“Imagine if we worked less. Imagine if we walked around our communities, talked to our neighbors, spent time in nature, played. Imagine if we could read, write, fall in love, without that nagging feeling of ‘needing to do something’; imagine if your life was your own.”
I’m lucky enough to do that currently. By having cut out consumerism completely, producing a lot of my own food, not wanting to go travel much and enjoying my surroundings instead. I guess it’s not for everyone but works for me. I feed three humans and a few animals with an online job and work only two days a week, when I want. I still wish I didn’t have to do that, as most of what I do doesn’t add to a better world for anyone, but really useful work doesn’t pay as well. My neighbors are a bit rough around the edges but they are very friendly. I choose to not mention politics, just live practical solidarity with them - they’ve given me plenty of food when we moved in, and we’ve helped them out whenever needed. I wish we could build more of that, but most people are too shy or too arrogant, or both. I know I’m a bit of both sometimes.
If it’s not too personal can I ask what your job is that lets you work online only 2 days a week / how much it pays?
I work as a freelance translator. The pay is between 0.5 and 0.20EUR per word depending on language. If ChatGPT steals my job I’ll have to do real work again. (Translation can be real and valuable work but within the confines of capitalism most of what I translate is bullshit that never needed typing out.)
that was the whole premise behind David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018) – when something like 40% of workers consider their own jobs to be useless, pointless, meaningless, unnecessary …
That book really made me understand why I felt so depressed living well within the mainstream parameters of success.