To Save The World, Stop Working

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]So, I came across two articles. One by the lead anthropologist David Graeber, the other by a blogger named David Keen.

[00:00:06]So, it's a tale of two Davids today. And I'll link both articles in the description. In Graeber's piece, titled "To Save the World, We're Going to Have to Stop Working", he says that our society is addicted to work.

[00:00:19]If there's anything left and right both seem to agree on, it's that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship.

[00:00:28]We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn't working harder than they would like to be working at something they don't enjoy is a bad, unworthy person.

[00:00:38]As a result, work comes to absorb ever greater proportions of our energy and time. Much of this work is entirely pointless. Whole industries, I think telemarketers, corporate law, private equity, whole lines of work, middle management, brand strategists, high-level hospital or school administrators, editors of in-house corporate magazines, exist primarily to convince us there is some reason for their existence.

[00:01:02]>> [snorts] >> Useless work crowds out useful.

[00:01:05]Think of teachers and administrators overwhelmed with paperwork.

[00:01:09]It's also almost invariably better compensated.

[00:01:12]As we've seen in lockdown, the more obviously your work benefits other people, the less they pay. This system makes no sense. It's also destroying the planet.

[00:01:22]If we don't break ourselves of this addiction quickly, we'll leave our children and grandchildren to face catastrophes on a scale that will make the current pandemic seem trivial. If this isn't obvious, the main reason is we're constantly encouraged to look at social problems as if they were questions of personal morality.

[00:01:38]All this work, all the carbon we're pouring into the atmosphere, must somehow be the result of our consumerism.

[00:01:44]Therefore, to stop eating meat or dream of flying off or dream of flying off to beach vacations.

[00:01:50]But this is just wrong.

[00:01:52]It's not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It's our Puritanism. Our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures.

[00:02:00]If you want to save the world, we're going to have to stop working.

[00:02:03]So, Graeber is kind of getting into the whole Protestant work ethic and its impact on the way that we approach work, the way that we approach pleasure, and whether we are allowed to enjoy ourselves. You know, that's something that that comes up for me sometimes where I'm like, "Yeah, I would like to relax and enjoy the weekend, but I didn't accomplish everything that I wanted to do in the week, so sometimes I might let the work that I was supposed to do in the week encroach on my weekend."

[00:02:29]Also, the fact that I even structure my life according to that sort of 5-day work week and 2-day weekend that the regular working population subscribes to, or at least much of it does. I mean, I know there are people who work on Sundays, who work on Saturdays, who have no days off, >> [snorts] >> or only one at some point in the week.

[00:02:49]But, for all my talk of the need to rethink work, to move towards a post-work society. I would have spoken about this stuff on my channel, of course. I'm still beholden to a lot of those societal pressures and expectations around work. Of course, the kind of work that I do, the creative work that I do, it does For now, that work schedule is working for me, but it is something to think about, right? This idea that even when I have some autonomy from the expectations of the capitalist economy, I still go along with those expectations in my day-to-day life. I do, for the most part, enjoy the work that I do, which is why I'm able to keep up the pace that I maintain, but it certainly overwhelms me at times. Now, the kind of work that I do is anomalous, so I'll go back to talking about the jobs and excessively productivist labor that Graeber is talking about in this article. 70% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide comes from infrastructure, energy, transport, construction.

[00:03:49]Most of the rest is produced by Meanwhile, 37% of British workers feel if their jobs are entirely unnecessary.

[00:03:57]If they were to vanish tomorrow, the world would not be any the worse off.

[00:04:02]Simply do the maths. If those workers are right, we could massively reduce climate change just by eliminating jobs.

[00:04:09]So, that's proposal one.

[00:04:11]Proposal two, batch of construction.

[00:04:14]An enormous amount of building today is purely speculative.

[00:04:18]All over the world, governments collude with the financial sector to create glittering towers that are never occupied, empty office buildings, airports that are never used. Stop doing this, and no one will miss them.

[00:04:29]I feel this way about some of the new constructions that I see around Trinidad because I see a lot of luxury apartments being built when much of my generation literally can't move out of their parents' house. Why are we doing this?

[00:04:43]Because luxury apartments are a place for the wealthy to invest their resources.

[00:04:49]They can store their wealth in these luxury apartments even while they keep them empty.

[00:04:53]So, those apartments are so lucrative that they'll continue to be built even as they're not being occupied. While the people who actually need housing have to wait around for the Housing Development Commission to get around to building their houses and with all the with all the corruption and nepotism that comes with that. A lot of commercial real estate in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain, is also empty.

[00:05:15]It's languishing. It's just sitting down there being unused because the rent is exorbitant and it's better for those real estate owners to just hold on to these empty buildings, these empty office buildings, and commercial spaces rather than allowing them to be used for more useful ends.

[00:05:33]Continuing the article, proposal three, planned obsolescence.

[00:05:38]One of the main reasons we have such high levels of industrial production is that we design everything to break.

