There’s a big difference between having a purpose in your life, something you love doing, that happens to be done at a work place; and being an employee.
IMHO it is absolutely a good thing to dream of a life which values things outside of employment.
We just happen to use the same word - “work” - for both kinds of situations.
Related - My friend group is a bunch of (predictably) nerds, and describing the times I want to keep working on an interesting tech problem for my employer as "wizarding" has been fairly successful. It's specifically a D&D reference, since what I'm usually doing is figuring out a new pattern ("spell") to add to my repertoire ("spellbook") that I can then use in many other situations.
It's... difficult, to convey to people what it's like having a job you like doing, working for people that treat you with respect, when they've pretty much only ever had jobs they didn't like and working for people that treated them poorly.
Yea it’s pretty disheartening that these r common experiences. Admittedly, I don’t kno a ton about UBI but I’d imagine the idea of giving people more security so they can pursue their interests in careers and not have to suffer thru a daily grind solely for a paycheck is a tenet of it
That isn't how welfare works. You're actually presenting the "welfare queen" argument even if you're saying it's good, but it was bad because it wasn't true.
Welfare is good because people like being employed and supporting them gives them more time and resources to find a better job. It increases employment because of this. (this is search/matching theory.)
Conversely, the kind of non-working people who are poorest and most need support are children and the elderly, not early retirees.
Do you think that full employment is necessary in today's society? Note I did not use the word economy. I wonder if people who have "welfare queen" adjacent perspectives believe that people would not be happy in a situation where we have a smaller economy and a society where the average person isn't forced to compromise their values or submit themselves to abuse just to afford rent and food.
I think it's the only choice because entropy exists. "Everyone should be retired" doesn't work when you need sewage workers, or even sewage robot maintenance workers.
That said, you don't have to work 120 hours a week just because you're employed, and hours worked has also been trending down over time.
> the average person isn't forced to compromise their values or submit themselves to abuse just to afford rent and food.
This is what happens without full employment; full employment means you don't have to do this because it's hard to hire new people (they're all already employed) so it's easy to change jobs.
Just because you'd be uncomfortable working on sewers when you could be sitting on your couch watching TV doesn't mean we will run out of sewer workers.
Full employment comes with a whole host of other problems for the kind of economy we inhabit today -- a sure enough sign that things aren't working under the current paradigm. We need a change if something like 'full employment' is expected to be a positive thing.
Near-full employment and full employment are very different, in the same way that carrying a 95% full glass of water and a 100% full glass of water are very different.
The "cushion" of unemployed people, according to economists, is very important for staving off runaway effects that drive bad macroeconomic dynamics.
I like that framing, thanks. And thinking about that vision, I think people all too often conflate being a cog in a corporate machine with being “a contributing member of society.” Not discrediting the notion of everyone pulling their weight in a community, but the frequency that I encounter that take in the mainstream always irks me
IMHO it is absolutely a good thing to dream of a life which values things outside of employment.
We just happen to use the same word - “work” - for both kinds of situations.