Comment by ellius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ellius | Hacker News Reader

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Hannah Arendt draws a useful distinction between "labor" and "work." Labor is effort required to sustain life: catching food, finding water, plowing crops. Because living creatures need these things continually, labor never ends. Food is eaten or decays and new food must be grown.

Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique.

In ancient times, labor was looked down on as something that slaves did. The lowest in society did the back-breaking, life-sustaining work anonymously, while rich, propertied elites built empires, wrote philosophy, and invented new technologies.

The world has changed since then, but I think there's something useful in that distinction. Capitalism transmutes nearly all work into labor. Almost every profession feels like it's performed solely to "sustain life" whether it's plowing fields or producing software. It's all just a salary. So I'm not surprised when I hear that people feel they have "nothing to show for it": they usually retain no ownership of the things they create and it all seems like one long endless task.

Completely different angle:

We're primates who by nature are very hierarchy oriented. We judge our lives by how high in the hierarchy we are. And no matter how rich society gets, how good our homes, health, food supply and culture are, we still end up on average in the middle of the pack.

And maybe that's what feels like you have "nothing to show for it".

Explanations based on evolutionary psychology tend to neglect the social or psychological adaptations that are responsible for complex society. The validity of the claim that we would be happier as hunter gatherers, for example, is really difficult to assess from the perspective of someone embedded in modern human society. The high level of interdependence (sometimes called organic solidarity) changes everything.

The tendency of evolutionary psychology to assert that life is governed by primal instincts established in harsher times isn't politically neutral.

Sure, you can dress up most any argument in some plausible sounding evolutionary psychology argument.

But "people really care about social status" does not rest primarily on that at all. I just threw that in to sound a little Malcolm Gladwell.

PS The tendency to deny evolutionary psychology isn't politically neutral :)

Roosevelt said that "comparison is the thief of joy".

I suspect the modern media doesn't help, it is full of people appearing to live richer lives than are attainable by the majority.

Perhaps we need to impose some real hardship on ourselves now and then to remind us how good we have it.

I like this. I very much like this. I feel what you described matches the problem almost perfectly. Modern economy seems to be transmuting all kind of work into labor.

In particular, in white-collar work is something that abstracts you almost completely away from reality. You come in, do whatever arbitrary thing you're asked to, and get money for it, which you can exchange to services of the modern society. Any contribution you may have is separated by a couple layers of abstraction from its real-world result, so there's almost nothing you can point to and say "I made that".

Your comment also reminded me of my own thinking on a slightly different subject - maintenance. Maintenance is essentially synonymous to "labor" here, the repeatable, unending activities needed to support things we want, as opposed to being the things we want. It's something I always believed we should strive to get rid of entirely.

> so there's almost nothing you can point to and say "I made that".

Really? I'd hazard a guess that most of Hacker News could point to the websites and apps they made and say they made that. What else would be on a developer or software engineer's CV?

Same with many other white collar jobs. Designers and media creators/artists can easily point out what they've worked on, as can writers and journalists, or scientists or academics, etc.

You don't have examples of projects that live on an intranet, belong to a client, or make a thing "go" in an industry you'll never interact with?

You've never worked on a project where you contributed a handful of pieces to a million piece puzzle, of which your contribution is nearly unnoticeable?

And can you say "I made that" when legally, and in the eyes of most, SoftwareCompany Inc "made" it?

> What else would be on a developer or software engineer's CV?

Job roles and responsibilities.

> most of Hacker News could point to the websites and apps they made and say they made that.

Maybe I'm particularly bad at it. I list some projects I've made on my site, and I notice that they lean heavily towards my earlier days of programming - they're learning artifacts in various states of completion, and represent a small fraction of code I've written. Ever since joining the job market, I've made things I can't show off because they're internal to the workplace, or internal to internal customers, or simply I've contributed pieces of work all around the stack. Most code I write these days builds either something I don't own, can't present, or is just a small piece of the overall whole.

You could be an Anarcho-Nativist and go back to living in tribal, hunter-gatherer societies and spend all day foraging for and hunting food just to survive and have nothing to show for it.

But it's Capatilisms fault.

You're assuming that I'm implying capitalism is "bad" and that no other form of society could produce the same effect. I don't believe either of those things. I've actually made many pro-capitalism comments on HN before. But it's sort of thoughtless to conclude it has to be one or the other. A complex system can have both good and bad effects.

Not assuming anything about your personal beliefs per-se but imagine we're friends and I know you well and we're having a philosophical discussion over some beers and it's an offhanded, sarcastic comment I chime in with to pillory those who would take such a statement as "see, it's capitalism's fault!"

> Capitalism transmutes nearly all work into labor.

In your opinion, was there ever a system where that was not the case? If not, then you can't really say that it's capitalism which transmutes work into labor, no?

Do you think there could be a system where that is not the case (apart from an anarcho-communistic utopia as in the Culture series)?

I'm not sure, I'd really have to think about that one. I'm pretty sure there has never been a society where the bulk of activity was not labor. That seems necessary by definition: you can't build things if you don't first sustain life which can build it, so "work" is necessarily a luxury of surplus. But I do think the idea of transmutation might be unique to capitalism. If you're really interested in thinking about this stuff I'd recommend going to the source and reading Arendt and other political science. This idea specifically comes from "The Human Condition," which I've just started.

EDIT: Sort of a follow-up thought: capitalism might actually be the escape mechanism that allows the bulk of activity in a society not to be labor. But the tradeoff is that all work is "transmuted" into labor (or feeling like labor) since everything is priced and a salary becomes the means of subsistence. I'm just spitballing, but I thought it was an interesting enough thought to add.

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