I often come across stories and comments from various people defending how influencers and content creators do a lot of work in order to be successful. And I get it, because unless already famous, yes, they have to do a lot of work, but is that work valuable? Yes, for the content creator who gets paid enough, sure. But is there actual value in the work being done?
I don't think so.
Because I think that most of the work we do as a species is busywork. It is akin to hammering a nail through thick woollen fabric until it drops, picking it up and doing it again, and again. It is work, but it is pointless. With all the resources and tools at our disposal now, we should be improving the world and our experience in leaps and bounds, yet we aren't. *If anything, average life experience is getting worse with more and more people dissatisfied with the state of the world, and their own affairs.
Perhaps this is part of the reason people accept nothing-work as something meaningful, because there is little meaning in much of what we do. Sure, we can apply it liberally to anything, but that doesn't actually make it meaningful, does it? To actually be meaningful work, it has to go beyond the individual in my opinion and have positive impact on others, whether family, friends, community or the world as a whole. "Making money" doesn't make a job meaningful.
In fact, if we are looking at positive impact, a lot of the money-making endeavours have a negative impact and probably more negative than positive overall. As most money-making activities do a lot of harm through the supply chain, or the effects on some large group of people, so that a small group can benefit. All the money in the world is meaningless if it isn't used in an economic way to improve humanity. It is not that every action will end up being positive, but that should be the intention and general direction.
In the system we have, the incentive isn't to improve, it is to control. Control resources and people. And it isn't some mythical benevolent control that has the best interest of the people at heart. The heart is only seeking for more control and more ways to consolidate and solidify power. Each individual amassing wealth to generate more wealth might not see themselves as part of the problem and will likely justify their behaviour through something like philanthropy, but philanthropy wouldn't be needed in a healthy economic system.
A healthy economic system is one that incentivises growth of resources and wellbeing across all sectors, so that people can thrive with opportunity that is available for their individual skills and traits. Where they can be their best doing what they are good at and likely enjoy, bringing real meaning into their lives in ways that will provide support to others. We shouldn't be consolidating wealth, we should be maximising positive opportunity.
Numbers are meaningless.
Life existed before number systems, and it will exist well after we have driven ourselves into an early extinction. If we could see "the numbers" on the existence of all past species before going extinct, I would predict that humans will be the shortest and probably the only one which will cause its own extinction, knowingly. But it doesn't matter what numbers we have, without behaviours to back them up and turn them into something meaningful, they are useless.
It is about 385000 kilometres to the moon.
Knowing that, doesn't get me any closer to the moon.
Money is much the same. Just meaningless numbers that we add meaning to in terms of trade. But the interesting thing is that the way to make the numbers go up, isn't actually through trade, it is through speculating on numbers. Making meaningless money by speculating on meaningless numbers.
What a sick system.
As said, if the goal is a healthy economic system, then the numbers have to be tied to healthy, real-world actions, not speculating on theoreticals and the imaginary. Wouldn't it be great to get the definitive numbers on what positive or negative impact an action has? With the technology we have today, every step of the corporate supply chain should be 100% transparent, so that the "health" can be independently evaluated. We should also have the real numbers on the positive or negative impact of the products on endusers, the effects on the environment from thought to end of life and disposal costs.
Everything. All the numbers.
And once we see them, decide if what we are spending our time on is worthwhile enough to keep spending resources upon, or should we shift the focus to something more meaningful. But we are conditioned to continue on this path, pretending that what we are doing, matters. It does matter in one sense.
It is costing us a huge amount of opportunity to do something meaningful.
If it is a job worth doing, it is a job that makes a positive difference.
Taraz
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I'd guess probably 80% of the work we do each day is busy work. Maybe that number is off, but that is what it feels like a lot of the time. In the grand scheme of things I am not saving lives or launching rockets!
It is likely that the pareto principle comes into play, but I suspect that if we follow the chains that lead to the work we do, most of it is unnecessary. Like we have spoken before, doctors are "helping" but most of what they treat is already preventable.
I just feel like not much of it matters these days. Like the futility of it is concerning.
So much to say on this but I’ll input just one thing this comment… consider all the content creators who produce the brainrot content that kids consume to the point of mental inertness.. wonder if they consider their work noble or just get rich fuck the world types…
Granted CCs are simply a product of the shitty digitotechnocracy we live in where as you said it’s all so meaningless once one realizes we should’ve been completely planet wide free of starvation and what the hell is debt even?! Fiction! Just control by the few at the top you already know we agree on this.
Other side of the globe and the sentiment is the same.
I suspect they choose to either remain ignorant to the harm caused, or actively avoid it through justification of why they do what they do. I guess tobacco farmers did the same.
Related
… now most of our farmers glyphosate all their crops never stopped
The most meaningless activity is driving to the office for 2 hours, paying $50 day parking fee to do the job you have been doing for 5 years from home remotely. Now that is awesome! Not only we are clogging up the roads and polluting the environment while burning $6 / gallon gas we are also getting more tired and reducing our productivity in the office... Now that is as busy work as it gets :)
And then if you consider what you do at work, most of that is useless too. Look at the supply chain that goes into making a smartphone, so that people can watch tiktok.
The real tragedy is not just the futile work itself; it is the staggering opportunity cost we are letting slip by. We have the technology and resources to solve fundamental human problems, and yet we squander them on optimising algorithms. Until the underlying economic incentives change to reward positive real-world impact, this illusion of ‘meaningful work’ will, sadly, persist.
I think there are already organisations that are handling impact assessments (some branches of the UN for instance), they just do a terrible job of it.
Can't even blame them too heavily. There are always vested interests and those who will always seek to act irrationally and selfishly in every system regardless of whether the greater good is the best option
The UN is largely corrupted by money when it comes to these things.
I think we are so used to being busy that even having a quiet moment can make us feel guilty, or perhaps it is bcoz time is valuable.
I think people also avoid quiet because it gives their brain a chance to think and they don't like what it says.
Small moves mount up as you always say.
I see this opinion a lot too when people are waiting for a big break to start, so they do nothing at all. Meanwhile the people who actually move forward are just doing tiny, boring, unsexy things daily but at least they have added value to daily life.
Doing nothing feels safe, but it's the most expensive choice long term.
My big break is coming - any day now....
Yes but not anytime soon.
Everybody wants that power of control. Most of the people at the top don't care about the well-being of the people or the society, they just want the interest in gaining and keep control over resources,money and people.
And it seems like they have something big planned in the next few years be careful!
For sure I am.
Until they have their heads chopped off with a guillotine.
😂that's it.
Opportunity costs. 99% of content is just noise. Finding something 'meaningful' in this online world is an oxymoron. In the end it's a philosophical question.
We have certainly confused ‘effort’ and ‘profitability’ with ‘value’, and your analogy of hammering a nail through thick wool captures this perfectly. In a system where survival and status are strictly tied to making the numbers go up, people will naturally gravitate towards whatever generates the most returns, regardless of whether it actually improves the human condition.
A significant part of the modern economy — particularly within the attention economy and financial speculation — essentially extracts time, energy and resources without producing tangible social benefits. When success is measured exclusively by the accumulation of wealth, the natural result is exactly what you described: a system that incentivises control over genuine growth.
Absolute transparency is not human, and that is the crux of the matter. If we could accurately measure the holistic cost of our activities (environmental degradation, the psychological cost, damage to the supply chain) against their actual benefits, many highly profitable industries would be exposed as massive net losses – this is where the economic paradigm shift comes in.