I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
I’m sorry what do you think happened before capitalism existed? Do you think that all Indigenous peoples were struggling to survive before white colonists came and enslaved them? Capitalism has created suffering around the globe.
Wait wait, do you think the rest of the world was in perfect harmony until the white man came?
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
Where the fuck do you think African slaves came from? Most europeans didn’t enslave them, they just bought them in the well established african slave markets after other africans and arabs enslaved them first.
In North America, do you think the indians only started scalping when the europeans appeared, or that it was a common practice in tribes that were at constant war with each other?
In South Africa a lot of the land europeans got was payment from tribes for help fighting other tribes.
Did europeans cause extra suffering in the places they colonized? Definitly.
Were those places peaceful before that? Fuck off.
I’m not pretending that every place that Europeans colonized was some utopia before but Colonialism made all of these places worse. On top of that you’re completely generalizing huge groups of people and their practices.
Oh yeah, native American scalping was so bad. Surely worse than Europeans coming in and massacring 100 million native Americans, expelling them from their homes year after year, torturing them for existing, enslaving an African population, building a nation on their backs, then invading nearly the entire earth, causing mass suffering.
Oh yeah where were we? Scalping and inner-tribe fights. Man that was wild!
I said in my comment that Europeans made it worse. I was just saying that those places were never peaceful to begin with.