A Solution to the Problem of Work
A New Approach to Community Building
Nietzsche once wrote that a man with a why could endure any how.
He was right. People have a great ability to endure hardship if they have a good enough reason. This rule holds across numerous domains, and its constancy allows us to exploit it. The best reason for doing so is to make the sour moments of life more bearable.
With this in mind, we should address the most prevalent of these moments: the workday. People work and dislike doing so. Their disdain for work is a common complaint. Yet they could be content with work if they had a sufficient reason. Therefore, we must consider ways to generate better reasons for working. As these are found and assumed by laborers, work becomes more tolerable.
So, we should reflect on why people work and discern better reasons.
Why People Work
People work because they have needs. Working allows them to fulfill those needs. Their needs are accurately described using Maslow’s hierarchy, and work fulfills them in manifold ways. Work ideally meets workers’ needs thusly:
Physiological: Work allows people to earn money they can then spend on consumer goods, which enables life.
Safety: That same money can be spent to ensure that the worker’s corpus remains out of harm’s way and to pay for any medical expenses that arise.
Belonging: Employment ensures the worker can remain financially solvent and contribute to a community that might have them. Moreover, the particular job may be valuable to the community they are part of.
Self-Esteem: Work makes people feel they matter because their job is important. The job may also confer social status, accompanied by admiration and power, so the worker’s self-esteem rises this way.
Cognitive: People succumb to boredom. Boredom can be avoided by preoccupying one’s mind with work of appropriate cognitive complexity for the worker.
Aesthetic: People have an innate sense of beauty and desire to occupy an environment that appeals to this sense. They also want to incorporate themselves into this environment so that they become a fixture of it. Work may aid the fulfillment of these desires by providing the material means needed for creating this environment, and it may do so by occurring within a beautiful workplace.
Transcendence: Humans must pursue goals to be happy. Pursuing these goals produces happiness while attaining them yields contentment. Often, these goals emerge from the stories people tell themselves about who they are, what they believe, and what they stand for. Work may fulfill self-actualization needs both by enabling material acquisition and by ensuring people meet their professional goals.
I conjecture that if work ensures workers’ needs are being met, then workers will be happy and content. However, most people dislike their jobs, so work fails to meet their needs. So it behooves those who want to make work more bearable to identify the unmet needs and propose a solution for the disconnect between what work offers and what laborers need.
Why Work Sucks
Work sucks because it either fails to meet peoples’ needs or does so incompetently. My views on the ability of work to meet each American worker’s needs are as follows:
Physiological
Work effectively provides for Americans’ physiological needs. This fact is apparent because homeless Americans, who are normally unemployed, are often overweight. Their rotundity proves that Americans’ physiological needs can be met without income and, therefore, without work.
So work is superfluous for meeting Americans’ physiological needs.
Safety
Work is adequate for meeting Americans’ safety needs. Workers’ safety needs are met in three ways: insurance, workplace safety, and general living conditions.
Insurance refers to safeguards that protect workers from accidents. Work allows people to pay for it. Varying levels of insurance exist. And workers often select their own policies and may elevate them at greater expense. Therefore, work is able to meet this safety need, and its ability to do so is a function of income level.
Next, workplace safety refers to employee safeguards implemented in a job environment. OSHA imposes these regulations, large employers adhere to them, and employees may sue for damages if a hazardous workplace is maintained. Moreover, many jobs expose workers to minimal hazard. Therefore, the need for workplace safety is met well.
General living conditions refer to the safety of one's neighborhood. This safety is a function of income because wealthier people live in costlier areas, which tend to be safer. Moreover, neighborhoods often have income thresholds that must be met for people to inhabit them.
Therefore, work’s ability to provide for this need is a step function of income, and the safety enabled is tiered. So, I think work adequately provides for this.
Belonging
Work does not adequately fulfill workers’ need for belonging. It enables them to finance activities needed to either join or participate in a community, but it fails to create that community. The closest approximation to a community that a job can supply is a group of coworkers whom one might socialize with. However, these associations are shallow because they arise from convenience and proximity.
Some managers know the need for community and attempt to inculcate their employees into a culture that could ostensibly meet this need. Hence, the existence of the phrase corporate family. However, these same managers are often transparently fake; their actions are driven by a desire to retain employees despite their low compensation, and those who fall for the claim are rightly viewed as foold by their coworkers.
