What's it all for?

I listened to a discussion on the radio today about the Swedish employment agency and it got me thinking (as I've done so many times before) about why we work. It might seem like a trivial question with an obvious answer - we work to earn money, in order to pay our bills, to buy the things we need and to generate taxes. Basically, you could say we work to make the cogs of society turn I guess.

But can we look at it differently? If we look back to a time before the societies of today, to a time of a simpler society, people worked hard in order to find food, to find shelter. People worked hard just to stay alive, and I imagine that if someone travelling from the present day back in time, and offered these people something to make their work easier, they would appreciate that.

Yet today, increasing automation and effectivisation is by many (although not by all) perceived as a threat. People fear unemployment, fear being made obsolete by new technology such as industrial robotics or more advanced computers. There seems to me to be something fundamentally wrong here.

The purpose of our work should be to achieve a better society, a better life. It should be about life-support and primarily about satisfying our basic needs - such as food, shelter, health. Once that is taken care of, we can turn to other important matters, such as realisation and development of our other human capabilities, such as creativity, imagination and thinking. Satisfying those basic needs frees up time to do other things.

But again, today we seem to work just so that we can earn money, which we in turn spend on goods and services provided us for, what seems to me, the main reason of providing other people with jobs. So that they can earn money to spend on goods and services. And so on.

The inevitable question is "what's it all for?". The pursuit of ever bigger plasma tv-screens? Ever faster cars? Bigger hotels? The whole thing seems to have gotten out of hand somewhere. I can certainly see how this way of thinking got us to where we are now. The general quality of life, in the rich part of the world at least, is at a level that even kings of times past could only dream of.

But now that we've come to roads end, all we seem to do is perpetuate the same old patterns and also to jealously and ever vigilantly, protect what we've got from those who aren't as lucky. Let's face it - if our society, from a purely practical life-sustaining point of view, could function with people putting in, say, four hours of work a day in a five-day week - what's the point of simply making up things to do in order to earn money for the remaining four hours a day? Are we so caught up in the momentum of ever increasing and accelerating growth that we can't even get out of it?

Of course there are other things we could do, such as help the rest of humanity to achieve the same level of basic need-satisfaction as we have. Certainly that would be an endeavour worthy of our time. But at the same time, the current system we're in, economics as they are envisioned today, are not geared towards this.

Our current economic system is based around competition and the idea that there are haves and have-nots. This perhaps isn't so strange, since our economic system developed in a time when there was actual scarcity and the gap between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, was great. Basically, our economic system is designed to work under those conditions.

But of course just looking at the economic system isn't enough. It is embedded in a bigger context, a society built around the same cultural norms and values, which runs on greed and selfishness. That may have worked in the past. Not so much now. As the conditions have changed, however, society along with the economic system and the myths we use to shape our view of life needs to change.

Or am I the only one who finds it strange that we live with a system that runs on inequality, exploitation and domination? A system which would fall apart if we made sure that everyone, and by everyone I mean every single person living on the planet Earth, had at least their basic needs met? People say that's just wishful thinking and a utopian unacheivable goal. I say it's possible, but not unless we change some of our basic, underlying assumptions and views.