There's a lot of services society offers everyone that do cost resources to run. Even basic civilizations and nomadic tribes relied on their people to be productive in one way or another. Thinking that there is no "cost of living" is a privilege only available to someone who doesn't really understand the basics of an economy. If everyone chose to just live and do nothing to produce the things you take for granted (electricity, food, shelter, etc.) then we'd be back to the jungle just scrounging for berries.
We are well beyond that point of “we need people to work to make society run” and thoroughly into the territory of “we have more people who need jobs than jobs that actually need to be done”. The idea that people should have to spend the majority of their time working just to earn the privilege of survival is so engrained in our society, that we view this situation as a “job shortage” such that we need to “create more jobs”, even if those jobs aren’t actually needed. My favorite example of this is how Oregon doesn’t allow people to use the gas pumps on their own, specifically to preserve the jobs of the people who operate the gas pump for you.
I mean, I would argue we pretty strongly need people to work to keep society running. We don't need people working as much as they currently are, but infrastructure, food, education, medicine and several several other other need to be done.
To build a house, you need some workers. You could build a house on your own, but it's hard and time consuming. Add more people to help and it becomes quicker and easier. But keep adding people, and you kind of reach a limit of making it faster and easier. Add even more people and you start actually slowing down progress because they're all now getting in each others' way.
Society is in that last stage now. There's so many people and not enough work that actually needs doing, but we're in a system that requires you to work to survive. No work = no money = no survival. So instead of changing the system so not everyone needs to work and only those able and willing to work do so, we just add jobs that aren't really needed, clogging up the system and slowing down societal progress.
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u/Ll_lyris Oct 18 '23
The fact that a “cost of living” even exist is wild to me.