I am with Mangetout on this one. Only one job with 40 hours of easy work. Sign me up!
Heck yea! Even if I have to work five, eight hour days, no problems. OTOH, Three 13.34 hour days would be better. Four tens, would be OK as well.
When do I start? Do I get to choose what shift I work? If so, I want 3rd shift. A big plus is that while I work well with others & enjoy doing it, I do like to work alone as well.
My attitude about others not working or “not carrying their weight” is already “I will worry about me, & they can worry about them”. So I will not get upset about being the only one working.
One of my core principles of work is “Wait and see if there is a workaholic who wants to do it”. There usually is, if you hold out long enough.
Another of them is "If you have to do it, plan it well and get it done as efficiently as possible’. But that is the antitheses of the 40-hour week stipulation.
Q: What if the person who gets stuck with the job is Dilbert’s colleague Wally?
Yes if the job is intrinsically rewarding (by my own personal definition of such) or if I’m the only one that CAN do it. However, I’d better never be cleaning a toilet or organising a cupboard EVER again in my LIFE.
The problem is that doing things for people and having things done for me is my currency. So if I’m doing stuff for the entire world and nobody is ever doing anything for me to make my life easier, then in my mind that’s the entire world giving me a big “fuck you, we don’t care about you and your life.” That would be…problematic.
Not volunteering. Apart from anything else, it would be lonely.
Depends. Is this a lifetime gig (a working lifetime, that is, e.g. from age 22 to 65 for us college types), or a short-term thing where I do this for a few years, then someone else takes a turn?
The former? Definitely not. Being odd man out for life would really suck. Everyone else would be out doing fun stuff, while I’d be stuck working. Also work itself would be kinda lonely, being just me.
But could I do it for a few years, to keep the party going for everyone else, on the assumption that there would be other people to pick up the slack when my turn was done? Sure, I’m that altruistic.
I don’t think the hypothetical presents enough of a dilemma. I mean, sure, it will be annoying seeing everyone playing Frisbee outside while I’m slaving away all day. But I work all day now. Working all by myself, without annoying coworkers, would be a dream. Plus, I imagine I’d be a beloved celebrity of sorts because I would be taking one for the entire team. Everyone would love me. Who wouldn’t want that?
I think it would be harder for me to say “yes” if the job was stressful. I like being busy, but I don’t like being stressed.
I think the interesting part of this question comes from how other people are allowed to treat you.
What if nobody on earth can physically harm you, but they can say anything they want to you, whether it’s praise, insult, or demeaning your mother? What if it means every day someone’s going to tell you this is a stupid, unfair system and you’re a fool for participating in it?
Doesn’t change the economic calculus a bit, but I think we’d find people’s generous nature suddenly evaporates when they aren’t being praised like heroes for doing a job which, at the end of the day, is ultimately self-serving.
Lot would depend on the mindset of people living in a culture where only one person needs to work. Might take decades to develop, but IMHO one person doing a job that is needed but uncommon is usually (1) Revered or (2) Hated and feared.
I would do it. I actually like working; I’ve had one sort of formal job or another since I was like eight years old. I like the structure it gives my life and the ability to sometimes tell people “Sorry - can’t help. I have to go to work that day/time”.
I’m one of those workers who will come in early, stay late, work weekends, all without complaint, as long as I am part of a team of people who are all pitching in to get the task done. I have absolutely no issues with hard work, as long as it’s fairly distributed, and somebody isn’t busting their ass so somebody else can skate by (which, in my experience, is a huge issue in a corporate workplace - people are often jockeying for position to take credit, or deflect blame, in pursuit of self-aggrandizement).
So, considering the OP’s hypo, I’d be wary (unless, as others have noted upthread, I get some serious kudos and rewards for my sacrifice). If you all want to be lazy, I’ll join you.
I would have to. It’s just a net happiness calculation. I could put a really high modifier for my own happiness, and I’d still have to do it. Otherwise I’m responsible for the working world being the way it is now. Nobody having to work is better than that.
Fortunately, you’ve added a bunch of qualifiers that make it sound like it wouldn’t be that big a deal. It honestly sounds better than many jobs today. Plus I’m pretty sure that I’d run into people thanking me. Even if only 0.01% of people cared, that’s a ton of people.
As proposed in the hypothetical it makes literally no sense for me to refuse to work - though I’m concerned that I would experience a marked decrease in quality of life by doing so, since I currently have a cushy desk job that offers thirty days of vacation (plus a half-dozen paid holidays) a year. I can easily -easily- imagine that the One Job To Rule Them All would be much less pleasant than my current job - if nothing else it sounds a tad lonely (I’m on good terms with my co-workers).
So yeah - if the One Job is worse than my current job, then I’d be reluctant to take it, especially since there are other people around who would be more likely to see it as a lateral move or an improvement. If one of them could do it instead of me, then why not let them?
But if it HAD to be me - if I and I alone had to be the one saving the world, and it wasn’t awful, then of course I’d do it. I’m not some kind of monster.
Huh? It’s the fact that it’s not self-serving that would make it easier to quit. If it benefited you, then you’d want to do it anyways. But since you’re really just doing it for everyone else, having them all be completely unappreciative makes it a lot harder.
Though I’d argue that the threat of you stopping would mean they’d be hesitant to do that. The same reason that it would be easy for you to stop is a huge threat to them. Maybe some individuals make the calculation and think they’d rather work, but society as a whole? Not so much.
It’s actually a nice bit of leverage. That would be what I’d use if I were mistreated. I don’t need to stop. I just need to make them think I might, and that all I expect is decent respect to keep going.
Though, now that I think about it, should I leverage my position to try and fix other ills in society? Not having to work suggests a post-scarcity society, so a whole lot of the impetus to evil has been removed. Still, there would be greedy people, and maybe I could influence that.
I mean, I find myself having to use anger management tactics now just because I get hit with how shitty the world is at times. There is so, so much room for improvement. Wouldn’t I feel the obligation to try to fix it?
But I’d also probably bite off more than I can chew, given that I can’t hire anyone to help make plans. I’d have to rely on volunteers, and then the volunteers would have power, and so on. I have a feeling I’d be like Puzzle in The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis.
Still, like I said, the alternative it worse, so I’d morally have to do it. I just have to keep my power minimal, I guess.
That’s it! Thank you. Not exactly as I remembered it, but still close to the point. It’s point-adjacent.
There would have to be careful negotiations and publicity control. But if there’s no one else working then I can’t hire a PR firm, can I? Hmmmnnn. I guess I’d have to befriend some bloggers since there’s no media in hopes of getting the right message across.
In general it comes down to this: By the very nature of human guilt, the fact that it’s unfair, will cause them to invent reasons why I deserve my fate. It’s the same thing many people do to the poor and the homeless. We need to believe that misfortune is earned, because otherwise it could happen to us.
One also can’t help thinking that the only worker would have a lot of power. If absolutely everything else is being done by machines, then this has to be a job of analysis and making choices. It’s also human nature that some people won’t agree with those choices.
But if I’m the only worker then I can control the message, and make sure that everyone know I am honored by my position. I can also make my decision processes know, so that everyone understands why I do whatever I have done. That should also mitigate the bitterness.
