Even the punishment has become more moral and more evenly applied to all to of course avoid discrimination. You are subject to mental assault by all others and even by yourself when you do not follow the game of the wage slave. A violent death? A violent death would be a needle prick relative to the 60 years you are expected to slowly break yourself in half.

Indeed, the lack of freedom is but one facet, but honestly, while we have become more free have we really gained anything in terms of long term ability to do what we actually desire or be our own masters?

So you are saying it is impossible to escape wage slavery.

It is impossible to live in modern society as people expect to without holding a job, but it is not impossible to live without holding a job.

Not everybody has this amazing idea they are absolutely passionate about and prioritize above everything else.

I just started working in a corporate environment. I'm the best at what I do. I work beyond hours. I also have a life. I can choose to go home and have a four hour game of thrones session, or I can invest my time into personal interests and developing myself.

It's up to the individual entirely. We live in a world where we are capable of forging our own path.

There is no lack of freedom, there is simply too much of it.

> while we have become more free have we really gained anything in terms of long term ability to do what we actually desire or be our own masters?

YES. You have all the resources at your fingertips. Institutions, counselling, meetups for specific interests, the INTERNET where you can communicate with anybody in a millisecond.

It's up to you what you do with these powers. Will you be complacent, or will you use them to your advantage? It's sad that most people use our new found technological superpowers to bore themselves instead of learn about our beautiful planet and all it has to offer.

I'm in the middle of making monumental changes in my life, and if I had helped ingrain a lesson or mindset into another person as much as your outlook helped me, I would've liked to know.

So is capitalism. So is the corporate hierarchy. Heck, the society we live in right now is man-made. Why does that matter as an evaluation criteria?

Yes, food and shelter have always required work. The difference is that they have required work by the person for the person. Or by the person for their family. Or by the person for their tribe. This meant that you worked only as much was actually needed - i.e. subsistence - and no more.

That is a very different set up than what we have now. The cost of healthcare alone makes subsistence living impossible.

What? It's perfectly possible to receive "subsistence healthcare" in today's society--just never go to the doctor or take any medicine. If you want to splurge, do some research online, and you'll gain knowledge leagues ahead of "subsistence" medicine.

What I meant by "subsistence living" is working enough to cover the essentials, and no more. These essentials include food, water, shelter, and healthcare.

The problem is the last one: it is astronomically expensive, which means that subsistence living still means working a ridiculous amount of hours.

So if you want a better standard of living than Caesar or Charlemagne or Washington could have dreamed of, you have to work, yes. Is that shocking or unreasonable? I doubt the men I just named would have thought so.

Lets just talk food - the work required to produce enough food to feed 1 person is astronomical and completely inefficient if everyone did it for themselves. In order to reach some efficiency (i mean, you aren't gonna just eat raw wheat right?!), there must be specialisation. Which means that if you were to really live alone, you'd have to aquire all the skills and all the equipment in order to produce food.

You can substitute food for anything else, and the story is the same.

The world as it is now, is pretty m uch the result of specialization over the millenia, your job (if you have one, or your business) is in fact some form of specialization, and it is this specialization that allows each and every one to eat, because they contributed back something they specalized in.

I'm a dual Polish/US citizen. Poland has better life expectancy according to the CIA Factbook than the US does. Poland had an average income of 240usd per year as recently as 1989. It's about $20k today. Still can provide better life expectancy than the US. Shame.

I'm a Swedish/Australian dual-citizen, and although both countries have higher costs of goods, it seems a most reasonable price to pay to have functioning public health care.

No. Subsistence living is entirely possible - there are millions of people doing just that somewhere in backwoods wherever, across a multitude of political systems and states, all over the world.

What you want as "subsistence living" is not its definition. What you're talking about is "how much labor cost it requires to maintain your current lifestyle in this current political system".

EDIT: I was late on this reply I guess.

You don't seem to understand what subsistence living means.

You do know that in agrarian societies this meant 12 hours a day 7 days a week with no holidays ever? And that children worked in the fields instead of going to school?

People don't subsistence farm because they don't want anything more than the bare minimum for survival. They subsistence farm because the bare minimum for survival is the best they can manage.

I have two questions for you that you should think about.

Question 1: Why is it that, as our productivity increases, we find more things to "fill up" our workday, instead of working fewer hours for the same output (which would satisfy our needs)?

Question 2: Forget about need. Do people actually want the things they are working for today? Or is it that we are socially conditioning them, from the moment they are born, that a consumption-based lifestyle is one they need to strive for?

We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.

Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...

Is it? There are several hundred million Buddhists who might disagree with you.

>>We aren't unique in this regard either. My cat needs air, water, and food. My cat wants attention, affection, and canned wet food.

Your cat wants attention, affection and canned wet food because as a pet it has gotten used to those things. There are a billion felines out there that are quite happy with living alone and marking their territory and hunting for and munching on raw meat.

>>You don't need much more than a pile of sticks to sleep under, food, and water, but I bet even you would agree this is not satisfying.

It depends. I love to go cross-country backpacking and the only things I bring with me are the bare essentials: tent, sleeping bag, food and water, clothing and some emergency supplies.

>>Question 2: I wasn't socially conditioned to want the fan that keeps me cool when it is hot. I wasn't socially conditioned to enjoy beer. I wasn't socially conditioned to like literature. Sure, some people are working for things they have no real use or desire for, but IMO there are plenty of things that improve life beyond the truest basic needs, that are worth continuing to strive for. Amusement, art, intellectual pursuits, athleticism, etc...

Your argument is shifting away from what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you do not have to work 40+ hours a week for any of those things. You only have to do it because our capitalistic society is engineered that way.

