I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
What would allow that isn’t communism, but a “post-scarcity” society, much like Star Trek TNG. A lot of what we take for granted can only happen thanks to the commercial logistics of fucktons of materials going around.
I’d devote more time into programming, performance optimization, processor architecture and computer graphics. These things are still “magic” to me and there aren’t many resources, especially on the “bare metal” graphics part of most recent parts. Once I figured it out enough to feel confident in passing that knowledge around, I would do that in english and portuguese
One thing that I’m already doing thanks to my job giving me a decent salary for only 20h of work is my own game project. Something that I’ll probably end up selling, but I’ll probably be the first to release a pirate/free version of it, too.
Yeah it’s easy to do whatever you want as a job when matter/antimatter reactors give unlimited energy and replicators can use that limitless energy to create any object.