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Antiwork

Anti work philosophy

So one objection I see to anti work often is that work needs to be done and not wanting to do necessary things isn't a good quality. While it is often pushed back on in the comments I feel like there are a few things I haven't seen shared, and one specifically that really applies to the movement. There is a book by anthropologist David Graber called “Bullshit Jobs” It's not a very long book at 368 pages but in my opinion it forms a foundation for what a lot of people seem to inherently know but is hard to articulate. That much of the work people do today is ultimately pointless. The book goes into greater detail, but much of the effort expended by human beings today doesn't help anyone. It does not need to be done. There are whole industries that don't need to exist, and even the…


So one objection I see to anti work often is that work needs to be done and not wanting to do necessary things isn't a good quality. While it is often pushed back on in the comments I feel like there are a few things I haven't seen shared, and one specifically that really applies to the movement.

There is a book by anthropologist David Graber called “Bullshit Jobs” It's not a very long book at 368 pages but in my opinion it forms a foundation for what a lot of people seem to inherently know but is hard to articulate. That much of the work people do today is ultimately pointless. The book goes into greater detail, but much of the effort expended by human beings today doesn't help anyone. It does not need to be done. There are whole industries that don't need to exist, and even the most necessary and impactful jobs contain a great amount of unnecessary administrative paperwork that takes up time that could be spent teaching children or doing heart surgery or whatever.

As I see it, the main statement of anti work isn't “I don't want to work so hard” but rather “Everyone shouldn't have to work so hard.”

This only touches on one aspect. There is a whole other side of workplaces being essentially dystopian dictatorships which is only partially related to Bullshit Jobs. I was just surprised I haven't seen it mentioned here before.

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