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Why are you working 8 hours a day?

LOL I work 24/48 hour shifts! Straight! I remember when I worked 8 hour days... good times!
 
Labour is has fruit, and to enjoy this fruit we of course have to produce it to begin with. We don't exactly live in a world yet where there is complete and utter infinite surplus of the utilities that alleviate suffering, so until then, find something you don't loathe doing to afford your priorities. This is essentially how I've been living.
 
The reason the system is like it is is because of greed. People in power/corporations have been slowly and quietly eroding the middle class because they make more profit. Simple as that. We're sacrificing money for education and quality of life for citizens, to fight wars for oil and wars on drugs, to pay the wealthiest people and organizations even more money. Income equality is growing wider and wider, pay raise rate is tiny while cost of living goes up many times faster, and this has been happening for quite a long time now. This attitude of "work hard and you can be wealthy" is a mantra for so many people. We're being set up to be used. What they want is a peasant working class, uneducated, easily controlled, and trained to work as hard as possible for a pittance, just enough to survive and keep working. It could be a lot different, and it was for a time after World War 2 when the rise of the middle class happened. But as always, the greed of a small percentage of sociopathic power mongers feeding off of the people they control.

In a technical sense, I do not think it has to be that way. However it seems like all throughout history, some people are sociopathic power mongers. Most people wouldn't knowingly make millions upon millions of people suffer for an extra billion dollars over their multiple existing billions, but it seems like some people are just wired that way and it's always been that way and it's those people that destroy every good thing humans have ever done in terms of civilization. It's why every civilization eventually collapses. So that problem seems rather insurmountable, because these people are very good at slowly infiltrating well-working systems and corrupting them for their own purposes and eventually destabilizing and destroying them.
 
If you look at it from a different perspective it's much easier to see there are very real solutions to our world economic woes.

From a personal perspective I look at the work I'm doing and ask myself the simple question of how I'm benefiting life on the planet by what I'm doing. Not how I'm benefiting myself because I'm just a temporary piece of life and I only have value if I leave the planet in a better state because of my existence.

Work is a joy because I make my job of value to humanity and pay attention to how much other life I'm consuming while doing it.. I work with food so it's easy to see how much "other life" must die to support the inflated sense of self humanity has developed.

We have two things on this planet, resources that we can harvest and use and human time resource. Currently we are living in a survival mindset with no plan for a future but we seem to be waking up. Soon we will realize our economy is based on fiction and 80% of the humans on the planet are not actually working at anything valuable or even necessary.

Money has been a useful tool but it's broken beyond repair. We are far smarter now then we were when we began using our flawed economic model. We can design a far better system.

An economy with money at its center kills one human every time you breath because we spend our time resource chasing our fictional money instead of chasing life and building a future for our children.

Personally I work 12 hours a day, not 8, but not because I want money or seek wealth. I work at feeding people and there is no lack of people needing food so there's lots of work in my field. Shockingly there isn't really much money in feeding people.
 
I was using the planetary "we". Pretty much as Xorkoth stated, the system is fucked. If you personally are blessed to use skills and talents you enjoy to earn a living, great! Would you say you are the minority or majority?

Why do we have to "earn" a living though. As yourbaker said, 80% (made up number, but probably close) of humans on the planet don't work at something valuable or neccesary. Why can't those 80% focus on something of value. Or just create beauty and art? I would say because a select minority of service to self oriented assholes are exploiting the planet as a whole for gain.

From the top down our current planetary world view is that of master/slave.
 
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It is a made up number taken from the 2016 Canadian census data. I just counted how many people worked at jobs that either harvested a resource or created useful things (clothes, food, tools, housing etc) it's still random because in every one of those categories there are accountants and managers who contribute nothing but stress to the process and often have no skills of measurable worth. I simply compared that to the total population including seniors and children. I came up with 22% of us doing something of value for someone besides ourselves, not including home makers so it would be slightly more like 72-75% really only doing imaginary paper work or watching imaginary money.

If someone really wanted to make their country great again they would get everyone working and not be wasting the labour resource of millions of humans because of a lack of imaginary money.
 
I am retired, well mostly. I still dabble.
Basically I don't do anything anymore. Too old and bored to do stuff that looks like work. My dabbling I do mostly because I still get ideas and boredom is well boring.
 
I work for myself and work from home. I usually work a 12 hour day but 8 of those are walking the dog or taking a nap / thinking break. And I am ashamed to admit the remaining 4 hours add nothing of productive value to the world and constitite a “bullshit job”.

Sigh - no wonder i feel so compelled to take drugs
 
The inherent flaws of capitalism are understood by most of us who care to look. The problems that we are facing and our ability to do anything about them, all come down to one MASSIVE issue, in a single word, "scale".

The issues that the individual faces in daily life vs the issues of society overall have such a huge gap that its nearly impossible to bring the two close enough together to implement any realistic change.

The momentum of the capitalist machine on the world scale is too much to stop. The gap of inequality will have to reach its inevitable tipping point and reach catastrophic failure on its own. Only then could a new system be constructed. A "new" society would require a shift in our fundamental view about value of human life, the planet, technology, education, and on and on and on.

The scale of the change is almost unimaginable.

Each of us have to decide how we are going to choose to live our lives as of now. We can play the capitalist game that is in place and just accept what it is, good and bad, engrained in every part of life as we know it. Or we can choose to live an alternative lifestyle, living the best way we see, reaping what we can from society without being consumed by it. Attempt to focus on a more natural lifestyle based around nature, community, and personal development.

Idk what Im even saying, basically I think capitalist society is too far gone and the scale of change is too large. When it crashes and burns it will be in an epic fashion the world has never seen. Fuck it lol
 
tracedwards313 said:
The inherent flaws of capitalism are understood by most of us who care to look
Click to expand...

Which capitalism? There must be almost as many versions of it as there are countries. Strangely the ones without some version of it seem to be the most fucked up and the less equal and the less free.

For example American capitalism is dog-eat-dog freedom with lots of losers but high levels of innovation. Australian capitalism on the other hand has state-managed redistribution built into its core settings and hence less innovation but far less inequality.
 
I guess I was talking about American capitalism. I have the classic American comparison problem. You are right, though. It seems like using terms like capitalism/socialism/communism is pointless because any country can claim whatever they want and practice something completely different.
 
I hate statistics. Actually, I don't know anybody who works that many hours. Aren't there labor laws?

Myself, I've probably worked 7 hours in a day doing manual type work, but that was seasonal. Normally I've clocked in 5~6 hours in an office

Also, that top diagram is wrong because I know for a fact that Norway has more leave (around 1 month) and fewer working hours every year than those top countries listed. Russia has the most paid holidays
 
In America 8 hour work days are the norm, I know people who work 12 hours a day. 40 hours a week is considered full-time, any less than that and you typically don't qualify for benefits (if the company you work for even has any). Technically you're supposed to get overtime pay over 40 hours (time and a half), but it doesn't seem to be very enforced because I've known people who don't get it. I work 45 hours a week (*;30-5:30 Monday through Friday) and get a salary so regardless of hours the pay is the same... I have to get all my work done and it's project-based so when very busy, I have to work more hours than that... the most I've ever logged was 72 in a week. Of course sometimes I barely have to work when it's not busy. And I work at home... in fact most of the time I'm posting on Bluelight I'm at work.
 
Let me rephrase this. The only people I know, and they're my immediate relatives, who ever work 8 hour days are government workers. Like, my aunt is a criminal justice judge and she works on average 7 hours a day; sometimes pushed to 8 hours, but she gets a month off every year in December paid by the government

I hardly count that as the average US worker
 
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