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Comment by missingpint | Hacker News Reader

Having work one finds valuable is.

Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.

Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.

IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.

You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.

Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.

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> Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift".

I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.

I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set to even out wear.

There might be someone who can rotate one tire and not four.

I would hazard this peculiar skill is uncommon.

"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."

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