[00:05:43]What's become outmoded and useless in a few years' time.

[00:05:47]If you build an iPhone to break in 3 years, you can sell five times as many than if you make it to last 15. But you also use five times the resources and create five times the pollution.

[00:05:57]Manufacturers are perfectly capable of making phones or stockings or light bulbs that wouldn't break. In fact, they actually do. They're called military grade.

[00:06:07]Force them to make military grade products for everyone.

[00:06:09]We could cut down greenhouse gas production massively and improve our quality of life. Now, it's interesting [snorts] to me that Graeber is advocating for government regulations here to force these corporations to make these military grade products for everyone.

[00:06:24]For one because, you know, Graeber was an anarchist, but also because even though we see some use some benefits to the occasional regulations, these are stopgap measures that defeat the overwhelming tide of structural incentives.

[00:06:40]You know, the economic system is designed to produce cost-cutting machines. It's designed to produce planned obsolescence because it's designed around endless growth. And corporations have to find ways to increase their growth, to increase their returns year upon year. And they'll do that by making the consumer suffer, by making the planet suffer. And so, while regulations can step in in certain specific localities and provide a stopgap, I think we need to be thinking bigger in terms of the changes necessary to transform the economy and improve our quality of life. But as the article concludes, these three are just for starters.

[00:07:19]If you think about it, they're really just common sense.

[00:07:22]Why destroy the world if you don't have to?

[00:07:25]If addressing them seems unrealistic, we might do well to think hard about what those realities are that seem to be forcing us as a society to behave in ways that are literally mad. And as the article there, he makes a solid point about the kinds of nonsense that we as a society and economy are putting up with for absolutely no reason.

[00:07:44]Beyond the maintenance of this nonsensical and unsustainable status quo. And speaking of which, that brings me to the next article by David Cain, written in 2010 on Raptitude.com, titled Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed. Now, he starts off the article talking about how he had been traveling for some time as a kind of a backpacker.

[00:08:05]So, he was a lot more conscious about the kinds of costs he was incurring and how he could reduce those costs as he went from country to country. When he got back from his travel, he returned to a 9-to-5 existence that, as he says, exposed something that he had overlooked before. That he had spent much less per month traveling foreign countries than he did working a regular job at home.

[00:08:30]He had more free time. He was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world. He was meeting new people left and right. He was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time.

[00:08:39]And somehow it cost him much less than his 9-to-5 lifestyle in one of Canada's least expensive cities. And so, it got him to thinking about why it was that he got so much more for his dollar when he was traveling than when he had returned home and gotten back into his job. And he references the example of the way that companies encourage us to spend consume. You know, I talk about some of these examples all the time. One of the examples he uses that marketing psychologists found out that the best way to increase toy sales would be to target the advertising to children so that children would pester their parents. As he says, big companies that make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away to satisfaction with money.

[00:09:24]We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what adulthood would be like, to to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is.

[00:09:38]How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven't used in the past year? Now, I'm not much of a consumer. I very much try to save as much money as I can. So, the kind of barrage of marketing and hyper-consumerist culture, that doesn't really get at me. But, I have noticed that the more that I would work in a week, the more likely I was to spend more money on stuff. For example, if I worked really hard Monday to Friday, I'll be more likely to buy outside food, for example, or treat myself to the occasional matcha. And this brings us to what Keen is talking about in this article, the real reason for the 40-hour workweek. He's only been back at work for a few days, but already he's noticing that the more wholesome activities are quick are quickly dropping out of his life.

[00:10:24]Walking, exercising, and reading, meditating, and extra writing.

[00:10:27]The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

[00:10:34]Suddenly, I have a lot of more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago.

[00:10:41]When I was abroad, I wouldn't have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours.

[00:10:47]Now, that kind of stuff feels like it's out of the question.

[00:10:50]Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days. The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It's also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that's really all the time I have on a weekday. And this is a problem for so many people who are working nowadays, right? You spend so much of your time working that you don't really have anything left in you for anything else.

[00:11:11]As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a short amount of time.

[00:11:17]You think this would lead to shorter workdays, but the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business. Not because of the amount of work people get done in 8 hours. The average office worker gets less than 3 hours of actual work done in 8 hours.

[00:11:29]But, because it makes for such a purchase-happy public.

[00:11:32]So, Graeber was talking about how much of our work is pointless and how much of our work is literally destroying the planet.

[00:11:38]And Cain here is talking about how doing that amount of work feeds right into destruction of the planet. You know, that kind of work day is profitable for big business.

[00:11:49]Because keeping free time scarce is the whole point. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television and commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

[00:12:03]We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have.

