CULTURE + PHILOSOPHY

Do We Always Have To Work?

Work is the cornerstone of modern society — but why?

In the past, we didn’t work. We survived. In order to do this we hunted, gathered, found shelter, made tools and clothes, defended against intruders, and brought up the young.

Over time, we developed agriculture, formed communities and built houses. Most people farmed, but some people used their skills to make things to sell in exchange for food. If you had nothing to sell, you promised to pay them next time.

Some people in these early civilizations, found they could exert their influence over others and appointed themselves as leaders. Then they charged or ‘taxed’ the people so that they didn’t have to work, as they were too busy ruling.

When people decided they were getting a bad deal, they got rid of the leaders and replaced them with someone else, normally themselves. When people got fed up again, they tried to replace the leaders. Only this time the leaders had gotten smart, and paid others to protect them. These people were called armies and when the people revolted, the armies killed the people.

When the leaders ran out of money, they attacked their neighbors, and when they’d ransacked them, they attacked places further afield. This, however, required bigger armies, so taxes were raised even more.

Meanwhile, the people were working harder and harder to pay for these pointless wars. Some got rich, but most were poor. But it didn’t stop people coming to the towns, which were now called cities, to make their fortune. With more and more people, it wasn’t long before people started working for others. And for the first time in human history, people had jobs that they went to every day in places called factories.

Once people had moved to the cities, they found they had to keep on working, as they didn’t have any other way to survive. And as more and more people came to the city, the factory owners realized they could make people work longer hours for less money. If people complained, they lost their jobs to the hundreds of other people looking for work. So people had to work even harder in order to survive, while the factory owners got rich.

Above is a potted history of human civilization from 100,000 years ago to the present. I’m vastly oversimplifying it, of course. But in essence, this is how things have gone, and in the past 100,000 years, humans haven’t come that far at all. We’re still doing the same thing. We're still working!

When I was a kid, I used to read sci-fi books by the dozen. As well as books on science, cosmology, and astronomy. I was fascinated by it, and truly believed that by 2020, we’d be living a Utopian ideal in the stars.

So imagine my disappointment when I started my first job at 16 for my local council collecting trash cans. It was only a summer job during the school holidays. But I remember wondering as we drove to the landfill every evening to empty tons of garbage into a giant hole, what happened to those ideals. What happened to that utopia?

The simple answer is, it wasn’t going to happen. Money took over. From the moment some guy 10,000 years ago said to his neighbor “Hey, mate, I can’t give you this axe today in exchange for this bushel of wheat. But I’ll give it to you next week, I promise. And I’ll write you an IOU on this scrap of parchment to prove it!” From that point on, humanity would never be the same again.

When I got my first pay cheque for that job, I wasn’t thinking of Utopian ideals any more, I was thinking of what I could buy with my money. Records, hot dogs, burgers, weed, alcohol, cigarettes. Suddenly, the world looked a hell of a lot better than it did before. Now I had money of my own. Yes, I had to work for it. But it was worth it. I was hooked!

Working to earn money to buy stuff is so deeply embedded in our culture that moving forward is impossible. If I lived to be 1000, I’d be writing the same piece. Elon Musk and his mates might be in space, living on the Moon or on Mars. But the rest of us won’t. We’ll still be working. Doing the same pointless jobs so that the leaders can tax us and go to war.

I’m not against work. I work all the time. I like work. What I hate is the lack of change. The lack of vision.

In the UK, where I’m from, we’ve just witnessed the utterly absurd sight of a billionaire king being fawned over by an entire population. A population who are working longer and harder to feed their families. This in turn is due to the total ineptitude of the leaders, who have been favoring the rich and wealthy (their friends). People protesting about this at the weekend were arrested by the police (the leader's army) because they disagreed with a modern country having a billionaire as the Head of State.

So when I say nothing much has changed, it’s pretty difficult to argue against it — unless you’re an idiot. Luckily, I’m not going to be arrested for saying that, so I’m fortunate. But it doesn’t change the fact that if humanity wants to move on from its vengeful slothful state, it needs to stop following the money, and find another way.

Thanks for reading. For more thinking, check out: