Work sucks

Work sucks. It really does. I don’t just mean the work that I do. I mean capital W “work,” the concept of selling labor to a corporation at the price of a salary and (maybe, if you’re lucky) some benefits, like the privilege of not working and the privilege of not dying from preventable causes or going into crushing debt because of a routine medical procedure.

Let us put aside for the moment the questions of whether or not we “have” to work, or whether things are “better” now than they were, and whether or not work is “good,” and instead examine the phenomenon of how work works today. Also, I do not claim to be an expert on this, so pardon me if I just make things up out of whole cloth.

Why does work suck?

Work sucks because you spend the vast majority of your waking hours dedicated to an institution that does not give a shit about you. If you’re lucky, you have coworkers and a manager that you like, that you might form meaningful relationships with in spite of the fact that that is not what you’re there to do. This will take some of the edge off of the fact that you spend your life and your skills dedicated to making someone else rich. You are expendable to them, but your job is not expendable to you.

What could we do if we didn’t have to export 80% of our energy to institutions that are not invested in our well-being? What could we do if we could spend that time with people we cared about, in the places that we lived, doing things that measurably made our lives better?

It is certainly interesting to think about.