From: spike66 (spike66@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 00:26:48 MST
>> Samantha writes
>>> But what the heck is "work" when increasingly large groups of people
>>> have no skills that are not subsumed by or made irrelevant by
>>> accelerating technology? There is no need in advanced countries
>>> for everyone to be in full-time work of any conventional kind.
Work is a surprisingly important builder of
morale. This is because we are genetically
programmed to work. The Frontier House series
demonstrated that those who survived the winter
were those who worked their asses off all summer.
We descended from these survivors.
My notion is that retirees often suffer rapid
decline in health because they fail to recognize
the importance of work to their morale and sense
of well being. Many workers look forward all their
careers to the day when they can walk away from it
all, never realizing that they may long for the
days when their lives had meaning, because they
had a function.
The hippies tried to declare the age of free love,
but they could not overpower genetically programmed
human nature to be possessive of our mates. We really
dont have free love today, altho we still have plenty
of the DNA-mandated expensive kind. Rifkinites may argue
that an era of plenty will allow most people to not
need to work, however we still have not figured out
how to deal with our genetic programming: we need
a sense of accomplishment. I would suggest that
the end-of-workers will be no more successful than
the hippies, unless we figure out how to modify our
genetic code.
spike
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