When God foreclosed on Eden, he condemned Adam and Eve to go to work. Work has never recovered from that humiliation. From the beginning, the Lord’s word said that work was something bad: a punishment, the great stone of mortality and toil laid upon a human spirit that might otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace. (Essay, What Is the Point of Working?).

An update of sorts now comes more than forty years after Lance Morrow first wrote the above words in 1981, courtesy of the following recent quote by “Slacker” that leads our focus article (click: Work Pays America!), “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it.” Says who?

Says the prospect of a looming zeitgeist best captured by Churchill in comparing two economic models i.e. the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

But even aside from the question about the country’s industrial health, we may discuss whether “Slacker’s” quote reflects a “vibe shift” on the left. Once upon a time “worker” used to be a central identity that was prized, maybe even especially, by socialists – with the caveat that work should not be harmful, exploitative or unpleasant to those doing it.

More recently, however, universal basic income and the “anti-work” movement suggest growing support for the idea that all work should be abolished. If work were no longer a central organizing principle of American life, how exactly would that human spirit “otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace?” Poetry slam sessions?

The point is that work plays a large part in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, beyond merely satisfying the basic need for food and shelter, to address the hunger for security, friendship and “belongingness,” maybe all the way to, ahem, self-actualization. At the very least, the ambition might be something loftier than Slacker’s lament captured in his “I may live badly, but . . . .”

Let us take a whack at some of the dynamics underlying this apparent antipathy towards work captured by the cited 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. We might start with the harsh supply/demand realities of what might be deemed elite overproduction. The illusion of cheap credit certainly played a role in distorting academic priorities that later fostered career disillusionment on the part of downwardly-mobile overeducated elites. Then there’s been this more recent AI-driven anticipatory labor obsolescence overhang used as an excuse to feather in universal basic income . . . . .

. . . . . at which time the room is silenced as eyes go in search of an adult, someone to remind us – as one might patiently address a child – that a democracy can can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, that in any event there is no such purported largesse having now become a stone around the neck in the form of a thirty-five trillion dollar black hole, and that history is littered with stories of empires hollowed out by this sort of magical thinking . . . . .

Okay, with that dream reminder now behind us, we might then focus our attention on an oh-by-the-way point i.e. that unpaid work like child care is no less valuable than the paid kind, raising one example of the need to perhaps reconsider our workplace priorities in a society that bemoans a fertility that is now well below replacement. Let’s figure out what’s important before we start throwing money around.