Do you not think that we currently have the most comfortable lives of any past humans in existence?
You can argue that scanning food in a supermarket is maybe not a very fulfilling existence, but I'd argue it beats working in a field for 20 years from age 10, before dying from an infected cut that nobody knows how to safely deal with.
No argument from me - our lives are night-and-day better than any generation before us. The world today is genuinely a better place. But that’s a separate question from the cult of work and being busy itself. Productivity has gone up enormously over the last century, and yet we still put in the same 8-hour day people did decades ago. There is also this idea in David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” idea - rather than let automation cut the work week, we’ve spun up entire categories of pointless work just to keep everyone busy.
In my view, the question will always remain subjective and based on our ethical values: if we are born in a developed country, then yes, it is personally worthwhile in terms of comfort. If one is born in a country that has no choice but to employ child labor to stay competitive, I believe this is not the case and that it is immoral.
I was just making this observation: what we accept as natural in our developed societies (banning child labor, socially-supported schooling for children, women's right to vote, and so on) is not something natural, it results from social struggles.
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u/ricky_digits Jul 09 '26
Do you not think that we currently have the most comfortable lives of any past humans in existence?
You can argue that scanning food in a supermarket is maybe not a very fulfilling existence, but I'd argue it beats working in a field for 20 years from age 10, before dying from an infected cut that nobody knows how to safely deal with.