Think about it like this: the productivity of the average worker has increased tremendously over the last century. Yet, instead of reducing work hours to account for the fact that we can produce the same amount of goods and services in less time, we have opted to work the same number of hours (or even longer in some cases) to produce more than society needs.

Even if everyone worked 20 hours a week, you could still enjoy your beer and athleticism and art and intellectual pursuits. In fact, you would have more time for them!

It is not an inherent human quality. Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods. They were lean.

Then how do you explain the necklaces, earrings, headpieces, etc etc etc found in the histories of tribes all around the world all through history?

Can you imagine a tribesman thinking, "man, I should work extra hard today and bring home more meat so I can afford that necklace the other guy has"?

Buddhism is much older than capitalism, so I somewhat doubt that.

> Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods.

They were, once they developed the means to derive use from them (making them goods, rather than valueless objects.)

Before that, hunter gatherer groups worked even less because they were so few and the food so plentiful.

They were imperialistic, mercantilistic, corporatist, fascistic, communal, the list goes on.

Adam Smith invented capitalism as a response to the mercantilism of 18th century England.

They all were. Not in social sense, but in the economic one. The challenge makes no sense. What is capitalism? As long as you let the markets work and don't interfere with people decisions on the market on a permanent basis this is capitalism. As you let the capital flow and accumulate. Once you impose restrictions to it based on ideology based in distrust to free economy or marktes, you don't have true capitalism. I.e. in communism private property is banned. Actually in some instances communists were propagating the idea of moneyless society. You haven't had such an assault on the idea of making money before socialism was invented. The first person who traded results of their labor for results of labor of someone else was a capitalist. And that's how it has always worked. Actually, even imposing penalties on people for doing trade, owning property, etc. as was common in communistic states, didn't change people's behavior who still wanted to enrich themselves. Meaning we are capitalists by design, it's as natural as eating meat. Might be inconvenient morally, but the facts are facts. Smith merely discovered/noticed the phenomenon and gave it a name. So not soon later it could have been and was attacked, but as long as our DNA doesn't change we are and will be capitalistic beings.

It's a recent invention, and requires much vigilance and restraint to be kept alive. In many ways it is already gone.

The thing that is so particularly sinister:

A: "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the others."

B: "You're right, so we should do away with affirmative action."

C: "Exactly, it's racist since these days there are plenty of white people that are just as disadvantaged."

D: "I hereby enact this law that officially ends affirmative action."

E: "Great, now let's solve the nuanced problems of inequality across the board!"

crickets

In this day and age, sustaining life should not require 40+ hours of work per week.

As a society we are producing a ridiculous amount of surplus, and then conditioning ourselves to consume that surplus so that we can produce even more.

Where does it end?

Until some place has a successful anarchic-type revolution (a la Spain & Paris) without an outside power coming in to overthrow them we're stuck with this legacy economic/political system and the best we can do is civilize it with prudent regulation (which we can barely do because it's been systemically corrupted).

Two examples:

1) I read an article where the writer took a job somewhere in the Pacific or Southeast in a non-heavily developed area. When he gets to the village he has no place to stay. How will I live?

What happens, which as a Westerner he did not expect, was that soon the community gathered at a spot and over the next few days built him his house! It was simple but in line with the community standard. The expectation was that when someone else had a need (maybe a house) he would return the favor.

2) In the scandinavian model, I believe you get schooling paid for until you find a job and then you have to pay the gov't back. Which is sort of the reverse in NA where you pay upfront and hope to recoup the cost yourself. With that model it seems the gov't has incentive to ensure there are enough jobs so that they can recoup costs.

how is this different than borrowing money from a bank to get a house built? In the village, the westerner had a debt - sure it was verbal, but it is a debt never-the-less. This method don't work when the size of the village grows beyond a certain point (because you cannot keep track of more than about 100 people without needing written records and formalizatin).

Fast forward a few hundred years, and you end up with what we have right now - a system of money, credit and work. Its exactly the same, except with way more indirections so that the participants don't have to directly know each other and keep tabs on each other.

As for how it would scale, I don't know. Is the structure and culture of western urban society the only form possible?

Of course they don't have all the fancy toys. Or the worries and medications. Running away from an existence you've never really been given time to understand. Bukowski's right about how it empties you out. But unless you're lucky as him, few options have been left you. The land's all owned, and the "hunting" is long-gone.

In the end, only the market is free. Until the day you drop it and turn away.

That's because they live in low numbers in tropical climates, where food is plentiful throughout the year and shelter is never needed.

Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with you. His idea of America was the idea that there would be many small farms where people could be more or less self-sufficient and work would have instrinsic meaning. Of course, he had actual chattel slaves to help out. Hamilton had the idea that the US would become a trading nation. By their time, the industrial-capitalist revolution had not really gotten underway world-wide but the Hamiltonians won out in the end. The notion of 'work' as we know it now had also not really come into existence. Most people in the US worked on farms or otherwise for themselves.

Lincoln advocated 'free labor' as the moral and honest form of labor. Which took as a given that labor is greater than capital. Its proceeds should benefit completely its worker and his family not siphoned by the few who have capital.

Industrialization has made the workplace of the farm or workshop obsolete but I believe the principle could be maintained if workplaces were employee owned and managed democratically rather than authoritatively.

It also an attempt to bring a lot of connotations which simply aren't true. People don't use the word because they want to explain something the reader doesn't already know, they want to make the connotations that come with the word.

However, most industrial societies, things are long past the point where most people would need to work full time in order to feed and shelter their populations -- we now employ a decided minority of the labor force doing those essentials.

Apparently instead of reaping a leisure dividend, though, we've decided other things are more important. Perhaps some of them even are.