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I remember in college reading "Laborem Exercens", despite it's very religious justifications, had a major point that resonated with me about the "dignity of work". In my interpretation of it (as a 20 year old), it argued that much of man's (and woman's) meaning in life is derived from the work that they do because of the interactions with the earth that work often creates. If you take that away, much of life's meaning tends to fall to the wayside as well.

That being said, if I stop to think really hard about whether I'd enjoy 12 hours of farm work or 12 hours of video games, I can't say I really know which one I'd prefer. A tired, overworked me says the video games. But I know having had several days of uninterrupted laziness before, that I'd quickly feel lost and unhappy with the video games as well because there's no "larger" gratification from them than whatever immediate feedback the game system provides.

"A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm."

This is not at all self evident, can you back up this statement?

"orders of magnitude"

So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

> So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

You can't put an exact number to it, but you could argue that in some ways people living today are infinitely more fortunate than people living a century ago. I recently got in an airplane and flew 700 miles in two hours to visit my mother. The richest person in the world a century ago did not have that option. That's just one of many, many examples.

We could argue about whether having all these new options makes people "happier". But more options means more people are able to do more things, which gives more people more ways to figure out how to be happy. Another example of options that the richest person in the world did not have a century ago is this very conversation. Presumably we are both getting some satisfaction out of it, or we wouldn't be here at HN. Nobody living a century ago had any such option. Multiply that by all of the myriad things that we have available that people then did not. That huge expansion of possibilities is basically what the grandparent is talking about.

People a century ago rarely lived more than ten miles from their mothers.

If that is true (I'm not so sure it is--lots of people emigrated between countries a century ago, and many of them left their mothers when they did so), it means that people were drastically reduced in their options, since they never ventured far from their places of birth. The ability to travel further in shorter time has greatly expanded those options.

It could be that mere freedom from discomfort isn't enough to call life good. Anyway, by what measure is a life spent slaving away for twelve hours on a farm worse than 12 hours spent playing video games? Both seem demeaning to human dignity, and the fact that one was "chosen" and one was (maybe) not is missing the point--both states of being are inflicted from without, whether slavery (wage or actual) or alienation. Both are symptoms of systems that dehumanize.

On the farm you can at least tell yourself you're supporting society and that people would starve without your labor. Video games give you no such delusions.

If those 12 hours is working on a farm that you own, I think that produces a very different outcome in the long run. If you can see a buildup of improvements and a reduction of hours over the long haul. Build a shed or a barn, improve the well, build a fence to last, breed the next generation of cattle, plant an orchard, etc. Maybe these operations are hard to fund by themselves, but the popularity of farm-to-table consumption could help bring it back. Being a steward to the land can bring great meaning especially when also getting to raise a family in that situation.

This is sort the situation that a lot of video games simulate, so doing it in real life might just work.

i don’t agree with everything you said but you make an important point here:

“what should really be frightening is the extraordinary poor governance that Americans have enjoyed for the past 20 years. (Seriously, trillions of dollars flushed down the drain on completely pointless wars.)”

those wars were a political attempt to focus americans on an externl enemy and thereby create social cohesion via patriotic solidarity, but vietnam (and to a lesser extent the gulf war) soured us on that strategy. we don’t want to fight random, far-away people we don’t know and don’t threaten us in the least (despite the propaganda of trying to equate muslims with terrorists).

it was literally an attempt to fix domestic issues like the opioid crisis (while also catering to the military-industrial complex) through a reflexive desire to return to post-world war II american prosperity. somehow that failure is lost on many americans, but let’s not do that again.

In a world without objectivity, perception of objectivity and objectivity are indistinguishable. I was using the word as short hand for those very pillars you're referring to; hence 'religion and jingoism'.

It's a false dichotomy. The life spent doing farm work for 12 hours per day, forever, is not to be compared against the life spent in non-productive consumption of entertainment, forever.

The alternative is to spend one's days doing anything at all--whatever a person may find pleasing. That may include playing video games for 12 hours every day. It may also include injecting as much heroin as the person can lay hands on. It might also include writing out a 1000-page mathematical proof. Or breeding rats to have better bladder control and better responsiveness to humans. Or designing a near-space habitat suitable for supporting a population of humans indefinitely. Or deciphering ancient scripts. Or building a roadworthy vehicle from scratch. Or building cosplay outfits. That kind of life completely blows the farm work out of the water.

A lot of jobs only get done because someone has to do them in order for everyone else to live. Those jobs compete with the things that don't need to get done, but people want to do because they think it's challenging, interesting, or fun. Nobody thinks that a job that can be done by a stupid robot is challenging, interesting, or fun. Boring, mind-numbing drudgery does not give anyone purpose.

It's not that people are bad at generating their own world views. They are bad at reconciling the colossal dungheap of comforting lies that have been fed to them for most of their lives with the objective reality that is starting to sneak past it, as lines of communication start to route around the gatekeepers that have traditionally been able to control the spread of information. The confidence and faith were never deserved in the first place. The story that could have previously been quashed by a local news editor, before reaching a national or worldwide audience, can now be spread instantly via social websites, and so too can the unfounded rumors of a malicious gossip. Before, people had to trust their kings, bishops, bosses, and touts. They had no alternatives--believe my bullshit now, or wonder forever what the truth might have been. Now, they are faced with a whole world filled with story-tellers, and are forced to decide whether any given person is trustworthy or not. For obvious reasons, the rulers that were formerly trust-because-you-have-to were lax in teaching those subject to their info-control about how to detect falsehoods or think critically.

The institutions formerly relied on most people believing them when they told plausible lies. They will be forced to educate people in critical thinking, now that everyone can be a believable liar on the Internet, because otherwise people will be more likely to disbelieve when the institutions tell lies, and also disbelieve them when they tell the truth.