Thread by @scottsantens

What if everyone spent every waking hour making really cool things? How cool would that be? Well consider also that there would be no hours spent enjoying anything created because everyone would be creating not enjoying.

Are the things actually cool if no one gets to enjoy them?

6-day weeks used to be normal. Then 5-day weeks became normal. It's past time for 4-day weeks to become normal. There's just so much stuff being created, and increasingly by machines. Humans need more time to actually enjoy all the stuff and life itself. We need to shift gears.

But what about all the jobs going unfilled? Paying people more per hour for fewer total hours per week would make many jobs more attractive, and the people filling those jobs would be less exhausted and more productive. Plus they'd have more time as consumers to create more jobs.

A lot of time is wasted doing things that no one need do and that machines could do instead, and a lot of time isn't available to do all that needs doing and to enjoy what all gets done. It's time to find a new 4-day balance just as we did decades ago with the 5-day 40-hour week.

It's not about being lazy, just as it wasn't back then when people working 60-hr weeks thought 40 hours was just pure laziness. This is about maximizing productivity and also well-being. It's about realizing that the point of breadmaking is to eat it, and its enjoyment has value.

The hours of our lives are limited. None of us know how many total hours of life we have. Should we really spend so many of them just proving our right to exist? Or is our right to exist inherent, and our time so valuable that wages should be higher and our weekends longer?

As we look at how things could be different now and in the years ahead, I hope work as a value in of itself is eroded. What matters is what's actually getting done, and how much we actually get to enjoy what gets done. Automation should be seen as a goal to create more free time.

As long as people fear automation because life is tied to work, we won't automate as much as we should, and people won't benefit as they should with less work and more time. We have to manually make that change with unconditional basic income operating as an automation dividend.

With bare survival no longer coupled to work, that will not lead to less of what we need done getting done. Stuff will still get done. The stuff no one likes to do may need to pay more though, or get automated, or involve fewer hours per week, all of which are positive outcomes.

We as humans are not beasts of burden. We have the technology to accomplish more with less time and fewer resources. But there exists a culture that worships work itself as a kind of god and that's willing to even sacrifice humans at its altar. We have to defeat this god.

The best way to defeat a god is to no longer believe in it. Evidence will not kill it because it exists on faith. I don't know what will erode this faith, but I'm hoping that shorter work weeks, automation, and UBI will play a role.

To defeat Work, we have so much work to do.