From this, we conclude that work fails to meet the need for belonging, and previous bungled attempts to make it do so have hampered future actions.
Self-Esteem
Work mostly fails to fulfill employees’ need for self-esteem. Because work imparts self-esteem by elevating a person’s social status, this elevation occurs for three reasons: salary, prestige, and mythos. Some jobs pay well, some are prestigious, and some are cool. People who occupy these positions may feel high self-esteem because of their employment.
However, most people do not have jobs like these. Their pay is mediocre, they lack prestigious roles, and their jobs are boring. So, work fails to fulfill their esteem needs.
Cognitive
Work fails to fulfill employees’ need for cognitively complex tasks.
Blue-collar work fails to do so because the work is mechanical and requires little thought or creativity. Meanwhile, white-collar work is more likely to stimulate employees’ minds, but many white-collar jobs belong to the fake economy and demand little of their occupants. These jobs are probably so numerous that they invalidate the generalization that white-collar work is cognitively complex.
However, a strange relationship exists between job cognitive difficulty and two economic trends: automation and de-dollarization.
Automation is displacing people in both white-collar and blue-collar roles. Jobs in the former class are disappearing sooner than those within the second class. They lack the immense capital investments needed to replace blue-collar workers. Therefore, moderately cognitively complex jobs are disappearing before less complex ones. But the most complex jobs cannot be automated.
So, the middle stratum is disappearing first, the lowest will disappear later, and the most complex cannot be displaced by automation. The net effect will be to decrease the size of the workforce and raise the average level of cognitive complexity for jobs that still exist. Meanwhile, the large population of unemployed people will either remain unemployed, reskill, or enter the fake economy.
Reskilling will be unrealistic because automation displaces people with low- and midwit-level IQs, and the new skills these people might acquire will likely be replaceable through either automation or immigrant labor. Yet unemployment is a poor option because the welfare state that enables it is disintegrating. So, the most probable path is to find employment in the fake economy. However, the ability to pursue this end is shrinking because of de-dollarization.
De-dollarization, the movement away from the American dollar as the world’s reserve currency, is destroying the fake economy. The fake economy, i.e., that portion of the job market composed of roles that do not produce goods or services, is sustained largely by low interest rates and gross government expansion. These drivers are only able to exist because of America’s fiat currency, financial engineering, and accounting fraud. And the availability of America to maintain a fiat currency depends on the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. This status is conserved by America’s military dominance - which is dissipating. Consequently, the dollar is losing value, and that portion of the economy that only exists because of the dollar’s status as a reserve currency will contract.
Therefore, the fake economy will shrink as the dollar loses value. In turn, midwits and dullards will become increasingly unemployable. Yet members of the former population require cognitively complex tasks and will lack jobs that fulfill this need.
So, a demand for meaningful cognitive challenges will emerge, and an enterprising person might use that. I will not address how to do so here, but this understanding should be present within the reader’s ambient thought.
Aesthetic
Work fails to meet employees’ aesthetic needs. Moreover, it damages their ability to meet them.
Workplaces fail to meet aesthetic needs because they are designed to raise productivity, and beauty is normally sacrificed at the altar of efficiency. Moreover, most business activities do not affect the environment. And those that do are overwhelmingly negative and require either resource extraction or the destruction of nature. The structures built afterward are frequently ugly.
In theory, work as it currently exists might help employees meet their aesthetic needs if they are paid enough to acquire a living space that they can customize to their tastes. Some people achieve this, but it is hardly the norm.
Transcendence
Work fails to meet employees’ transcendental needs.
Transcendental needs are met when the job held coincides with the stories a person tells themselves about who they are, what they aspire to, and where they ought to be. For example, a person who dreams of becoming an astronaut will feel their aesthetic needs being met when they become an astronaut - or when training in flight school. But if the aspiring astronaut becomes a retail worker in a dead-end job, they will be miserable because the dream will forever be beyond them.
Transcendental needs are also met, albeit less well, when a person has a cool job, such as a pentester (hacker). Cool jobs meet them because everyone likes to feel cool.
Most current jobs fail to meet transcendental needs because they exist to disseminate low-quality products for a corporation, provide mundane services for an alien community, or manage a bureaucracy.
Identifying Pain Points
Work satisfies employees’ physiological and safety needs. It fails on the other five points. Work will become more appreciable if it meets the other five. Therefore, employee happiness and participation rates will rise if jobs can be restructured to better fulfill the five pain points.
