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The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.
For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.
The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.
Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)
Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.
The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.
As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.
I think it’s somewhat true that hard times create stronger people. The problem is that in order for human brains to mature properly, they need to have challenges to be met. The thrivers tend toward immaturity, they would rather play games and put forth minimal effort toward useful things.
I mean sure, but on the other hand in some sense the immaturity (play etc.) is a valid purpose of humanity. What else are we striving for with the term "good times" if not a reduction in demand for useful things, leaving more overhead for playing games?
Well, in my view, you do need a balance of both, but if you end up creating a completely “playful” culture, a lot of things don’t happen simply because those things that need to happen are hard and boring. This is a problem both personally and in wider society.
On a personal level, things like getting a job and doing it, cooking and cleaning for yourself are not exactly fun. And things like gaming, internet scrolling, partying and so on are fun. So a lot of people choose the latter. They take minimal jobs if they take one at all and spend the rest of their time playing. They accomplish very little and end up less happy because they haven’t accomplished much. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSYjCgXKOXE)
On a more societal level, building things, fixing things and getting along with everyone else is necessary to keep society humming along. Those things are boring. Who wants to pay taxes to fix roads? That’s not very sexy. Who wants to do the hard work of learning advanced math so they can invent and build important things to make society better? Sitting around discussing literature is much more fun. And self control is not as much fun as doing whatever you want and whenever you want to. It just doesn’t work because unless people know what the rules are and that you’ll mostly go along with them, they can’t really cooperate as they’d have to to make society work.
I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.
For most of human history, this has been the case. And the demand for this kind of work hasn't gone away either, just because we live in the modern world. Someone, somewhere, has to do the work. Maybe the work's become more dispersed and technological abstractions have made managing the load easier, but the work itself hasn't disappeared. And a lack of respect for that burden, encouraging people to ignore addressing problems at the expense of their leisure, is only going to exacerbate the problem in the long-run.
Society may not be for anything aside from itself. But for most people, that seems to be good enough when you look at the ways people live their lives. I tend to have much more of a collective view of humanity more than I do an individual one. I struggled with the paradox of thinking through this for a long time. And I still do. Thinking of oneself as an individual is important but it's not paramount, IMO. People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from. Despite being individuals, human beings aren't 'only' individuals. And being an individual may not even be the most important part of being human.
But I don't think this post-singularity world is ever going to come. Everyone on Planet Earth is living on borrowed time that's going to eventually come due.
Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)
I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.
I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.
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