- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:
Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:
•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),
•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.
EDIT: for people who didn’t pay attention to my “think about Appalachia” comment.
Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn’t mean the people around you can too.
Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn’t know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.
And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of “grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family” - and who suddenly won’t be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.
And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that’s how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.
Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because “free trade” and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.
You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I’m afraid you’re going to.
My adult life has been an experiment in disengaging from the economy and reducing liabilities. To a large extent I’ve succeeded; I live off-grid, taking care of my own energy, water, sewage and most of my digital stuff. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve never been able to simultaneously hold down both a full-time job and the will to live for very long.
I can confirm that the above (structure, community and identity) are indeed missing from this ‘freedom’. It is gnarly lifestyle.
A friend of is doing the disconnected thing out in the woods pretty similarly to you. Built a cabin, got it all set up, farms, hunts, his grocery bill is probably a tenth of mine, very simple lifestyle. Last I heard from him the fun was wearing thin and another winter living that way was pretty daunting. I should try to get a hold of him and see how he is. I had a teacher in highschool that emphasized “One foot in, one foot out” meaning not to completely disengage from community and modern living, but to deliberately and purposefully keep that other foot out, spending time in nature, keeping material possessions limited, and being grateful for the comforts available by removing them occasionally.
One thing that I think many people don’t realise is that it can actually be the opposite of a simple lifestyle, at least if you want to have modern levels of comfort. Setting up and maintaining your own infrastructure is actually really complicated and daunting. And unless you have the serious money needed to invest in things like boreholes and 10x redundancy for solar in midwinter you will always be juggling and tweaking and faffing around with water filters, vehicles & trailers and generator spark plugs, just as a few examples.
You should definitely try and get in touch with him - especially if he’s really out in the sticks it will probably do his mental health a lot of good!
There are great things about living like this too, but you know how it is; the grass is always greener on the other side and it’s easy to take things for granted…