Antiwork

Food isn't free. It takes effort to maintain and protect it from pests, keep it well-fed and watered, and encourage it to bear fruit.

Karl Marx talked about this extensively, and he was writing for us workers. its always breathtaking to hear "why hasn't anyone talked about this," when everybody knows there were people who talked about this, made it their life's scientific work, set the intellectual foundation for those of us who figured it out to go deeper with our inquiries and understanding, but because others who control the ideas of society have so successfully stigmatized these ideas and their proponents, we workers have internalized the hate for ourselves and our ideas that the ruling classes have for us.

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. -- Economic and Philosophic manuscripts, 1844

And later in Capital:

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. - chapter 25 sec 4

Because "Work" is just effort for some stranger's benefit; a CEO or Corporation. Whereas the result of effort enriches you and/or the people you love.

You're not antiwork, you're anti-capitalism.

Doing it for yourself vs for someone else. You get the reward if you do it for yourself, then you’re done.

If you do it for someone else as a job, they get the reward, you’re presented with more problems to solve, and there isn’t any additional reward.

I mean, the answer is agency. You enjoy doing things that you choose to do—which you choose to do because you enjoy them, it’s just a tad selective and cyclic there.

Most people don’t choose to work because they enjoy it; they work to survive, doing what the market will support.

Some few very very lucky people get to do work they would otherwise choose to do anyways.

"food is literally free" go enjoy picking berries like a squirrel, I'm going to the supermarket because it saves a lot of time

You don't like your job. I don't like mine either. Effort feels good, but having no agency as to what you put that effort into, and actively feeling as though it's wasted, is of course going to feel bad.

"None of the pro-work people can answer the question" Tumblr hyperbole is so annoying lol

Have you ever tried to produce food, though. It is surely not free, and I refer you to the labour theory of value (LTV) for a straightforward explanation of that.

Does Marx’ concept of alienation measure up?

That's a tad spurious though.

"Work" isn't about having to get things from those that guard it, not inherently.

It's also about specialization. If I'm a better hunter, and you're a better farmer, then why waste effort by splitting our time and energy each doing something we're not as good at.

You expand that until you've got specialists that aren't "working" with food at all, they're making bows for me, and making plows for you.

The problem is the system of resource allocation. It ends up where resources are hoarded by some rather than being used. In a non capitalist system, working to eat doesn't mean wage slavery or grinding at something only to be able to eat, it's about keeping the wheels of social exchange moving. Allocation of resources, where you do whatever it is you'd be good at, or be willing to get good at so that someone else that's good at other things doesn't need to do that, and you all eat because you all worked.

Not that any given system of resource allocation is perfect or free from problems, but the concept of having a job, of working, doesn't have to be oppressive. Hell, in a well enough regulated capitalist system, it would be less oppressive than it is; you can see that in worker owned businesses.

That second post is so fucking on point.

Interestingly I was watching a Howard Marks video (investment billionare, know thine enemy) anyhoo, he was asked why he bothered still going to work, he answerd that if you'd rather be anywhere else doing somwthing else, it's work otherwise it isn't..

That nonsesne is the problem with nearly all of society, I doubt he cleans the toilets in the Oaktree office building.

What is this person smoking that they like effort so much.
Bro, effort sucks.