More Work Won't Fix Our Broken Finances - It's Making It Worse

The goalposts are moving faster than you could ever save

Nearly everyone on Earth is stuck in an endless pursuit of money. 

Not to get rich.

Not to buy private jets and hyper-yachts or send penis-shaped rockets to Mars.

Not even to buy $1,000 Taylor Swift tickets from a parasitic scalper.

Just to stay fed and sheltered.

Work for money.

It’s the one thing that everyone from conservatives to liberals to Putin to Xi Jinping to Trump/Harris agree on.

That the plebs must work.

Nearly everyone on Earth is stuck in an endless pursuit of money.

Why are we okay with this?

There are 6 major problems with modern work:

#1. It increasingly doesn’t pay the bills

If you adjust for Truflation, real wages have been falling for the past fifty years.

Every year, the hours you work buy less.

And there’s zero sign this trend is about to turn around.

So, modern work is the law of diminishing returns.

Imagine if your boss said to you, “I’d like to offer you this job. It pays $XX,XXX, and even though you’ll make us more profit every year thanks to your growing skills and productivity, we’re going to cut your real-terms pay every single year until you die.”

That’s not a fictitious scenario — it’s what your boss is doing to you right now.

#2. Most people’s work is meaningless toil.

The majority of people hate their jobs.

“Vocation” comes from voice, but most people’s work doesn’t speak of who they are.

We work because we have to.

And isn’t that the definition of slavery, albeit not the Antebellum variety?

#3. Most people’s work is unnecessary.

According to David Graeber’s book Bull$#!t Jobs, there are tens of millions of people who readily admit their jobs serve no real purpose, IE, corporate lawyers, PR consultants, middle managers, etc.

Graber’s categorizes five types of bull$#!t jobs: 

• Flunkies (receptionists or administrative assistants)

• Goons (lobbyists, corporate lawyers, and telemarketers)

• Duct tapers (many IT support roles)

• Box tickers (compliance officers)

• Taskmasters (supervising people who don’t need supervision)

I’d add showmen (marketers), money-spinners (asset managers), interest-eaters (bankers), house-hoarders (landlords), and wage-suppressors (shareholders.)

None of these millions of jobs create new useable wealth for others.

None of these millions of jobs meet real needs.

#4. Most people’s work is destroying the environment.

Let’s face it: 

Work is an environmental disaster.

Pretty much every job aside from regenerative farming is helping to savage the planet.

#5. Most people’s work enriches the rich, which increases inequality and undermines democracy

People mostly work for corporations whose parasitic shareholders scape an unearned passive profit off of active contributing workers.

Then, with whatever meager wage-suppressed money they get to take home, the lion’s share goes to their land-lorder as rent or their bankster as interest.

Then, whatever pennies are left over are mostly spent on goods and services, which are all paying shareholder profits, rents, and interest — over 50% of every dollar spent goes towards dozens of layers of interest.

The really crazy thing?

#6. The more you work, the worse it gets for everyone else

Let’s say you and a million other people in one city decided to really “hustle.”

Rise and grind, baby.

They all say, “Forget my spouse, kids, friends, family, health, emotional stability, spiritual life, or sleep.”

They all take three full-time jobs and start a part-time side hustle.

They start making multiple six figures a year.

Now, they can afford to spend more.

They can outbid everyone else for a house to rent or buy.

You can afford to spend more on food and clothing.

What would happen if a few million of you in one city, simply by working yourselves to the brink, made a boatload more money?

“The market” (ie corporate sellers, landlords, and banks) would raise prices for everyone in that city in order order soak up all that sweet new cash money.

Welcome to New York, London, Paris, Austin… welcome to every city, state, and nation in the Western world.

When a bunch of people work and make more money, prices go up.

So everyone else now has to work harder to keep up.

Work makes little sense anymore

It pays less every year.

It’s less fulfilling than it’s ever been.

It’s mostly unnecessary and doesn’t meet real needs.

It’s destroying the planet.

It’s increasing inequality and undermining democracy.

It’s making things worse for everyone else.

What was the point of work, again?

Oh right.

To meet our needs and a few reasonable wants.

Benjamin Franklin thought we’d all be working four hours per week by now.

But he didn’t factor for greed.

• If we abolished interest and for-profit rent, prices would fall by half and we could all work half as much.

• If we abolished passive shareholder extraction, prices would fall even further and we could work even less.

• If we un-monopolized some land, we could flood the nation with free stone and wood so houses would only cost a few thousand hours to build.

Imagine if you were a debt-free homeowner and everything else cost 25% of what it currently costs.

How hard would you have to work to meet your family’s needs?

Now imagine if we eradicated inflation and your savings today would still be worth the same fifty years from now.

People could actually save and grow old without worry, or having to exploit workers via an investment portfolio.

We must end the “need” for humanity to endlessly pursue money.

There should be a point at which most people have met their needs and can simply stop working for money, reallocating their labor to serving others instead.

It’s time to build a global economic system that actively loves people and the planet.