Tuesday, February 04, 2014

Meaningless jobs and no jobs

I believe that lot of our jobs are meaningless and have been trying this quote on friends and family since 2006 "all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." I have not been able to convince anybody, but there was an addition from Jhansi: 'many women too'. Today Dalel Benbabaali mentioned this article on bull-shit jobs. Enjoy. 
Mishra says towards the end of this article (behind a firewall)in NewYork Review of Books "It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about "The Overcoat," called "flaws in the texture of life itself.""
This may very well be true, but Gaeber's point in the above, blaming many meaningless jobs on capitalism, seems to me to have some validity. Apart from this, as foreseen in the 1994 book 'A Jobless Future'  "Accordingly, if unwork is fated to be no longer the exception to the rule of nearly full employment, we need an entirely new approach to the social wage and, more generally, "welfare" policy. If there is work to be done, everyone should do some of it; additional remuneration would depend on the kind of work an individual performs." Some have been suggesting universal basic income
"We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff." Another related solution, out of temperament or necessity, is to  form small communities relatively independent of the state, described here, here and other places.

No comments: