There are a large fraction of Americans who don’t have that leisure though. They’re forced to work long and arduous hours at meaningless jobs for low wages, because they can’t survive otherwise. Hard to see yourself as someone who is valued beyond their economic output in those cases.

This echoes my favourite passage from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:

“If any action of yours, then, does not have direct or indirect relation to the social end, it pulls your life apart and destroys its unity.”

That said, keeping yourself mentally healthy is just as important, to the social end.

I'm in my late 20s and used to believe something like this, but I've become quite cynical. I think that modern work is just about capturing wealth and passing it onto the wealthy, so they can have more control over their time and can enjoy the fruits of our labours.

I think people conflate the above with "wanting to contribute to society and benefit others" because you're not usually willing to pay for things that don't benefit you. However we all know there's a massive section of capitalism that's built on manipulating people to buy things they don't need or will actually do them harm, and there's also a huge section that benefits from desperation and will use it's political weight to increase said desperation if possible.

Of course in principle it's possible to have a company that balances a healthy profit with a useful and beneficial product, but in practice a vast majority of companies will abuse its customers and employees as much as legally permissible if it increases the incomes of the upper echelons. At least that's my view.

So nowadays I just do my job to get my stagnant wage, so that I can pay my extortionate rent.

> Of course in principle it's possible to have a company that balances a healthy profit with a useful and beneficial product, but in practice a vast majority of companies will abuse its customers and employees as much as legally permissible if it increases the incomes of the upper echelons. At least that's my view.

Survival of the fittest. Competition on the market guarantees that, over time, the companies that do useful things and balance that with profits and employee needs will die off, while companies good at maximizing revenue by any means necessary will flourish.

That's my cynical realization. Both too little and too much competition on the market is poison.

> I think that modern work is just about capturing wealth and passing it onto the wealthy, so they can have more control over their time and can enjoy the fruits of our labours.

wether or not that is a concious goal. it defintiely seems the result that is happening in our current culture

sometimes i think of it like a horse and a jockey, somehow the horse was acclimated to allowing someone to ride on its back, tell it where to go, and how fast to run... in return the horse gets a stable, some food and a trough... but even if the horse is compensated for its "work" its still a releationsnip of "rider" and "rode on"