Is Work Bad?

Do communists have a point?

So, recently Little Ben Shapiro made a bit of an oopsie-doopsie. He parroted the typical boomer talking point that “work is good, actually:”

https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1767634328732013030?s=20

The reaction to this was swift, with people of all political predilections dunking on Shapiro by characterizing his position as “work til you die, slave.” We have to start by clarifying that Shapiro makes two separate claims here: One is that Social Security is terrible, and the other is that work is good in and of itself. The former claim is extremely obvious and not worthy of much discussion at all, never mind a dedicated blog post. Obviously, people should be allowed to just keep their money and do as they wish with it, with “retirement” afforded to people when they’ve saved/invested enough for it.

It's that second claim that people take issue with, the idea that work is a good in and of itself, and that you thus shouldn’t retire even if, financially, you could afford to. I think there is a substantial generational gap on this question and with good reason. Despite only being 40, Shapiro’s viewpoint represents the boomer mindset that work is basically the point of life, or at least one of the top three reasons to live. You are supposed to work, work a lot, and work hard, because “it builds character,” “it gives you purpose,” or whatever other platitudes. Basically, being at work, spending a lot of time and effort on work, is a Good Thing.

Obviously, younger generations may disagree, and this disagreement is borne out quite clearly in poll data:

Taken from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/30/how-americans-view-their-jobs/

One obvious reason for this is that older workers have had decades to shuffle around the job market until they find something that suits them, to work their way up the ladder to cushier positions, and the like. I don’t think the difference is purely due to such an effect, though. It seems quite likely that views of work would tie in closely to beliefs about the economy and one’s economic opportunities in general. It is no secret that young people today tend to have negative views of their economic prospects, with a huge number of articles and think-pieces dedicated to this finding. I don’t feel the need to list them off here, a quick Google search will flood you with them if you care to read more about it.

A potential retort is that this is not actually true and the belief of young people that they “can’t get ahead” is false. Maybe it is; for the purposes of my discussion here, that actually doesn’t matter. The perception is what matters. And it is objectively true in at least some respects. It is general common knowledge at this point that home ownership has become unaffordable for young people, as housing costs have continued to soar over time, along with two other essential areas of the economy, education and healthcare (wonder what happened to make all three of these things so gosh darned expensive, hmmm…).

The common perception for someone just entering the workforce today is that that they need to spend a decade plus and potentially go tens of thousands of dollars into debt just to start a career that might give them some upwards mobility, such as doctor or lawyer. A four-year degree is far more expensive than in the past and does not at all guarantee economic stability or upward mobility. The end result is that large swathes of the younger generation expect to be a pseudo-underclass of permanent renters.

This perception of the world fundamentally changes a person’s relationship to their work. If work can genuinely increase your wealth and social status, you can develop a positive feedback loop whereby putting more effort in at work results in tangible benefits for your life overall. And indeed this idea is part of the “American Dream” narrative—the idea that, while you may not become filthy rich, hard work will at least pay off for you in some real way.

I believe this is the view of work typical in the boomer mindset and put forward by Shapiro in his controversial little rant. In decades past Shapiro’s viewpoint wouldn’t have been controversial at all, I suspect. But if you adopt the millennial/Gen X economic outlook, it’s easy to see why it’s controversial today. If you don’t think that working will ever ultimately get you anywhere in terms of financial stability, it feels pointless. It is drudgery that you put up with because you have little or no choice, as opposed to a means by which to uplift yourself.

Another retort I have heard is that even a permanent renter in the United States in 2024 has an objectively better life than 99% of everyone throughout history, probably including most of the world population today. But people are, understandably, often more interested in the future trajectory of life than in their current conditions. Sure, I’m better off sitting in my air-conditioned apartment than my caveman ancestors were, but I don’t sit around comparing myself to cavemen all day. It is not human nature to think about things in such terms. Human nature is to think about what tomorrow will be like, what next month or next year will be like. I am primarily concerned with and dedicate my thoughts to whether my personal situation will improve or not and how I can influence that outcome.

There may be less of a problem here if the perception was that society has always been and is likely to remain economically stagnant, such that no one really has much economic mobility between generations. But again, this is not the perception we have today. There is a strong perception that previous generations enjoyed greater economic mobility, and that those opportunities are largely closed off to younger generations today. This creates an obvious and understandable feeling that a contract has been broken and that young people today are getting a raw deal.

This is the conflict which creates a legitimate grievance on the part of people, often those who are younger, that tend to espouse “anti-work” views. At root, they are upset because they believe that the rug has been pulled out from under them, that they were promised one thing and given something much worse, that they have been taken advantage of and sold down the river by those who came before them.

I don’t mean to side entirely here with the “work is bad” crowd, because I also believe that this mindset genuinely promotes laziness, envy, and lots of other negative things. It is a viewpoint that is friendly towards communism, and we definitely do not want to throw communism any bones. But I understand why people develop these sentiments, and I think that it is unreasonable to expect that they will change their minds without some corresponding change in material circumstances (or again, at least, the perception of those circumstances).

The analogy I would use here is that of a fixed 8-hour workday compared to a “flexible” job arrangement in which you are simply given tasks that you must accomplish by a certain deadline, and the rest is up to you. A fixed 8-hour workday which requires you to sit in a cubicle for 40 hours a week, regardless of workload, promotes laziness and “quiet quitting.” There is no incentive to work harder or faster if completing your task only means that, at best, you will just be handed more busy work to keep you occupied until the 8 hours is up.

