This here is one of the most profound stories and questions of our time. It’s about work, how our society values itself and each other through productivity, but the accessibility of this identity will soon be permanently taken from us. In less then a generation, the robots will soon take our jobs And whether or not we will adapt as individuals or or a society to a world that doesn’t have jobs for us to secure our livelihoods. The 2016 election was lost in large part by our societies failure to recognize the plight of the unnecessariat, a word we’ve created to describe people who have no hope of ever finding gainful employment, now that that population is becoming largely white. What they are currently in the throes of, is a mass epidemic of suicide and drug addiction, which is only equaled in death toll by war zones. It’s a war zone out there in poor white america, and the elitism of liberal culture is made evident by their apathy and ignorance of this mass die off.
But this unnecessaryness of these flyover country humans isn’t just for them, very soon it’s for us all. I quote, “Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary.” With automation and computerization, more then half of all thinking jobs, let alone ones more simply mechanized will disappear in the next 20 years. That poor white war zone will expand to 50% of the population becoming unemployed, and unemployable; or in other words, un necessary for the continuation of our economy. And if our current society is any example of how we’ll treat this problem as its scale baloons, we’re looking at massive social upheaval. This is a terrifying prospect on its own, but even more terrifying when you consider that the top 0.01% income earners won’t just own an army of robots workers, but an army of robot soldiers to protect them from the mass under and unemployable hordes. The terminator series premised on hostile or empathyless AI, might come more rapidly with the parabolic concentration of a much older destroyer of empathy, power.
This also a profoundly personal question for me, and at the core of my struggle to find meaning and value for myself, outside of the pride and power of work. When I started this journey, a few years back I was suicidal, my recovery from suicidal to depressive was made largely by .:
(1) trying to value and rediscover playtime, (2) establishing and doing my best to keep a moratorium on self judgement, and (3) seeing a therapist regularly to try and catch and weed out the sneaky start of value through ‘pride in work’ working its way back into my “philosophy of value”.
Since then I’d say I’ve largely been floundering about trying to beat depression by digging for a philosophy to value myself, and my life outside of work/productivity. At the suicidal start, my idea was to place at the center of my life purpose beauty; to pursue, create and spread beauty. But I haven’t yet been able to bond with that, I’m closer now, largely throughworking through the philosophical problems of value through, to where it isn’t just something that I’m not good at, but seems to me to be an inherently destructive premise; like a continually expanding market, it’s great until it falters, and then there’s nothing in it to help you get back on track. I find great refuge in finding this article, this line of thought; it’s validating, it’s lets me know I’m not alone in these questions, and that making sense of this issue won’t just be valuable to me, but possibly to all of humanity.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem
