Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness

http://www.jonathanlipps.com/blog/2015/02/blogging-borgmann-tccl-chapter-18-leisure-excellence-and-happiness/

by jlipps • 11 years ago

16 6 11 years ago

otakucode• 11 years ago

say to make more money and pursue a higher standard of living

There is no evidence that increasing the amount of labor a person engages in can have any effect upon improving their standard of living. Since 1980, compensation of workers has been totally divorced from the value of the work they provide to their employers. Whether they earn their company $100,000 a year or $1,000,000 a year, they will be paid mostly the same. It is more valuable to companies to suppress the 'market rate' of valuable positions than it is to lose individuals due to underpayment.

It seems to me that very few people realize the consequences technology has had upon daily life. It has radically increased the productivity of individuals - and guaranteed they see no benefit from it. It has expanded their work life to encompass more and more of their total life. It has contributed to workers being seen as interchangable, disposable cogs. It has destroyed economic mobility entirely (on the national scale).

It has also inspired in the whole of society (so far as I can tell) an unreasonable faith in a sort of thought process that I've seen best described as 'systems thinking'. People are willing to lie down and accept as immutable any sort of 'process' or 'policy' that is ever defined. If it is 'policy' that you must sit in an uncomfortable seat, well then you simply have to accept it. You can't hold the person who provided you with the seat responsible, they're simply following the policy. And policy is formed by, supposedly, very well-informed beings of wide understanding who could not possibly explain themselves to regular people. When someone suggests that people should not be restricted in a particular way, the very first question they will hear is "Why should people be allowed to do X?" Restriction is the assumed norm. Each action a person can take, whether in their work life or personal, must be justified as a useful and integral part of the overall 'system' of society.

I fell in love with computers when I was 9 years old. But I studied philosophy alongside CS. While I still spend both my work and personal life working with technology, I try to do so in ways that do not cause me to fall into those philosophical tar-pits that seem to have ensnared nearly everyone else. I was a teenager in the 1990s. I still hold on to some of the hopes for technology ushering in a better future. Hopefully we're simply suffering from some growing pains and before long we'll look back at this time period and say 'what was wrong with those people? Why did they let employers yolk them like slaves and wring profit margins out of them simply because they used a computer to generate titanic amounts of value for the company?' We would think it very odd if an employer proposed paying someone less because they were going to use a hammer to build a chair. But if someone is going to use a computer to do 300x as much work as someone doing a thing manually, we find the idea that they should be paid 300x as much similarly nonsensical. Why?

civilian2• 11 years ago

For wages, it's a supply and demand thing. It's not just that a few people are 300x more productive, it's that most people are now 300x productive. I don't hold anything special by being able to login, type, email, and use Word and Excel.

I share your outrage at people's willingness to follow rules, but I've always thought it was because of our autocratic education system and the fearmongering media. People are discouraged from taking risks (even risks with probably beneficial outcomes) everyday, and sometime they let it get beat out of them. I don't think that computers are responsible for that, it's a just generic psychological conditioning. And in my more pessimistic moments, I think that some people just don't care.

omalleyt• 11 years ago

I completely agree with you. Our primary education system is in no small part based on the Prussian system, which was developed after losing a battle to French, with the purpose of raising children into troops that would hold the line even in the face of certain death. This autocratic system of education is sometimes cited as enabling the rise to power of the Nazi party.

heurist• 11 years ago

Happiness can be induced chemically. I imagine future societies will have clean drugs to enable safe perpetual happiness in an existence where humans are to machines as dogs are to humans, humans don't have to labor for resources, and existential depression is the main cause of death.

I don't think people look out far enough when projecting the future. Or maybe I look too far out.

civilian2• 11 years ago

I imagine future societies will have clean drugs to enable safe perpetual happiness

I was going to argue this point, but you solved later in the sentence: " and existential depression is the main cause of death."

The easiest way to resolve this inconsistency is that there are multiple kinds of happiness. I like this description: http://sensophy.com/the-holy-trinity-of-happiness/ Happinesses are Pleasant, Good and/or Meaningful. Your imagined future wouldn't contain anything meaningful.

kazagistar• 11 years ago

Meaningful might be a finite resource.

Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness

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