Pain is all about avoiding worse pain. It drives the conformity that drives the world.
For most individuals, the worst recurring sensation is the anticipation of having to going to work. Alarm clocks are terrible impositions, even if billions have had it unimaginably worse.
Stress is another word for inefficiency. Some folks just want to be left alone to pursue their hobbies, like writing this article. In return they would surrender any rights at respectability or even reproduction. If only there was a way to get paid for that. They would gladly live in a tiny mobile home, give up pretensions of fashion and style, make do with uncool transportation, and only eat processed food products. Health insurance smealth insurance. Freedom until death.
Of course that would be too easy. Simple options don't benefit the System. Artificial barriers, thresholds, rules, regulations, and monopolies exist to enforce the consensus. People may live in an approved manner, or not at all.
Those who can't manage the treadmill face fates worse than death, from homeless shelters to crimes to prisons. An American homeless shelter is better than being a medieval peasant, even with the risk of violence, but it's still a fate worse than death. Anyone who has faced the dread of eviction knows the world is really an evil place. It doesn't have to be, unless the majority wants it to be so, which they do.
We were promised automation would make most labor redundant. By the year 2000, people would be paid to do nothing. Leisure would be the leading social problem. How did that turn out.
People still have to suffer to survive. They even come to love their controlling forces, like how Stalin's audience couldn't stop clapping after his speeches.
The problem is not work itself, but the deliberate frictions, bureaucracies, and inefficiencies at the base of everything, including the ordeal of getting hired in the first place.
When barriers go away, the economy can sometimes go into overdrive, as in Hong Kong and West Germany after 1949. Unfortunately, that requires the system to become less evil.
The goal of progress should be maximum free time for everyone, if not an endless vacation. In this dream utopia, robots would do most of the work.
There must be many brilliant people out there. If only enough of them were lazy.
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Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
More original scientific, sociological, and technical ideas than any science fiction novel ever published.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.
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