But it isn’t decoupled.
Uhh.... I know? I literally just said we need to decouple it. This isn't an argument, dude. This is like me saying "we need to abolish slavery" and you saying "but.. we have slavery".
There are people whose work directly enables your survival, and that of everyone else’s around you, as well as their own.
Okay? No one wants critical work to stop, especially those doing it.
Food production, mining, logging, maintenance of infrastructure, just to stay basic.
Yep.
These people need to be compensated too
This is what I'm talking about. Everyone deservers a good standard of living regardless of the work they do. Stop thinking "work = living". Stop operating under the principle of "no work, no food".
and they can’t just opt out
??
Cause if enough of them do, or if the ones who don’t are just not performing well enough, everyone is fucked.
This is a needless concern. There will always be people who want to do the "dirty" work. You truly underestimate peoples' ability to find satisfaction in necessary work.
This fixation that we don’t need to work to live is moronic
Ha. I have a quote for exactly this sentiment:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
just because your job is not essential doesn’t mean no job is.
Excuse me? Truly, honestly, what? Who is saying any job is not essential? Did you really think I was saying "we need to stop working", or that "work is not necessary"? Surely, surely not?? What I'm saying is we need to remove the requirement of work for a good life. Work should enhance your life, not enable it.
At its most basic level work is about portioning scarcity.
No, no it's not. Work is doing stuff that needs to be done. Work is producing and reproducing what is necessary for society. Portioning scarcity? Some say money does that, but even that isn't true; at least, it doesn't do it well. And, depending on the goods, scarcity is barely a concern: housing and food exists far in excess of what we need.
You work to be assigned a smaller amount of the hardship pie on your society
Yikes. Big oof, my dude.
Thankfully western society has a very small pie to dole out, comparatively.
Depends what you're comparing it to. Maybe the poverty stricken third world, but that's a very low standard to have. Compared to what we are capable of, though, with our level of technology and infrastructure, we're doing pretty poorly.