Some ruminations on the nature of work

Scarcity of individual items is the cornerstone of our economic and political systems. We're taught to fear scarcity. The strange thing is that all the stuff that are artificially scarce usually have alternatives. Yes, scarcity drives us to work harder than we need to in order to provide for things that we don't need. However, when a society's failure to ensure a supply of basic resources, that work becomes tantamount to slavery as essentials become scarce.

Everything requires some kind of work, but in better systems, were not working so that someone else can get a higher yield from our productivity than we do. That's just giving away energy. Rather, we can redefine what we call work into a form that aligns with enlightened self interest.

Living a sustainable lifestyle takes a lot of work and energy, I'm at it all day, but it's my work, my energy and my time that yields returns for my family, myself and my community (and, I hope, for the wider world in general). Luckily, I can do my thing in sync with my ongoing health problems, taking frequent and long breaks and whole bedridden days off. I don't count posting on Steemit as work. The returns are far too small for the time and effort spent. Rather, it is a way to learn and also to hone and strengthen my ideas by writing for a receptive and reactive audience of like minded people. One day, I may make a full income writing, but I doubt it will be here.

By working for ourselves, we can choose what is a free lunch, then we can keep that lunch or give it to someone else. It is your own definition of free that makes it so. How much energy do you put into something before you stop considering it as free? The amount will vary from person to person, day to day and even mood to mood. People are so used to working for someone else that they begrudge giving stuff away because they're used to seeing the fruits of their labours being taken away. I'm proposing we change this.

You are doing great work and I see your returns in your posts and pics of the food you eat. Your personal work is benefiting the world

Crypto is often touted as the answer to all our woes. Yes, blockchain and crypto take work, but they are generative processes the results of which are easily made distributable. For every process, something is generated and can be given freely. Blockchain and crypto do have a weak area - so much of the production falls to miners, in a way centralizing what we want to be distributed. It's getting that way with Bitcoin now, only big players can make anything out of mining and once they get together and truly understand that they are the source of production, we will see big changes in the whole field of cryptoeconomics. There are, however, other options in the works, holochain, for example) that take the distribution and decentralization ideas further bit they are still in their infancy.

For the time being, most of us need a financial income of some kind to allow us to trade further than within our local community as well as to connect and deal with the remnant structures of governance. Mortgages are a prime example -
most of us have mortgages that will tie us to the banks for the foreseeable future.

Of course, the structures controlling the system at the moment don't want things to change. In Australia, our government introduced a Goods and Services Tax (GST) that was implemented to stop the dreaded 'Black Economy' of cash deals and trades that escape the net of the taxation system. On the largest scale, it works as planned and many small businesses and sole traders were run out of business, but the cash economy continues stronger than ever.

There is another tax in Australia, that is Child Care. Many people work at least one day of their working week to keep their children in Child Care for the time that they spend working.

Then we have Superannuation. A compulsory savings and investment amount is deducted from our wages for 'our future needs'. It was planned to relieve the government of the need to pay Aged Pensions to retirees by providing amazing ROI on the money saved. Has it worked? There have been many years when people's Super Funds have gone strongly in reverse, many lost hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight during the GFC and returns since then haven't come close to compensating.

Subtract one more day of the working week for income tax and add in travel time, fatigue and the resultant bad moods and we start to see that our work is directly influenced bu structures that that we must question the sanity of.

The solutions are many, but the two I focus on are redefining work and Universal Basic Income.

In part 2 of this article, next week, I'll explore my findings on both.

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