We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

[hunter]

110. Just curious... does your own hard work make the world a better place?

Do you grow healthy food, do you teach children, are you a health care provider, do you promote birth control worldwide especially in cultures that oppose it, do you build affordable low energy housing? Then maybe you are doing something useful. Maybe. I've done all those things, but I still have doubts about my impact on the earth. As a U.S. American the cards are stacked against me. Hell, I own a car. A really shitty $800 mid-eighties car with a salvage title that I don't drive much, but that's still stomping on the earth a lot harder than the times I've been an entirely feral invisible person with nothing more than I could carry.

Everything beyond the basics is an elaborate game where the "winners" torture the "losers" and the earth is destroyed in the process.

Paid work does not make you free. It's frequently a more comfortable flavor of slavery.

Sturgeon's Revelation that 95% of everything is crap is especially applicable to modern economies.

The world would be a much better place if certain people didn't "work" so damned hard, if they stayed home, read a book, played with the kids, or puttered around in the garden.

The "Protestant work ethic" and other cultural work ethics have outlived their usefulness and now serve only to destroy the natural environment that supports all humanity.

Entire sectors of the "global economy" ought to be shut down for our own good. The fossil fuel industry is one. If we can't do that on our own terms then Mother Nature will do it on hers. We are not the first innovative species to experience exponential population growth only to crash, and we won't be the last.

In the blink of an eye our civilization will be a peculiar layer of trash in the geologic record, and the marker of a mass extinction.