The incentive is thus to simply “look busy” or intentionally drag out tasks for as long as possible to minimize your workload while sitting through your mandatory 8 hours. On the other hand, under a more flexible work arrangement where getting all your work done means you can actually put work away and go do other things, the incentive is now the opposite—you want to work as efficiently as possible, so that you can get as much of your time back as you can.

A manager may feel that it is wrong for workers to engage in “quiet quitting” under the mandatory 8-hours model, but how they feel about it doesn’t change what the material incentives on the ground are. This transfers over to the boomer-zoomer divide in economic outlook. If investing in work actually does get you farther in life, the boomer mindset makes sense. Likewise, if there is no opportunity to gain economic ground, doing the bare minimum to skate by is perfectly logical.

The final cope of the boomer is referenced by Shapiro when he says, “if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job, they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket.”

Indeed, throughout all this I’ve spoken only in terms of economic prospects and completely ignored the possibility that people might work because they actually enjoy work. The meme of “doing what you love” is one that hasn’t quite died yet, although it might be on its way out. In my view, that’s for good reason. The notion that work is somehow supposed to be fun strikes me as utterly ridiculous. It’s right there in the word “work.” By definition, work is not “fun.” It can be fun, sometimes, for a few people, maybe. I am sure that Ben Shapiro has fun at his podcasting job, as do others who get to talk at the world for a living.

But the professional podcaster and similar careers such as “Youtuber” represent the privileged few; the very, very few. It is simple mathematics that most jobs will not be like this because all the other ones still need to get done by someone. Someone has to take out the trash and keep the lights on, and even those in the careers we might initially perceive as “fun” or “purposeful,” such as social media influencer, often suffer from burnout at some point. “Fun” is thus not a defining feature of work. The defining feature of work is the fact that you get paid. That’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, the money.

We can prove this easily enough with a simple thought experiment: How many people would still be willing to do their jobs for zero pay? Perhaps a few, in certain fields. But the obvious answer is: Almost none. Would Ben Shapiro still do his podcast if it brought him zero dollars, or if it only provided him with bare-minimum subsistence wages, because it’s just so heckin’ purposeful sitting there owning the libs all day long? That seems doubtful.

The need for happy-talking work as being “your purpose” ties in to the general inability of people to think of things in anything other than absolutes. Human nature seems to dictate that abstract categories such as "work” have to be either entirely good or entirely bad—very rarely if ever can we acknowledge that a thing needs to be kept at some kind of healthy balance, rather than aiming to totally maximize or totally minimize it.

A couple examples of this are people’s views on government and on race. People tend to believe that government is essentially all bad and needs to be totally minimized if not outright abolished, or that the appropriate solution to any problem in the world is to create a government agency tasked with doing something about it. Likewise, people seem to have a hard time internalizing that different races actually are different without getting upset about it for one reason or another.

In the same way, it seems like people trend towards one extreme view or the other on the concept of work. Either it’s so good that it’s basically the point of life itself, or it’s so bad that it’s literal slavery and we need a communist revolution to put a stop to it. No one can accept that it’s just an unfortunate fact of life that we must put up with, the same as inclement weather or the common cold. Those are another couple great examples, in fact—climate change and COVID-19 hysteria, cases where people hyper-focus on a certain outcome to the exclusion of all else, and then chase that obsession right off a cliff into insane beliefs such as wanting to ban all fossil fuels or shut down all public spaces indefinitely.

Perhaps this is a coping mechanism of some sort, but again, if it is, that’s just what it is—a cope. Just like government, work is what I would term a necessary evil. It usually sucks but there is a good reason why it needs to be there. It would be nice to imagine an ancap utopia where somehow everyone gets along perfectly fine without a state to structure society, and likewise the communist utopia where we are all poets and somehow the lights still stay on would be pretty cool too. In reality there is going to be a government and you are going to have to go to work.

I guess that the way many people operate is, if they have to put up with these things, it’s just more emotionally bearable if they convince themselves that they are A Good Thing, Actually. The boomer “work is purpose” mindset copes with work this way, while the libshit “government is the solution” mindset copes with state authority this way. It would be better if people could not do this and instead accept that these are downsides to life that we just have to try and manage to the best of our ability.

One final observation I want to make is that, while I haven’t bothered to try and find any studies on this, I think it is self-evident that the workplace today is much less connected to a person’s overall community than in the past. There are various reasons for this, but even before people started to work from home, the rise of HR departments and “diversity” probably destroyed a lot of people’s potential for meaningful social interactions at work.

If I could go to a job where everyone shared my racial, gender, religious, and overall cultural identity, I can easily imagine that we might have a lot of fun interacting in the office, going out for drinks after work, or what have you. But this is not the kind of workplace that most people will encounter today. A diverse workplace means a workplace where people don’t share anything in common and thus have little reason to associate with one another. This is further compounded by the politicization of everything; it’s hard to have any real conversations when you have to constantly watch your tongue for fear of upsetting a hyper-liberal co-worker.

Ben Shapiro gets to go to his office and work in a cultural and pseudo-racial (they even got rid of their token black, Candace Owens, just yesterday!) mono-culture. If my work, including even my bosses, was staffed by nothing but fellow chuds, I am sure that I would also view my “career” a lot more positively. I recall loathing every second of high school, for the most part, but with the one silver lining that I would get to see all my friends and we would seize any spare moment to clown around or talk about the latest things. Everything else about high school was garbage, but the fact that I had real social connections there salvaged it to an extent. This was probably a lot more true for the office environment of the past, before HR catlady culture fully settled in. Luckily technology has come along to save a lot of people with remote work, something which might warrant a post of its own at some point.