I have seen a lot of talk lately about work, idleness, UBI, jobs programs, and the like.

I really need to write a for-serious essay about this stuff.  But for now, my thoughts aren’t quite that organized, so have a rambling Tumblr post. 

From a broad-scale social perspective, the actual terminal goal is to set up a situation where people are spending their time doing the activities that cause them to flourish. 

…and the secondary operational goal is to ensure that the grunt work of civilization, which we require someone to be doing so that we can enjoy an acceptably high standard of living, gets done.  For so long as we need it, anyway.  If God is good, then soon enough FAL-something will come in and save us all from drudgery by allowing us to hand it off to robots.

(You can probably learn a lot about someone by finding out what word he thinks should optimally complete the phrase “Fully Automated Luxury _____.”  My own suggestion would be Aristocracy.)

If those aren’t your goals, then – as far as I’m concerned, you’d better have a really good argument for the goals you do have. 

A point that I consider really obvious and important, but which gets very little air.

There should be a strong presumption that any paid work you can get is not going to be an optimal use of your time, from the standpoint of your own spiritual well-being.

I mean, why would it be?  Your employer is paying you to do things that are good for him, not for you.  Maybe you’re lucky, and you’ve found someone who’ll pay you to work in a field that you love, a field where you want to be working in order to be the person you want to be…but even then, if you were truly the master of your time, would you be doing exactly that work?  Would you be doing it exactly that way?  Wouldn’t it be better to use your own preferences and ambitions as the goalposts? 

In Heaven, scholars can study whatever matters most to them, not whatever gets grants or makes their resumes look shiny.  In Heaven, artists don’t bow to the whims of patrons or audiences – or maybe they do, if they see themselves as entertainers / service-providers, but at the very least they can seek out their own favorite patrons and audiences rather than catering to the rich ones.  In Heaven, chefs cook whatever the spirit moves them to cook. 

This get-paid-for-fulfilling-someone-else’s-demands model is a temporary arrangement that we’re using until we can set up something better.  At least, I sincerely hope it is. 

Let’s be real.  Given financial freedom, most people are not suddenly going to become passionate amateur artists and scholars.

…this is in fact true.  Not quite as true as you might think, if you’re the sort of person who sneers at the idea – there are an awful lot of fanfiction writers and fanartists in the world, and there would probably be a lot more if we gave them the least cultural encouragement – but it’s basically true.  You need some pretty hefty intellectual or creative talents to be happy spending your time doing intellectual or creative work, and not everyone has those. 

So OK.  In Heaven, what would all those non-creative non-intellectual people be doing?  What would cause them to flourish?  What kind of lives would we try to arrange for them, if we were optimizing for their well-being rather than for anything else? 

I’m no social psychologist, and I imagine that my readers will be able to add to this list in all sorts of ways, but a few obvious suggestions off the top of my head:

* They would spend lots of time consuming, and appreciating, really good art / entertainment.

* They would spend lots of time in social communion with friends and acquaintances.

* They would spend lots of time exercising (which I gather is good both for endorphin-related reasons and for feeling-like-you-are-physically-powerful reasons, not that I would personally know). 

* They would participate in competitions that mattered to them (games? sports? politics? status struggles on the Internet?), and spend lots of time preparing for such competitions.

* They would spend lots of quality time with their families, attending to the people they love.  

* …they would spend lots of time out in nature?  Maybe that’s a thing?

* They would perform tasks that made them feel useful and valuable to people about whom they cared. 

With the exception of the last entry, the one in bold, these things all seem like they’re easy to offer very cheaply.  We’ll get to that one in a bit.  But otherwise…it doesn’t actually seem very hard, or very expensive, to set someone up in a pretty happy existence even if he’s not participating in the economy at all. 

Idleness is bad.  People who are able to be idle, in our lived experience of welfare systems, mostly don’t do any of those nice-sounding things you’re suggesting.  Mostly they laze around and grow depressed, and occasionally beat their girlfriends or join gangs or do something else that’s very undesirable. 

In fairness, yes.

The glib answer is: “Yeah, well, maybe if we didn’t dedicate our entire culture to spitting on those people and making them feel like worthless losers, they might be a little less resentfully glum and a little more inclined to live up to the social standards that would make themselves much happier and better-off in the long run.”  

…and it continues: “And maybe if we didn’t tell them that they’re not allowed to work if they want to continue to receive the only financial stability we’re willing to offer, they might do more in the way of experimenting with work.” 

The less glib answer is: “Yeah, it turns out that it’s actually pretty hard to teach people how to live their best lives.  This is a really important project.  It is for precisely this reason that it’s good and useful to have culture, and the total anarchic liberalization of culture is a bad plan.  But let’s go with ‘figure out how to teach people how to love their best lives,’ even if that’s difficult, and not settle for ‘force people to do random probably-pointless probably-degrading work and hope that it’s a good enough substitute for flourishing.’“

As intimated above, many people actually do benefit strongly from traditional-type work of certain kinds. 

Let’s be honest, though, the kind of work that is best for average people is mostly not the kind of work that is economically viable at the moment.  And that’s been true for, like, a century.  

You want to feel competent and masterful in your domain.  You want to feel like you’re working for the benefit of someone about whom you care, who will be grateful for the effort. 

…those much-lauded manufacturing jobs of the mid-twentieth-century were soul-killers. 

Doing something that’s urgently needed does help (cf. agriculture in a subsistence-farming society), but we don’t want this work to be urgently needed by anyone, that’s holding the rest of civilization hostage to the desire for people to be employed. 

Given that, the best general-purpose model for rewarding employment that I can think of is domestic service. 

Domestic tasks are simple and accessible.  When they’re done, you can see what you’ve accomplished, and feel good about it.  There will always be a desire for them, even if not necessarily a need as such.  Most importantly: you can have a relationship with a singular boss who understands and values your contribution.  You can develop all sorts of skills as an outgrowth of “being a useful personal asset to your boss*,” and take additional pleasure in that, so long as no one is trying to be super-economically-efficient about it. 

* like bodyguarding!

This kind of service arrangement would actually be really beneficial for a lot of people, to some extent for the “employers” but especially for the “servants.”  And I don’t mean that in a contemporary-class-driven kind of way.  I went to Big Fancyname University, most of my friends are rich creative-class types, and I’m pretty sure that like half of them could live quite happily as someone’s handmaiden or butler.  Perhaps more happily than they do now. 

But of course this can’t work so long as you’re telling the servants that they’re low-achieving scum for being servants.  Which comes back around to the culture-engineering stuff.  Really, “let people take pride in the things they can actually do” will get you a lot of the way there. 

There’s more, but I’m running out of steam.  Perhaps later.