s possible to ignore. I don’t think the problem here is unique to capitalism, either. The historical socialist glorification of work makes sense in context, and people do feel better about performing backbreaking manual labor if they feel they have control over the process and a stake in the cause, but that’s obviously as stopgap measure because – surprise – backbreaking manual labor is terrible. It’s true that most people alive today really do value being able to work and provide for their families, it’s also true that men in honor cultures valued their reputation enough to die for it. Some values are objectively dumb. 

Less flippantly, a lot of what goes wrong with the world can be reduced to cultural values failing to track actual sources of human happiness. Attitudes towards work track underlying economic and social conditions. A real post-scarcity society would be a golden opportunity for cultural engineering. Let’s recognize the importance of leisure! Roman culture was incredibly fucked up in almost every possible way, but I do think they got this one right – real intellectual and creative accomplishments are only possible with space to rest and room to breathe. Most people are better and happier moving at their own pace. 

This doesn’t mean that we should just make room to be lazy. I’m more optimistic than most people that, given resources and a safety net and a complete lack of stigma, most people would use their leisure positively (even if their activities don’t contribute much to society at large). Even so, I think society as a whole would benefit from structures that reward creative efforts (as well as the fulfillment of unpleasant but necessary duties) with respect and acclaim. 

The real challenge – and the real reason not to recreate an aristocratic culture – is to avoid forming social systems that incentivize endless, exhausting, zero-sum status seeking. People are just as capable of working themselves ragged for social position as for money. I’m not sure how to solve this one.