I love videogames, but the few times of my life where I genuinely did just play games all day for weeks or months, I felt awful. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.

Maybe there is a future where video games optimize around giving life meaning once there is little work to be done.

Designing a game where the goal was to create strong friendships between players would be a pretty interesting task.

Definitely! I’ve spent a good amount of time volunteering with kids, teaching them to read and helping them with homework.

But demographics are against us on this one. Children and elderly people are very much in the minority on any population distribution plot. I have personally been in situations where the number of adult volunteers greatly outnumbered the kids they were there to work with. It’s funny and a bit awkward but you get through it, usually by shifting over to board games and other large group activities.

It would be a totally different story if everyone was looking to do this stuff. A hundred volunteers with half a dozen kids or elderly folks is just not going to work. Most will be sent home.

I think it’s the same story with any group who might benefit from this. It could work if we doubled or tripled the number of people available to help out, but 10x or 20x (or more) would be unworkable.

You might say that a large number of people already volunteer for this work, but a handful of hours per week. There’s no way we could absorb millions of new volunteers for 40 hours per week each, that would be excessive.

The last thing I would add is that there are tons of people who are simply unsuitable for this kind of care work. They’re naturally disagreeable people. They may also be restless and easily bored. They would much rather be outside working or messing around.

I think a large portion would choose video games over this...

For myself I both enjoy video games, and enjoyed/felt fulfilled by my time volunteering with an elementary school program to assist children who were having trouble learning to read at the same pace as their peers.

Instead if I don't punch in for the day I won't outlive the next paycheck.

The public park gets swept by a robot.

The robot gets repaired by a bigger robot.

The robots are designed by AI.

Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.

Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.

I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.

I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.

But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.

Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.

We haven’t done it yet only because we require people to do menial labor for shit wages so they don’t starve.

Heck, several local restraints have done away with most wait staff. You sit down and order via a web site.

That's one problem but not the most crucial one. There will be a bunch of people complaining that they do all the work while the freeloaders have it easy.

We can see that today as people don't want universal health care or social safety nets because these people feel the freeloaders are taking advantage of them.

Well, it certainly won't be possible as long as we tie people's housing, food, and health care to their ability to convince others they are useful.

Society currently sends the message: "If you aren't useful, you don't deserve housing, food, and health care". I think the existential angst is something we have to address as we transition into that post-work economic system, but I don't think it's actually possible to address until we make that transition.

There really needs to be some return to commons where ownership of certain things is just discarded so that everyone has the opportunity for self-reliance and self-actualization without needing to provide something of value for others. Community gardens, city parks, and city pools are like the fuzzy, myopic, "My memory's not as good as it used to be" view of that commons fitting into the modern world. The problem is that kind of participation doesn't provide a verifiable exploitable value the way that working under someone towards a set goal does, and our modern economic systems BSOD at even the thought.

In short, it's okay to not be useful just so long as you have something you want to do. Intellectual stimulation will always be a core need, but working for sustenance doesn't have to be.

My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they're children. Then that becomes non-viable. If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn't have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.

Also, the COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse at "nothing to do". Finding meaning is pretty hard for many people, especially if you can drown any form of boredom in endless consumption of shows, video games and social media.

Finding meaning is simply less important than having food on the table and a social circle, even if it’s just the watercooler talk with colleagues.

Not saying it’s impossible to find meaning outside of employment, but my observation and experience is that it’s not as easy as "stop working bullshit jobs and you will find meaning easily".

This completely discards the premise. We're talking about a hypothetical world where we don't need work from people, and where it would make very little sense to require meaningless work in exchange for having your needs met.

(We're also talking about the actual present world, where we don't need nearly as much work as we're forcing people to do, so the above should still be partially true, but it really isn't.)

The FIRE community have won the ruined game -- they're what you get when you remove the financial need, but keep the same psychological objective function, keep the same screwed-up sociality. They might be lounging by the pool but they're still stuck in the old mode of being. The ones who transcend the old workday-grind-mode are doing great. But that's non-trivial.

There was a really good article on this that I found recently ... Ah yes, here it is [1]. This is a thought-provoking take on a similar topic.

