this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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The image accurately depicts what would happen to 98% of all people: lying dead by the river, starved or killed or died by disease.
When I saw the pic all I could think of was the horrendous amount of ticks that person may now be hosting.
I've never heard of this rampant deadly disease that targets the unemployed.
Go work in an ER. The homeless are super susceptible to all kinds of diseases.
I doubt that in a society of abundance and equality, everyone would choose to live homeless.
Cool, soooo if we're all no longer working, then who's taking care of food production? Shelter? Medical care? Defense? Maintenance? Etc.
There is a happy medium.... everyone not having jobs is not it. A lot of jobs are hard work but benefit society heavily.
Think of it like a Star Trek esque utopia. A lot of people have jobs, but only to further themselves and grow as people. Noone has to take a job which takes all of their waking moments just so they don't die if starvation.
Yea and star trek has replicators...let me know when those are available.
Where does the abundance come from if nobody is working?
Ok here's my pitch: murder the top 5 billionaires and liquidate their assets. That's 2.5 trillion. Everyone on earth gets like 300 bucks. Keep doing that until it evens out a bit. Also grow a vegetable garden.
Money's worth comes from the ability to buy someon else's work with it. If no one is working money is worthless.
Good, buy someone else's work by trading for it with some of your own.
when no one works, this person will not have blue jeans, shoes, socks, shampoo, toothbrush, underwear, shirt, soap, domicile, clean hygienic food, sanitary conditions, assisted travel... electricity for their internet points - just for starters.
Sure, when noone is forced into wage slavery, everyone will just waste away and do and produce nothing. That's why we all died out before humanity discovered various forms of servitude.
You seem to use 'slavery' and 'employment' as interchangeable. These are separate concepts.
No, they are not. Not in most countries.
from Now and After by Alexander Berkman, Chapter 3: Law and Government. Available to read for free here.
You seem to have absolutely no idea how many people just died away in those times. You need food and health care, nobody will just give that to you. It will be survival of the fittest again, much more extreme then what we have today.
You seem to assume that everybody will have enough of everything and we all live in happyness and joy, only doing what you love.
That's of course BS. You will be fighting for your survival and chances are you'll lose that fight. Only thanks to our civilization it is possible at all to sustain that many people.
Tribes were found to actually take care of their old, unlike us.
Can confirm.
We also sent the mentally unwell ones who hoarded all the bananas into the forest alone...
This is a romantic view on that. In reality, 'old' meant 30 years old and then people died pretty soon. There were no real old people. And the very young also died left and right, that's why women had to throw out one child after another just so the tribe wouldn't go extinct.
That's also not very accurate. Old = 30 is why there are many ways to measure.
6 kids dying before the age of 4 and one guy living to 60 means the average age is 30.
The point is people died very frequently and in no way could we sustain the current population if we went back to those practices. Even if some people got older, a tribe needs a huge surplus of young people to survive. And everyone had to pull their weight one way or another. If people stopped working today, most would absolutely die off and that's it. It is beyond me how some seem to think it would be some kind of paradise where everyone has everything they need. Delusional.
You trust info from the same ones that enslave you?
Your username checks out buddy. I'm not enslaved btw.
That's what they all say
You're saying there is a giant glowing orb in the sky watching you all day, and you're not allowed to look at it?
Thank you for summarising the mentality of capitalism and why one guy has a trillion dollars, a few others have billions and the rest are fighting for their survival as you describe.
Yeah, thanks for even more BS. Nothing I said is linked to capitalism, at all.
Enlighten us, how would it go in your mind. Why would you not just fucking die, who will provide for you and why.
It is still possible to gather and grow food and trade with others, even create luxury goods, without having what is considered a "job".
It's a really odd concept that you wouldn't be able to enjoy the world and that you would immediately die without your job.
Ok listen, we're 8.3 billion people on this world. If everyone goes back to growing and gathering their own food, there is no fucking way you can sustain this population. There is not enough land for everyone to grow their food. There is not enough food to gather if everyone depends on it. There will be a massive fight over resources, where a very small subset will come out on top, a massive amount of people just die and then a good portion of people who will try to survive by serving the winning group.
And no matter where you land, IF you even happen to be the lucky one who survived, you have enough land nobody is strong enough to take from you and you happen to resources in your area you can gather, doing that will be a full time job, massively labor intensive. No matter if your 'regard' this a job or not.
BTW. You can live your dream of gathering your own food right now. It's called being homeless. Knock yourself out.
Sure, we don't have enough space on the planet to farm, even though we do it currently and waste 19% of all food. Communities can farm together and share things. Not every way forward is Mad Max.
Its sad that people can't even fathom a world where people aren't fighting each other to be on top and just want to fight and murder to control all the data centres.
Lol. We can sustain and oversupply right now BECAUSE people do their jobs. This becomes absolutely impossible if people just stopped. Do you even have the slightest idea how many people have to do their job in order to build the simplest of machinery needed for modern farming?
Who is building the machines and equipment needed for that? Ok, just for fun - let's imagine someone still does that in your world without jobs, why would they just give it to you or someone else? In exchange for some bones and pretty stones you've found in your backyard? What can you possibly provide that's worth even a fucking tractor? This is so delusional I have really no words for it.
If you think it's so easy and great then go get your like-minded buddies and just do it. What's stopping you? Nobody will care if you play somewhere out in the wilderness.
You clearly have never have touched a plant. The amount of work required to farm and feed yourself in a single year is immensely labor intensive. That's just one person. Try doing that with a family of just 3 or 4.
Well I guess it's good that very few people would choose to do absolutely nothing if they could literally do anything instead of settling into something they don't like at all just to survive.