When the company I work for was a tech startup I really enjoyed working long hours, that problematic tech bro “let’s burn the midnight oil and get this done” attitude, the feeling of camaraderie that comes from doing hard work with a team, I absolutely loved it and got a real kick out of it. I felt ownership over my work and felt personally fulfilled when it came together and found success.

The problem is that it wasn’t a true camaraderie. Actually it was unequal. I got a wage and only a small group got to own the thing. The hard work wasn’t for myself it was taken by a them. It wasn’t in fact myself that was being fulfilled. It wasn’t actually my success.

I don’t want to play the sob story too hard because financially they treat me well and there is genuine appreciation from them for my contribution, but really the illusion of ownership of my work has been broken and I realize I fell into some trap where I was told we were making this together but really we were making this for them. I should have taken a regular desk job and poured those midnight hours into myself instead.

I don’t grudge hard work at all. On the contrary I love it. I wouldn’t force hard work on anyone and I strongly believe the ideal we should advocate is more like a 4-day work week (or less or earlier retirement etc) that emphasizes work as a necessary part of building society but not work as the purpose of society.

Work is glorious and hard work is fulfilling but having the product of your labor taken from you is what transforms work from a fulfilling, even self-actualizing, exercise and instead turns it into a simple transaction of labor for money. It reduces you to a cash value rather than a member of a community laboring to create society.

Work should be part of community. Work should be an exercise of political and economic freedom rather than a result of my lack of it. Work should be part of who I am and what I mean to my community and to the world rather than what cash value I represent to an employer.

I’d be happy digging trenches for roads if that was a decision I made with my community that we need more roads. I enjoy physical work as well, although I’m not the best suited for it. I’d be happy writing software for a large firm if that firm was owned in part by myself, or was owned by my community, and I had a voice in the consensus to shape that.

I’d be proud to be the person who is known for giving more than I need. I really am not motivated by money, I’m motivated by autonomy and respect. I am exceedingly willing to work hard for respect and a kind of social status that comes from being known as a person who gets it done and I’m also willing to give you the shirt off my back if you need and I’m really not just circlejerking myself when I say that.

But I want to be clear that it’s a bell curve, right. I am motivated to be at the top of the curve in terms of what I contribute because that satisfies some of my needs such as ego and status and respect. The 80% in the middle, this group just want to live life and enjoy themselves without too much stress and without worrying about losing everything if one small thing goes wrong. I don’t believe we should hold as an ideal that “work is good for its own sake.” That Protestant work ethic is pure propaganda to equate giving profit to your employer as a moral good.

For the majority of humanity I think everyone needs a purpose and work is an important part of that but work is not the end of that. Their purpose is more defined by their community. Work can play an important role in defining a persons place within a community but it’s wrong to reduce a person to that because we are so much more. I would imagine reducing the number of days worked or enabling longer and freer childhoods and early adult lives for education, and working to reduce the retirement age to the extent possible, these are worthy goals.

It should be democratic. Simplistically, we should give society a dial. That dial adjusts the needle between “how much material wealth do you want vs how much free time do you want”. Let everyone dial in what they choose. In a socialist state that minimum will very likely need to be above zero of course but I see no problem at all with the amount of work we expect from each individual being adjusted to what they desire.

Like, someone is going to get the nice beachfront property for example and it makes sense to give that to the person who contributes the most so I see inequality of total income as a perfectly acceptable outcome for inequality of effort invested. Socialism is perfectly comfortable with “to each according to their effort”. So I would agree with tying material success (in the form of higher wages earned due to more hours worked, and status items like houses tied to more or less challenging fields) to effort but the critical thing is to end the capitalist practice of being entitled to the profit of the effort of others. And I’ll add of course so long as there is true equality of opportunity to pursue the higher status fields with those perk rewards, that being eg a doctor or engineer doesn’t become a hereditary class.

That’s my perception of labor. I value it. I think it gives meaning to an individual. Capitalism robs that meaning by reducing it to a cash value. When you have the autonomy to decide how much you want to work and for what goals, you will likely find you do want to work more than you realize but it’s wrong to reduce us all to mere laborers and consumers, and it’s a fact of nature that we have different appetites for work and different psychological needs to be satisfied.