Work and Useless Jobs

Last Friday, I shared the following clip from the TROM documentary with my English Club in Irkutsk, Russia:

After watching the video we had a discussion about work, motivation and automation. You see, most of today’s jobs are pretty useless- they do little more than contribute to an unsustainable system that’s based on the need to grow profit. Since money (profit) doesn't represent the resource that exist on our planet, and we live on a planet of finite resources (which globally are not managed intelligently), this becomes problematic as it is simply not sustainable. Most jobs just feed this system and do little to truly motivate or inspire people (think about accountants, cashiers and factory workers). Most jobs can also already be automated, and will be automated as soon as it is profitable enough for the big boss to do so. This will lead to more and more unemployment, and problems such as people not having the purchasing power to buy the goods and services that are created. And that’s just one scenario of the system’s collapse. There are hundreds of others 😉

In our discussion, Ivan mentioned some nice advice about what one should do when they’ve quit their job and have spare time to figure out what they want to do with their lives. -Basically, take it easy at first, eventually you will start doing stuff that you’re interested in, through this, you will most likely figure out what you really enjoy doing, and if you really dig into this, eventually you will probably figure out some way to make money/support yourself by doing what you like. Hopefully :)

My take on the whole job thing is a little different- I wait until I’m down to my last few hundred dollars, then I find my way to some rich country, where I can work for at least $20/hr (usually in a bar or restaurant) and save as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. After I’ve saved enough money, I quit the job completely and go back to traveling around the world and doing what I want on Earth (for the past year, I’ve replaced the “traveling around the world” with living in Irkutsk and working on https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/, while volunteering for TROM and TVP, and hiking guiding on weekends 😊). So for me, it’s easier to separate working for money from my lifestyle; and to minimize working for money as much as possible (the longest I’ve ever had one full-time consistent job was for 7 months, and I've been living off of the money I saved from that job for over a year and a half now). You can read more details about this on my site if you’re interested.

This blog called, "Being a Responsible Adult", relates to this discussion: https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/single-post/2018/05/07/Being-a-Responsible-Adult

And here is one that details the last time I had to work for money: https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/single-post/2017/12/02/Where-I-am-Today-and-How-I-Got-Here-Part-1
I call those periods of my life "the job game" :)

Here is a picture from the last time I played the job game on the North Shore of Hawaii :)

*read the blog for detail :)

And a pic from my last English Club meet up ;)