I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
What would allow that isn’t communism, but a “post-scarcity” society, much like Star Trek TNG. A lot of what we take for granted can only happen thanks to the commercial logistics of fucktons of materials going around.
I’d devote more time into programming, performance optimization, processor architecture and computer graphics. These things are still “magic” to me and there aren’t many resources, especially on the “bare metal” graphics part of most recent parts. Once I figured it out enough to feel confident in passing that knowledge around, I would do that in english and portuguese
One thing that I’m already doing thanks to my job giving me a decent salary for only 20h of work is my own game project. Something that I’ll probably end up selling, but I’ll probably be the first to release a pirate/free version of it, too.
Yeah it’s easy to do whatever you want as a job when matter/antimatter reactors give unlimited energy and replicators can use that limitless energy to create any object.
I get three days off a week and just got off of a 3 week long vacation and I slept a bunch lol. Played videogames. If I could never work again I’d just relax and enjoy food and entertainment.
I would cut cars in half and weld them into the other halves of other cars
You jest, but my dad actually had a friend who did this for a living with Ford Pintos back in the day, and one time an inspector of some kind remarked that he made them safer than they were when they rolled off the factory floor.
Not jesting 100% serious
Even better. Supposedly, there’s a guy around here who flipped the frame of his pickup truck around so it looks like he’s driving backward down the road. Get creative with it!
Lenght or width wise?
Diagonally.
Yes.
Like imagine taking a big ol dump truck, and putting the back from a regular pickup on it so it’s just a monster pickup. Saw one like that once.
Or imagine a sports car front, with a station wagon back. Like a shooting brake but more shootier.
Or utes like they have in Australia, love those
Make hybrids?
Produce documentaries, develop a video game
I would love to do those too!
I also jump around with this. Like I would definitely read more. But there’s a part of me that would love to write books. But also male music. But also paint. Basically I would do something in the realm of art.
I wouldn’t mind having a part time job doing something physical. Like I used to work at a warehouse for a medical supplies company. It was probably one of my favorite jobs. I could see myself doing that again. Gives me a reason to get out of the house, be active, and people will always need the supplies. Ironically I lost the job because we got bought out by one of the world’s largest corporations so they could make even more money, and they closed us down. So I lost that job because of capitalism.
I’d be that guy that makes all those useless inventions, except they’d be incredibly useful to me and like 2 other people.
That’s how many great inventions benefitting the entire world happened :)
If I wasnt working a job for money I wouldn’t be doing anything that contributed to making food or providing infrastructure. What I did with my time would probably be considered useless by society and that’s why I’m not doing it as a job currently.
I too would never do anything to serve my interests or the interests of my community!
Thank God for our capitalist overlords for keeping us in check. We thank them by making them even more mega rich.
What would you when you get in this undefined yet not capitalist utopia and are forced to work long hours at a job you didn’t choose to help further the cause of the revolution?
I’d be writing a lot more music
Reading. I have lots of books I want to read but not enough time / energy to do so.
Jesus Christ this post sucks
If only we had a voting system to express whether we thought a post meaningfully contributed or not!
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spoiler
sadfasfasdfsa
I’m sorry that a harmless question on askLemmy bothers you so much :(
luke’s poor feefees. :(
I’d play music for my community. It’s alright by myself but I love an audience.
Get involved in whatever community food garden is around.
Make art. Give it away.
Basic research. I left basic research because research in academia is a lost cause, killed by lack of funding, hyper toxic environment, rat race to the bottom, mafias and corruption.
It is so bad that I feel a much more morally cleaner environment working in finance.
I would go back doing what I used to do, but without the baggage that forced most of us to leave
I’m trying to change careers into medical science research…
I did a bit in big pharma… But it was 90% paper work unfortunately.
Probably a smaller firm would have been better, but I was tired of lack of job security and I went for safe bets.
I am now in fintech. We still struggle with corporate mindset, particularly IT, we are highly regulated as pharma, but at least we are not stuck in the 90s as I was when working with SAS in pharma. And salaries are slightly higher.
At the end you don’t need much to be successful outside academia. In academia it is literally a scammy lottery. Outside, you just need to be a bit pro active. Standards are pretty low. The biggest difficult is to convince hr that you are good fit without industry experience. HR people unfortunately do not think as reasonable beings. They wouldn’t do hr if they were reasonable. But once you manage to start, even the most “complex” job in industry is pretty trivial, you’ll be more than enough doing the bare minimum. If you put a bit of effort (even not much), you’ll be very successful
I appreciate the advice
Same thing I do now, but instead of full-time work / part-time student, I’d flip it to part-time work and full-time student.
I’m hanging on to the bottom step of the medical ladder - this field is fascinating as fuck, and even as just a tech I get a lot of satisfaction in my role (albeit minor relative to doctors or nurses) in helping others recover from whatever sickness/injury they present with.
Without the financial barriers and current need to work till exhaustion to afford rent, I’d be highly interested in going all the way to physician, but at the rate I’m able to actually afford the time and money to take classes, I’ll be pushing 40 when I’m able to clear the hurdle from tech to nurse; and it already hurts to move half of my fucking joints, so once this nursing shit is finished, I don’t see myself climbing any more ladders, literal or otherwise… at that point it’ll just be the counting the days till retirement or planning out the most pleasurable way to commit suicide.
Same. Almost completely the same except our jobs differ. Work is going to kill my goal to be more specialized in the medical sciences. It’s depressing. I’m hoping to at least land in the field of research.
I’d still be a programmer. I’d work on open source projects 100% of the time. It’s something I love to do.
Man’s got to eat though. I still work in an area that makes the world slightly less shitty though, so it’s not all bad.
