My point was that most of your money is used just to allow you to... work. No transit if you have no work, nor a need for a flat in clean street, or to "buy time" .. Without work that's exactly what you reclaim: time. Without work you just need a cabin in the wood under the tropical sun, a bicycle and cheaps hoes. But you need your netflix, 3G, clean street, low emission car, nice flat because... you work. Good for you.
Henry Petroski argues that necessity isn't the mother of invention; luxury is. Nobody is going to sit around inventing a fork when they're hungry. They're going to invent a fork in their off-time while sulking about the gravy stains on their cloak from that mutton slipping off their knife. Luxury is also the prime motivator in work, not money. There's a reason even the homeless need money, and why they "go to work" sitting on a street corner to collect it, rather than relaxing at the library reading Milton. While it is possible through vanishingly specific methods to subsist off the grid with no financial interaction with the rest of the world, the fact of the matter is there aren't a lot of hunter-gatherers left in the world because it sucks. I give you a "cabin in the wood" somewhere temperate. Let's say you've got 5 acres planted and you know how to fish. You're going to spend a lot of your time (your given time, because I've just handed you one hell of a leg up over everyone else) subsisting - tending your crops, catching your fish - but not every waking hour. Even presuming you have two spare hours a day, what are you going to do with it? Watch leaves fall? Scratch cave drawings out of charcoal? The minute you decide you'd rather read Harry Potter, you're going to find yourself needing excess cash. And what are you going to do for it? Maybe sell some fish? Congratulations, you have a job, fisherman.
Your only argument for innovation as a luxury byproduct is a negative one: Foraging for food in a cold cave wont let you invent forks. Living a decent life without meaningless job, might make the society more innovative. May be the innovators in a society less driven by consumption might try to build meaningful invention, not sporks, or a bigger iPhone. But that's just wishful speculation on my part. I like when you say Luxury is what you work for. I just tried to refute Francopoli's ironic comment about working for money. Because working, in the end, cost you most of the money you get. But, if it is luxury you crave, I have to admit working is probably your only legal path. Investing still has a greater profitability.
Because working, in the end, cost you most of the money you get.
i'm not sure what kind of work you do, but this certainly is not the case for me. The only cost I can think of that is tied to my employment is my clothing. I wouldn't have as many sports coats or dress shirts/pants if I didn't have a job. -that's it. That costs me maybe, .05% of what my job provides me.
The only argument I made for innovation as a luxury byproduct, you mean. I did link you to a book, after all. "Living a decent life without meaningless job" is what most of us do, by the way. There's this value judgement in the entire discussion - if all jobs are meaningless, and we all work jobs, then we're all too stupid to determine that our jobs are meaningless. Which, considering we all spend the majority of our waking hours there, implies a stunning lack of self-awareness. So on one side, we have experience and daily living. On your side, "wishful speculation." Still, you admit "if it is luxury you crave... working is probably your only legal path." Worthy of note: luxury, for the purpose of this discussion, has been set at "flatware." And not even a full set - the evolution of the fork derived from the knife, which is most assuredly not something you're going to forage for, even if you're a practiced flint knapper. Yet you still throw out this canard about investing. Investing what? Nuts into trees? Or money? Money which comes from an exchange of goods and services, also known as a job? It's kind of amazing how you can embrace the philosophies of the subsistence preppers and the 1% simultaneously while casting aspersions on all the people in a middle that have somehow figured out a way to enjoy working for a living.
I don't see any irony in francopoli's comments. He describes money as a tool to exchange work for other things. He doesn't say anyone is working for money.I just tried to refute Francopoli's ironic comment about working for money.
Maybe I am reading too much into this. The core human drives in this life are for a safe, clean place to live and a belly full of food. A secondary would be for social interactions (family, community etc). Every society uses the tools available to make these things happen; they are one of the driving forces that pushed us from hunter gather societies to agricultural villages. In the old days the tools used were muscle, both human and animal, and the rough resources of the land. We also had an average live expectancy of 40, half our kids died of smallpox and measles and most of us starved at least for a part of the year. Now, we write checks from the money we earn and learn how to do the other things via the collective social intelligence of society. Everyone works unless you have a trust fund or lottery winnings, and even those resources were created by work. Are you trying to make a point here that I am not understanding?But you need your netflix, 3G, clean street, low emission car, nice flat because... you work. Good for you.
How much money do you have in the bank? If you stop working now, how many years could you live with that money, in a decent cheap house (in a cheap part of your country, not even in a cheap foreign country) Remember you do not have to work: so no transit, no representation shopping, plenty of time, so you can enjoy repairing broken furniture instead of replacing it, you can enjoy cooking instead of going out, etc.. You can fish, but will more likely buy fish... fish are cheap. How many years? Those years measure the part of your income that go into paying for the obligatory expense your working lifestyle impose upon you.And that's my only argument: money you get from work is overrated, it is mostly useful because you work. There must be a case for a sustainable innovative world where we work 15-10-5h/week. But obviously we will be too bored to indulge in it.
Adding: Your link implies that self-sufficiency can be accomplished in 2 acres of selective, intensive agriculture, which is a number I've seen a few places. If you delve deeper into it, you'll see that the hour estimates for that sort of lifestyle hover around 10-16 hrs/week for half the year, and 2 or less for the rest of it. This is a great book - it was reprinted in 1973, first published in 1929 or so. It still implies mechanized agriculture; you can subsist on 5 acres if you have a tractor, a truck to get your produce to market, and a house pre-built. There's this real Chris McCandless vibe to a lot of young mens' concepts of self-sufficiency without really grasping that Chris McCandless starved to death 5 months into his odyssey even with someone else's hunting shack to live in. A more reasonable and sustainable approach can be found in Shannon Hayes' Radical Homemakers, which solves the investment capital quandary with "freeload off your friends and relatives until you don't have to anymore." Which gets to the crux of the issue - money exists so that people without nepotism can function. If you have nepotism, you don't need money. Even then, subsistence farming is a job just like any other. Its hallmarks include difficult manual labor, long hours and outsized risk exposure due to weather, market forces, blight, etc. I love me some Mother Earth News as much as the next guy (had a letter published, in fact!) but even the most die-hard preppers will point out that self-reliance is hella hard work. There's a reason jobs specialized. I'd much rather make hundreds of dollars a day pushing faders than averaging less than a hundred dollars a day milking cows. As a result, I arranged my education and experience to further that goal. That doesn't make me deviant, that makes me normal.
This assumes you know how to raise food, which is much more involved than throwing seeds into dirt. That is the one I was thinking. There is a romantic version of going back to nature, living off the land etc. There is a reason it is a romantic fantasy; go talk to a old farmer for a few hours and that fantasy comes crashing down. I have the added benefit that I have friends living on farms so I get to see how the sausage is made and have no desire to do that on my own. Bingo. I make ~100 per billable hour; doing a lot of things would be a good learning experience but there is an opportunity cost that needs to be added to the equation. The concept of an opportunity cost is one of the things I have trouble explaining to people.Your link implies that self-sufficiency can be accomplished in 2 acres of selective, intensive agriculture, which is a number I've seen a few places.
There's this real Chris McCandless vibe to a lot of young mens' concepts of self-sufficiency without really grasping that Chris McCandless starved to death 5 months into his odyssey even with someone else's hunting shack to live in.
There's a reason jobs specialized. I'd much rather make hundreds of dollars a day pushing faders than averaging less than a hundred dollars a day milking cows. As a result, I arranged my education and experience to further that goal. That doesn't make me deviant, that makes me normal.