While I was writing about preparation for retirement last night , I think it is good to note that I don't actually plan on ever retiring and my goal is to die working. Most people probably think that dying working is pretty depressing, but I think it is far more the way life is meant to be lived than what we tend to be sold by the media and culture.
Don't misunderstand here, I might have a different definition of what "work" is than you, as it seems that most tend to believe that work is a job, something they have to do in order to make ends meet, to pay the bills, buy food. I think this is part of the branding of work that keeps us somewhat enslaved by it, as we believe it is something unpleasant and should be avoided, so we work doing what we don't like until we are can either retire from it or, get forced out by the laws of society, as age makes us irrelevant.
Irrelevancy is not something that we tend to enjoy, yet we have engineered a society where we are continually making ourselves more irrelevant through automation, but also disposable in relationships. This means that not only will our work to earn opportunities decrease, but we won't have much socially to turn to, leaving ourselves somewhat societal islands, trapped behind screens.
I don't plan on that outcome, as I value being productive in a way that I think is useful for myself and others, so the "work" I want to be doing isn't tied to needing income for it as the goal, although income might be an outcome of the activity. Essentially, I don't want to live to work, nor work to live, I want to work at living a better life. This makes work a hobby, not a job, and hopefully I will be able to keep evolving myself in order to be able to do something useful to the day I die.
It is interesting these days, as many of us are acting like retirees, even though we are decades away from retirement. We sit at home, watching screens, screaming at strangers about the way they live their lives and are becoming increasingly disconnected and lonely. Just as the older one gets, the more friends are lost, we tend to be building a society where personal relationships are dying, as we favor the fleeting company of digital strangers, valuing the token acknowledgement through hearts and stars from unknown masses, while degrading the real-world connection with people close to us.
This disconnection has been further exacerbated as we go more remote, meaning that we are having even less contact with real people, further removing our visibility of the impact of what we do on the people around us and the world in general. I think that much of what we do for jobs in this world is rather useless, other than a task designed to generate wealth for a handful of people, who provide the bare minimum back.
It is largely busy work - yet we are made to feel that it is important. The only importance for most of it is that it provides the economic feedback loop where we create something, are paid for the work, so that we can buy what others have created. It doesn't matter what is actually done, as long as the loop keeps on turning the economic cogs.
People are mistaken. We aren't cogs in the machine, we are the oil that keeps it running and as such, we are a consumable that gets emptied and replaced when we longer are able to do the job. To be a cog, we need to be part of the machine itself and that means owning a position in the network, something that is getting increasingly hard to do in the traditional economy, as the concentration of wealth has become so extreme and the hurdles so high, that even active participation isn't going to make much of an impact, as wealth attracts wealth and due to the vehicles used, it is at an exponential pace.
Without stake, there is no passive generation, which means being forced to continuously do jobs, even if one doesn't want to. This is being worked to death, not working for life. It isn't a hobby, it is enslavement. It doesn't have to be useful, it doesn't have to help anyone, it doesn't have to be healthy in any way, as long as it can generate a dollar more than the cost of generation, someone will pay for it to be done. Society will do all kinds of damaging activities in order to make a profit, including killing endangered animals and selling children into sex slavery.
The model doesn't care about what is good for us, it only cares about generating wealth, which is why society itself is in such a poor condition at a time where the advancements we have made should be providing abundance. The only way to change the model is to stop supporting it and start supporting what does bring value to life. Essentially, what should be economically rewarded is what improves our well-being, but this is rarely the case, as we are continually convinced to tow the line of the status quo, that change is too expensive, that it is too disruptive and we are isolated individuals, so what we do doesn't matter. It is a lie.
We are isolated by design through a divide and conquer strategy that has been made even easier through the digitalization of our interaction and disbanding of our real relationship networks to chase the approval of strangers. We will keep doing our jobs as the oil in the machine because we think that as long as we don't create too much friction, we will one day take a position as a cog, as if we can change our nature, even though we don't change our behavior.
You might understand what I am getting at here, you might not. But in my eyes, there is a lot of work to be done and a lot of it isn't going to come rewarded, as it is going to create friction in the machine. I don't see the point of working a job until retirement and then watching the world crumble, the world I helped build through the job I worked. And I definitely don't want to have to spend the last half of my life watching my daughter live in that crumbling world, even if I am comfortably able to sit on a beach with a view.
I think that this is part of the problem with the idea of working to retirement, as it becomes an individual process that is constrained by a lifetime, meaning that the activities done do not have to extend past death. In a healthy society that thrives long term, activity has to have a much longer view than a lifetime. There has to be the progression toward improvement and if we are disconnected from the group itself, the direction of the whole is blind to us, except those giving the orders.
Generational wealth shouldn't be constrained to family finance, it should include the well-being of society, with the activities that provide for future well-being valued higher than those that support instant gratification of desires. Of course, what these things are can't come from a centralized source due to the risk of corruption, which is why a paradigm shift in society itself needs to happen so that all take some ownership, all become a valued cog, rather than the disposable oil. This means that the economic feedback loop isn't between the owners and the employees, as all are owners, all are employed in some capacity.
All movement takes energy and that is what work is - energy. How and to where it is applied matters a great deal more than most individuals think. If health is wealth, than wealth should by default indicate health - how many are healthy in this current economy? Many people are doing jobs, yet the concentration of wealth keeps consolidating evermore rapidly. Where will we be in 20 years from now at this rate?
With so few cogs, how much oil will be needed?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]