[1] https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/notes-on-privilege

looks like someone under influence :)

Presumably the weed smoker might occasionally leave home. Someone must pave the road he drives on. Someone must build the weed-smoker’s car.

For all those people doing things for the weed-smoker, someone must manage them. They will work in multiple enterprises. Someone must work to sell things between those different enterprises. This might seem inefficient, but humans have not figured out a better way to do it.

And all that explains exactly why, despite what people prattle on and on about with there being useless jobs, people do in fact remain employed and even as wasteful as that employment sometimes is, there is no better alternative on a social scale. Because when it all comes down to it, people want the benefits that modern society provides. That requires that people work. The alternative is living as a solitary mountain man. Not many people try that—and that, lo and behold, takes even more work.

Everybody today lives more like the aristocrats of old, we just don't notice it because it's common. If you got a special dress for your wedding, you're imitating what used to be a preposterous display of wealth for the elites. Your great-grandmother probably just got married in her nicest dress.

Meaning-making is harder when you've conquered the problem of mere survival, but not impossible.

Some aristocrats just played cards all day, or engaged in elaborate parties, or invested enormous effort into climbing the social hierarchy, or dicked around incompetently ordering the common people into stupid wars.

And some did philosophy, art, science, engineering, and exploration.

We have an absolutely enormous task ahead of us: the climate crisis. I think we could occupy ourselves with that for the next few centuries at minimum.

Nonsense. As this very article shows, many people find no meaning in their job. They feel dejected by working bullshit jobs every day and receiving shit pay in return. They do find meaning in things like raising a family, which ironically is something that is less and less attainable for the working man/woman, as the working class gets a lower share of wealth and things like housing skyrocket.

Your implied solution is to have the person sweep the floor by hand before the sweeping robot makes a second pass in half the time. How will that help the person feel any better? If the machines supass us, forcing people to do busy work will not make them feel better.

For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not strike out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?

What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.

How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!

The list goes on and on.

Graeber was an anthropologist. He recognizes that having a purpose is good for humans.

Among the examples he gives are people joining the military. Versus say becoming a corporate wage slave. For many, it's one of the few tracks available which offers "helping people", "serving my country", and other purposeful motivations. And the positive of having a purpose can outweigh all the negatives of serving (low pay, relocation, risks).

Another facet Graeber covers is the "service economy", including "knowledge workers". He challenges the idea that people need results oriented work to feel job satisfaction.

Alternately, Graeber suggests using the category "care work". All the things people and society needs to function well. Nurses, cops, soldiers, councilors, running a soup kitchen, volunteer work, etc.

Sadly, our current economic model devalues "service work". The focus on profits and productivity and efficiency is anathema to the work of people caring for other people.

Just to note the issue, I believe (but cannot prove) "productive work", where labor is part of making something, is orthogonal to "care work", and should be considered separately. Or at least be included thesis which is larger than a drive-by HN comment.

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Highest recommendation for

"The Utopia of Rules" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

Developing his Bullship Jobs thesis, Graeber tries to take on bureaucracy. Many critics get stuck on his prior criticisms of neoliberal economics. They're missing the point. Bureaucracy is (apparently?) a trait of modernism and (apparently?) central to all systems of government and economics.

I would LOVE continued exploration of the territory scouted by Graeber, Scott's Seeing Like a State, the Ehrenreich's professional middle class (PMC), and I'm sure many others. (Sorry, I still haven't read much about Marxism and its critics.)

It's so sad that Graeber passed.

There's a huge chasm where a leftist criticism of bureaucracy should be. Like the failed promise of the administrative state. Like how "the system" is dehumanizing when it should empower. Like if we understood it better, maybe we can minimize capitalism's dark pull on the state (panopticon, taylorism of all things, cost disease, accelerating credentialism). Etc, ad nauseum.

The closest (adjacent) work that I'm aware of is now being driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Stuff like permitting reform, better governance, scaling up the administrative state (necessary to roll out renewables at the scale required). All the PvP stuff where opposing concerns and incentives are in tension.

Administrative capacity is one of David Roberts' obsessions. His Volts podcast has terrific episodes tackling this and related concerns. https://volts.wtf

Please share anything you might think is relevant. TIA.