The 9-5 Grind

In Bali there was a guy who took us down a river on a raft. He does that every day while I sit at a computer. He meets people, laughs, and smiles every day while getting exercise. Who is really winning at life?

Sometimes I look at my cat and hope she isn’t bored sitting at home all day. To the cat, that’s all I’m doing as well.

Alienation from Work

When you are an employee, you get paid a wage. This is less than the market value of the work you perform. You get $X as a salary, which means you are producing at least that much in market value.

Paying taxes feels bad, because another entity is taking some of the value we created. We couldn’t capture all the value. We should be feeling just as bad about a company capturing our value, in all likelihood this is a much higher percentage of value.

The amount the company skims off the top can vary, and it can be huge. High salaried positions are more likely to have bigger skews here. A hedge fund quant trader could get paid a million dollars a year but be making 20 million dollars for the fund.

We may look at charts that compare income to the general population. A high salary may put you in the top 5% or so of income earners.

A large percentage of the top deciles have income from business ownership rather than wages.

A peasant was a worker who lived and worked on land they rented from their feudal lord. The rent was a certain flat rate, a number of output per crop cycle. If they made a lot more crops, they get to keep all that excess. We can see the difference from this to an employee today. The peasant had real ownership in the outcomes, not simply time spent. Real alienation comes from busy work, getting through hours with no incentive and in fact lots of incentives to stretch work out, take extra time, which is so unnatural and feels wrong. There is not enough cognitive dissonance to cope with the fact that we’re actively trying to accomplish less. As humans with any ounce of ambition we want to do more, achieve our potential, work smart not hard.

There are a few paths to feeling a sense of peace and connection with work again. One is to have ownership. That means you have a real stake in the success and benefit from success. Some companies offer vested stock options.

Another way to get ownership is directly such as purchasing shares, and being an investor seeking a return. Then you are tightly coupled to the business outcomes.

What you want is to be congruent, deeply aligned in everything you do. There is no bad incentive making you do busy work, if there’s no work to do, you stop. Or you get to the next task.

You want to do tasks because you want the business to succeed because you are part of it.

Alienation from Society

It shouldn’t be so much on the individual like this. We’ve lost so much social capital over the last decades. We have much fewer social clubs, activities, physical obligations and meet ups.

We’ve also lost a lot of pride of our work. There is a culture of just doing enough and then leaving to do other things. Layoffs and COVID showed us how we’re dispensable to our employers.

Alienation from Religion

Religion is the highest ideal, the final aim of believers. All other actions in principle serve that goal and having a population that all believes means they are aligned.

With such a big religious decline we just chase status, money and short term pleasures. There is nothing more to aim for. Work is just serving that, just a way to get money to buy things and experiences to post on social media later. There are people who gamble their entire paycheck every weekend.

In a game theory sense that is a strategy that, while stable, has all these negative externalities when a critical mass of people are all following it. We get the system we’re in now, a new baseline is set, and a culture of indifference to work permeates most institutions.

It would take leadership and cultural forces to push society back to different values. We are starting to see glimmers of that, and most people would agree the status quo is not working for them.