The five considerable points are:
Belonging
Self-esteem
Cognition
Aesthetic
Transcendence
And the question to be asked is:
How do we approach work in a way that improves jobs’ ability to meet these needs?
I have an answer. It came to me first as an epiphany and later as a deduction.
I created the Guild Pill to elucidate it.
And I created Elenarda to apply it.
The Failure to Unify Workers
Workers need a community to satisfy their need for belonging. Some workplaces try to satisfy this need by calling employees a corporate family and imposing mandatory fun and insincere cultures. These all fail because the people involved are motivated solely by profit. The motivation is obvious, the manipulation is transparent, and nobody can retain their self-respect while participating in corporate culture.
So, the community of workers must be unified by something other than the pursuit of profit. Some industries can plausibly assert a unifying principle, but these assertions are often insincere or political. Insincere assertions succumb to the problems already addressed. Political motivations tend to create toxic work environments for other reasons, which the Woke cult has made apparent.
So, an alternative principle is needed. It must unify a community while allowing its members to meet their higher needs.
In retrospect, the principle was obvious.
Aesthetics as the Solution to the Problem
People have aesthetic needs. They recognize these needs by imbibing artistic media depicting worlds superior to ours. People resonate with a few of these and wish to trade their lives in the mundane world for one in the more beautiful vision portrayed in their preferred media. If they move toward this goal, then they will be happy.
At the same time, many of these fantastical worlds can be created in part - if not entirely.
And certain jobs provide goods and services useful for creating such a world.
People who work to realize their aesthetic vision will be satisfied with their work because it helps them move toward their desires.
So, people will be happier if their employment aligns with their aesthetic dreams.
And it plausibly could.
However, dreamed worlds are holistic, and one working alone cannot realize them. Therefore, their creation requires a network of artisans who share the same aesthetic vision and coordinate to bring it about.
Such networks do not exist at the moment. But they could, and the internet allows us to discover like-minded individuals and coordinate our activities in unprecedented ways. So I propose a new type of organization that could create this network and organize its members’ productive activities in pursuit of their shared vision.
I will use the familiar term guild for it.
Aesthetic Guilds as the Solution to the Problem of Work
Aesthetic guilds should exist. People who resonate with a shared aesthetic vision should form a union to pursue that vision. They must produce works to realize that vision, develop the skills needed for its achievement, and create a new culture to produce and sustain the vision once realized. Members will include artists who elucidate the vision, workers who bring it into being, and hobbyists who consume but do not participate.
Such an organization can enable work to address the five pain points in the following ways:
Belonging: The guild is a community dedicated to an aesthetic. Participation within this community should provide a sense of belonging for its members. Participation may take many forms. These include creating cultural products, developing relevant skills, or consuming and advocating the guild’s works. Participating in this way makes the member a living form of the aesthetic and contributes to the guild’s mission.
Self-Esteem: The guild sponsors an aesthetic vision and builds a culture around it which members must adhere to. Hierarchies of value will emerge within this culture, and guild participants may ascend hierarchies. Being less populous than the larger society, the guilds will have shorter hierarchies, and the tops will be achievable for those within the guild. Thus, people will feel a greater sense of self-esteem by participating in the guild because their relative contributions will be greater than those within the broader society and because they can distinguish themselves within them.
Cognition: The guild must build its culture to ease members’ interactions and bring about their shared vision. The culture requires artifacts. The creation of these artifacts provides members with cognitive puzzles they can solve, which, once solved, allow them to distinguish themselves within the guild.
Aesthetic: By presenting an aesthetic vision as the unifying principle of the guild, all actions and consumption taken by the members when acting according to the guild’s aims will satisfy their aesthetic needs.
Transcendence: Aesthetics lend themselves to stories and professions. People who join the guild and adopt the aesthetic as an identity can achieve their transcendental needs by adhering to archetypes within the aesthetic and completing works appropriate for that archetype.
So, by using aesthetics, rather than profit, as workers’ unifying principle, work becomes tolerable and an aspirational pursuit that more effectively satisfies workers’ needs than current labor models.
Understanding this, I began the Mosaic project to create these guilds. Their creation will free mankind not from work but from its intolerability.
And I created Elenarda, the space guild, to be the first.
