Categories
Antiwork

“What Would You Do If You Had A Million Dollars?”

My thesis is that there are three main types of anti-work schools of thought and depending on the school of thought one has they would answer this question very differently. The most common school of thought is that of the selfish and temporal individual; their entire stake in the movement is purely based on them either being unhappy with their current situation (with or without willingness to change that outcome via any number of economic methods) and therefore being against their own current situation. Once given the money this person is satisfied and cares nothing for anyone else much like in their relatively impoverished state their main focus was on fixing the landscape they lived in. There is nothing wrong with this. Let me make that clear; being self-centered and coming to places to vent is fine but they more fit into places that would be dedicated to something like…


My thesis is that there are three main types of anti-work schools of thought and depending on the school of thought one has they would answer this question very differently. The most common school of thought is that of the selfish and temporal individual; their entire stake in the movement is purely based on them either being unhappy with their current situation (with or without willingness to change that outcome via any number of economic methods) and therefore being against their own current situation.

Once given the money this person is satisfied and cares nothing for anyone else much like in their relatively impoverished state their main focus was on fixing the landscape they lived in. There is nothing wrong with this. Let me make that clear; being self-centered and coming to places to vent is fine but they more fit into places that would be dedicated to something like r/ihatemyjob rather than a true movement to end work. These individuals never really walk away from work in the sense that they don't know how and make no effort to do so; these are the lotto winners who are broke within 5 years.

The second school of thought is that of the socially and politically aware individual who almost rise above themselves. These individuals may take the money and do what they really want to do; it is not that they want to produce nothing for society but instead that what they do produce, or want to produce, is not appreciated by society. A good analogy is a poor Elon Musk. Imagine that we have a very clever individual who has a lot of skill and ability relative to a craft (engineering in this case) but is stuck at a gas station and is effectively forced into slave labor by means of social suppression because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time to the wrong parents. There are millions of these people and for them anti-work really doesn't mean the “end of work” so much as the “appreciation of value”; these are artists, engineers, individuals passionate about sports, or other activities that genuinely do have social value but are not opportunistically available to express in society and therefore they suffer extreme suppression of their happiness.

Once given the money this person is probably going to open a theater/arts center/STEM lab charity or something that gives them the ability to create. They are creative people who feel stifled by the social imperative of producing something of immediate tangible value today rather than exploratory value for tomorrow; while much of the globe talks about entrepreneurship as if it were a beautiful pursuit with the reality that most fail it's pretty damning to see that the world almost balks at the idea of trying if you aren't going to succeed. That is insane. This class of individuals is eventually satisfied and usually leaves their mark, if they are allowed to, in local or regional methods of advancement that is more community oriented.

The final school of thought is the philosophical discussion of “Work” as it is. These individuals would probably not need the money because they actually work well within the framework of society by challenging the status quo and eventually fitting themselves in, through force, into jobs that work for them. These people are not ones to not understand money because they usually build their way out of the system if they really want to leave; they commit to the idea, the general philosophy, of work being a choice in society and therefore take very seriously the notion that one must do everything in their power to fix that. For some examples you might see the FIRE movement where you have Lean FIRE and people “squirreling away” 50% of their income into investments. You also have people who take on extreme jobs, whether academic as most of us think of, or extremely dangerous, which is the vast silent majority of high earning individuals, but all-in-all these are the millionaires next door in a sense.

The only thing these people will do with the money is turn it into more money.

I don't think there is anything wrong with being any one of the three classes but there is a disparity where we need more of group 2 in the world; I think that the movement itself, philosophically, is moot and that the movement on an individual level is corrupt but the political and social valuation of creativity, expression and general wellbeing should be the path we go down. Sadly, I am of the third variety, not the second, but working on it.

Let it be known that for those who would say, “I don't want to work because I am lazy.” this does not really bother me; that would be technically a fourth classification but it's not a particularly large portion of the population in the sense that you'd just get bored to tears because if your entire being is vested in finding new stimuli you probably have about 5 to 10 years of stimuli on the planet doing no work whatsoever; yes, you could travel all the time and yes, you could try the newest thing but eventually it catches up to one that there isn't really all that much more to the world than what you effectively bring to the table as that is where all the challenges are. A bed is a bed in Japan and in Nicaragua and Canada.

Which are you?

And if nothing else, what would you do with $1M?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.