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If I offered you 100% of your salary without working, would you still go to work? What about 90%? 80%? 70%? My early feedback suggests audiences start getting serious about still going to work when I reach 50%!
The post-work future is coming! Ironically, this is mostly looked at with fear and trepidation. Pause for a second and think how crazy that is. We’re afraid we might not have to work. Full employment is an almost unquestioned policy. Talk about setting the wrong goals! Of course, within the context of capitalism, this backward goal makes sense … since jobs are the mechanism we’ve chosen to decide who gets to eat, have a place to live and such. Jobs are also an important aspect of our identity and our daily lives. We even hear that work is part of human nature and we are hard-wired to be this way. Nonsense, jobs are a social construction that we created and can be un-created. Yes, we need “activity,” but not jobs! The figure gives an idea of things we could do without jobs in After Capitalism.
What we see taking place is that jobs are an increasingly ineffective resource distribution mechanism. In my early work on the future of work with futurists Joe Coates, Jennifer Jarratt and John Mahaffie in the 1990s, we frequently reported on the long-term trend toward structural unemployment. Basically, due to automation there would be less need for human work to produce the goods and services needed by society. Ironically, or unfortunately (unless you sell consumer goods), people have used increased wealth and productivity to consume more rather than work less.
But “The Times They Are A-Changin‘.” I would take the 50% in a heartbeat, and I like my job! But the freedom … that my friends is why the post-work future is eventually going to win out. – Andy Hines
[…] life that we consider so normal that we don’t even question them anymore. We recently discussed how everyone should have a job and go to work, but if we take a historical perspective we see that is a blip of human history. We assume it’s […]