Imagine work abolished. Tell me what you would do.

We sometimes say that your work shouldn’t feel like work. But unfortunately, it almost always does. ‘Work’ has become synonymous with forced labor or labor necessitated at the expense of our livelihood. Our entire approach to human labor should change.

Imagine what you would do if you were not ‘obliged’ to work, your needs were sorted, you had a shelter, and there was bread on your plates. Shut up, I know you are going to say, “Then who will work if you already have stuff?” That’s precisely the point. You are so used to it that you are not even able to imagine “activity” when you have resources at your disposal.

Forget multiplying wealth too; even that comes from this urge to make sure that you have resources in the future. So spare me the bullshit, close your eyes, and imagine for a while what you would do if you were not forced to work at the expense of your livelihood. If you don’t know what to do other than this rapid race in chase of shelter, food, and objects, you should realize that we are already submerged totally in a dystopia. So much that we don’t even know anything other than work as in forced labor. So much so that we even justify it by saying, “If we had all the resources, we wouldn’t have incentive to work”.

You are right. You won’t “work” if you have all your basic needs, as in you wouldn’t need to do forced labor. You will do what you like to do. And that “what you like to do” wouldn’t be a single homogeneous goal or passion we all speak about either. You will have multiple “goals” and “passions”. You don’t need to be a ‘Ravi, the Writer’ or ‘the engineer’. You could be “Ravi, the person who is good at engineering, writing fiction, and also dancing”.  You free your activity and time from the need to monetize them. You don’t need to dance to earn money anymore. You are free from converting your activity into monetary value. You dance for the sake of wanting to dance. You wouldn’t need to have one single goal or purpose at all. You will be free to choose according to your growing and changing personality. Some can say, “But I never had a goal”. And that’s precisely the point too.

The idea of ‘goals’ as we know today comes from wanting to monetize your interests, i.e., to ‘earn,’ but while doing what we like, as we’d like to say. Or many would say their goal is ‘wealth’ in the first place. But let’s zoom in to it a bit. We feel the need to amass wealth because we need resources to live, and they cost you your wealth. But I am asking you to imagine yourself with all your basic needs ready at your disposal. Tell me, what would you do?

You might also be wondering, then what about production? We still need to produce to have our needs met, right? Sure. You will produce just enough. But no one will be forced to grind 9 hours a day. You will work not for quantity but for quality. And if you say without this forced incentive to produce a certain target per day, we wouldn’t get enough resources for everyone. That’s simply not true. There wouldn’t be targets if we removed the element of induced starvation.

You should realize that the resources are already abundant regardless of centuries of depletion and corporate-induced environmental degradation. We still don’t have natural scarcity as in we are still not so many that we will run out of earth, land, water, and food. The current scarcity that we are being told about is human-made and well maintained. By creating scarcity, they keep the power to decide how much of the resources you deserve so that you’re forced to return the next day to work again.

But they were still not happy giving you any resource in exchange for your work. So instead of directly valuing your labor in resources, they have created an intermediary called ‘monetary value’. They will tell you that this monetary value is equivalent to the resource that you deserve to get for the amount of work you have done. Now instead of giving you resources directly, they will sell them to you for the value your labor holds. But it’s in their hands to increase or decrease this monetary value at their benefit. They say this is ‘trade’. This is ‘economy’. They now have supply, created by you, and demand, bought by you.

At the start, you would surely receive enough monetary value to get the equivalent “whole” resource, but suddenly you will start getting less and less till the point where you are getting only a tenth of the whole for the same amount of value. They maintain the economy to make sure you keep getting less and less. And you would have to silently accept it. Because they would point to ‘the economy’ as if it were some naturally flowing force independently existing. “Oh come on, it’s the supply and demand” they’d dare say to literally the force that creates supply and demand. So, if you already have your basic needs, you wouldn’t need to be working for monetary value. You would be free from the entire necessity of ‘exchange’.

But what’s happening to the resources if they are already out there? They are being held in storage rooms and garages. They’d rather let the grain rot than give away what’s not needed. To justify holding more than what they need, they cleverly point back at the scarcity. “Shouldn’t we be prepared for the scarcity?” they’d ask. You who are accustomed to hoarding a week’s worth of resources would assume it’s fair, not realizing that they hoard centuries’ worth. So, if we all had our basic needs, we would automatically not have squirrels that carry more than mouthfuls. So, close your eyes and tell me what you would do if work were abolished.

We would not have factories that overproduce some resources at the expense of destroying the others. We would just have enough to live, let live, learn, and be better. So, when a man named Bob Black wrote we should abolish work, he meant it. We should be abolishing work. We should be abolishing scarcity. We should be realizing that we are not heading towards a dystopia; we are already in it. But I am not calling you for a revolution. “Let’s be practical,” your mind is screaming. I can already hear that. So, hold your horses; I am only calling you to dream. If you tell me to be practical even in fantasy, no amount of revolution is going to liberate you from your captivity. I just ask you to close your eyes and imagine no scarcity and imagine no obligation to work. And honestly, just tell me, what would you do then? Dream on. We are ages behind revolution. All we can do is dream. So, join me, let’s just dream. If we dream enough, maybe one day, unlike you and I, someone will think it is ‘practical’ to revolt.