[00:12:15]We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing. And if we stopped buying so much, if people stopped buying so much, the economy would collapse and never recover because the economy is built on growth. It's built on this endless consumption. The culture of the 8-hour work day is big business's most powerful tool for keeping people in the same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

[00:12:38]The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

[00:12:51]Now, this article is written back in 2010. Let's see how much of this still applies, right? Dissatisfied but hopeful. I'm not sure how many people are still hopeful, but maybe that hope is unnecessary for being a perfect customer after all. Uninterested in serious personal development. I guess the keyword there is serious in the serious personal development because a lot of these stuff that is being sold people now is sold under this kind of marketing packaging of personal development, of things that would improve you as a person.

[00:13:20]Highly habituated to the television. I would say while television is still relevant, more so highly habituated to shorts, reels, TikToks, whatever short form content there is.

[00:13:32]Working full-time, that still applies.

[00:13:34]In fact, people are working overtime more and more.

[00:13:37]Earning a fair amount, that doesn't really apply. Wages in a lot of industries have stagnated. Minimum wage has stagnated in many parts of the world, including my own. And yet, people having less money to spend does not mean that they won't spend money.

[00:13:52]I've noticed that people of my generation will tend to spend on the little luxuries, you know, the creature comforts, almost because they've accepted the fact that they will not be able to actually purchase long-term stability in the form of housing and that kind of thing. And yet, people are indeed still indulging during their free time and somehow just getting by. So, my takeaway with these articles was relieved that the workday, the traditional workday, is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for making the changes we want to see in the world. And as I've spoken about on my channel before in my video on why nobody wants to be working class, unions have historically fought to change these circumstances, but modern unions are very much caught up in a reformist posture. And the nature of so many of our contemporary workplaces and approaches to work has left, I think, a lot less room for organizing. I made a short post about this on Substack a couple weeks ago.

[00:14:51]I said, "Workers nostalgia for the high point of trade unionism must confront the real conditions workers are facing in the 21st century. It's not just legal obstacles and corporate interference that limits unionizing efforts. People are unemployed, underemployed, on precarious contracts and gig arrangements, tied to BS jobs they want to get out of, and over productivist jobs that literally don't need to exist at all, or need to be curtailed significantly, all in the context of a globalized, imperialized world.

[00:15:21]I'm speaking to the service sector in the global north and south, as well as the manufacturing sector and primary sector.

[00:15:28]A lot of these jobs need to not exist, which means people need to be looking to build escape hatches, not continuing to cling to institutions that presuppose the permanence of wage labor. I highly question the ability of unions to break free from the terms of set by the capitalist economy.

[00:15:46]I'm not saying it's entirely impossible.

[00:15:48]I just think the likelihood of it being the case is extremely low.

[00:15:52]Because over the decades, they have very much been integrated into the capitalist economy. They have very much capitulated to the permanence of capitalism as an economic system. I continue to post, I'm not saying give up the labor access of struggle entirely, but these issues can hardly be dealt with by funneling one's blind faith and energy into unions and electoralism. Especially for those in the global north, we must attend to the fact that the rest of our economies are all being, you know, those of us in the global south, are subordinated benefit of your rulers. We exist at the pinnacle of economic and political power, and to a lesser extent, your workers, who derive some benefit from imperialist plunder. We need alternatives prefigured on the ground to set the foundation for a livable relief from this rat race and sustain further social revolution.

[00:16:39]Fighting to entrench jobs that are ecologically destructive and or socially meaningless should be a much lower priority than building commons and alternative economies that can create a material basis for autonomy, so that people can have the option to refuse exploitative destructive work.

[00:16:55]Not saying it's easy to organize, but to me that should be the north star in establishing smart goals toward that end. Smart goals being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.

[00:17:07]I feel like having vague goals is not nearly as beneficial to us if we want to construct a better world than actually picking a goal, a smart goal, and sticking to it and seeing it through.

[00:17:20]Developing a specific strategy that will get us toward our goal within a certain time frame. You have to be step-by-step in your process. And that's what I was talking about in the video I made last year. What if we run a revolution like a business?

[00:17:34]Yeah, the title was tongue-in-cheek, but I hope that people went beyond that kind of surface packaging and took away those useful messages from the script itself.

[00:17:42]And one of those is that we need escape hatches. You know, we need to pool our resources toward creating those escape hatches. We need to build infrastructure that can hemorrhage the lifeblood of the capitalist economy itself. The lifeblood being labor.

[00:17:58]Confrontation is inevitable. We have to confront. I speak about that opposed side of the equation all the time. But we also need spaces to, quote unquote, walk away. You know, borrowing the title of that Cory Doctorow book. To get to that point where such a struggle is viable and able to advance our liberation rather than feeding us into the state's meat grinder and struggling on the capitalist terms. If you can, put your money toward projects that are actually going to build that autonomous infrastructure. And I point to some ideas of the kind of projects you could get into in my how to revolution video.

[00:18:32]As we set up that network, more and more people will be able to break away from the jobs that are literally destroying the planet. No matter what sector of the economy we're in, put in those skills toward constructing something better. As always, all power to all the people.

[00:18:48]Peace.