I'm surprised by some of the attitudes in this thread. Work isn't a good thing. Money is the only thing that makes work "good" for the mental health of the majority of people.
How many of you claiming work is a good thing would carry on doing your job if you won the Euromillions quintuple roll-over? If not, why not? If you would, you're either lying to yourself or you are in a tiny minority (potentially true, given the demographics of U75).
Puddy_Tat mentioned the basic income thread and I assume he meant the most recently one that I started. It's worth reading through some of the links I and others have posted, if not the thread itself. Those links show the vast amount of research which has been done that show that the best way to get people out of poverty is to give them money for nothing. Punitive sanctions or 'nudge' policy or whatever else is less efficient than just directly giving people money, no questions asked.
So it's money. Everything is money, in this society at least.
How many of your posting on this thread that work is good for you see yourselves as socialist? How do you square mental well-being with exploitation by capital? The plight of the unemployed and the issues they suffer is not because of a lack of work; it's because of a lack of money and a way to meaningfully contribute to society due to the capitalist mindset being dominant. Imagine a post-capitalist/socialist world where 'work' was what is needed for society to function and not what is required to further enrich an elite: would you still be so happy to go number-crunch risk data for loan defaults? Or photocopy legal documents for multinational companies to sue other multinational companies? Why not, if work is good for you, then it's better than idling.
How do you explain attitudes like this, which are surprisingly common:
I'd like to work a lot less hours - say a couple of 8 hour days a week, or a couple of hours a day Monday to Friday. But I do quite like work in moderation and would hate to be unemployed.
I'm disappointed the Leisure Age, where work is done by machines, hasn't yet arrived. Instead most people I know seem to be working harder and longer.
"Would hate to be unemployed"; "disappointed that a world without work doesn't exist." Which is it? And I don't mean to pick on you specifically, metalguru. This sort of contradiction is common.
Work is shit. There's maybe 1% of people who truly enjoy the work they do (percentages are all made up on the spot, that one included), and there's a bigger but still tiny percentage of people who don't mind the work they do, but would still probably quit if they were mega-rich. The rest go to work to slave away for a boss who doesn't give a shit about them, and don't enjoy either good pay or good working conditions, and the only good thing about the job is they get money to be able to get pissed at the weekend and maybe go on holiday and buy some shoes and whatever else. It's not good for the soul, it's not a measure of worth...it's just an absence of crushing poverty and social stigma.
