Work should be based on quantity of boredom involved
In fact, the whole economy should be based on quantity of boredom involved. Boredom can be quantified, but how much someone would rather be doing anything else besides what they were doing, if they did not have to earn money to survive for every minute worked.
B = Boredom. The highest amount is represented by 100.
a = any other thing besides this task measured to an absolute range of 1-100%. Thus 90a would mean that about 90% of any other activity besides what they are doing would rather be accomplished than the task they are doing at that point in time.
H = hour
Thus B = a/h * hour per time period or
Boredom = any other task besides the current one / hour * hour per time period.
So a person who stacks boxes for inventory all day who hates this job but needs it at the moment, might have 99/1 or 99Bs. If someone works 8 hours a day that is 99 * 100 = 9900Bs.
A creative writer who makes money on their books, and enjoys their job might have a B which is
20/1. Thus, an 8 hour day of work for them might be 20 * 8 = 160Bs.
The economy moves on much boring work. The minutia of how copper wire is made by a worker who is refining and cutting it and wrapping it and transporting it, and the minutia of creating fictional characters and plots and settings can be compared. The economy moves in a lot of boring minutia that needs to get done by humans who pay the cost.
Oh and this should replace opportunity cost models as that is comparing two items, and not measuring the actual cost of boredom involved, which is the true cost :).
B = Boredom. The highest amount is represented by 100.
a = any other thing besides this task measured to an absolute range of 1-100%. Thus 90a would mean that about 90% of any other activity besides what they are doing would rather be accomplished than the task they are doing at that point in time.
H = hour
Thus B = a/h * hour per time period or
Boredom = any other task besides the current one / hour * hour per time period.
So a person who stacks boxes for inventory all day who hates this job but needs it at the moment, might have 99/1 or 99Bs. If someone works 8 hours a day that is 99 * 100 = 9900Bs.
A creative writer who makes money on their books, and enjoys their job might have a B which is
20/1. Thus, an 8 hour day of work for them might be 20 * 8 = 160Bs.
The economy moves on much boring work. The minutia of how copper wire is made by a worker who is refining and cutting it and wrapping it and transporting it, and the minutia of creating fictional characters and plots and settings can be compared. The economy moves in a lot of boring minutia that needs to get done by humans who pay the cost.
Oh and this should replace opportunity cost models as that is comparing two items, and not measuring the actual cost of boredom involved, which is the true cost :).
Comments (49)
I do not foresee a time when we will actually see sanitation workers getting $15,000,000 a year for clearing those underground sewers, and brain surgeons and NFL players getting $20 an hour. But the principle is sound. I was really very well rewarded in therms of satisfaction for the best jobs I have had, and no amount of money was enough for the drag-ass, boring, tedious, pointless jobs I've had.
I definitely agree with you, but my intention was not to say, "Hey, lets compensate people according to a boredom scale", but rather, "Hey, look how much boredom and minutia mongering our economy is based on!". It is staggering how much boredom goes into the electrical system, the electronic components of any device, computers, construction, other utilities, manufacturing, transportation, and all the rest. It is just staggering amounts of boredom being spread around through the need to survive.
This economy is built on enormous, heaping gobs of boredom. Engineering team's inventions, formulas, schematics, leads to millions and billions of uninteresting jobs. I do not necessarily see it as anything amazing. With the small amount of enjoyment that the very few who CREATE technology receive, comes the HUGE amount of boredom that most will implement and maintain. And no, there are not enough artistic, literary, outright fun, educationally satisfying jobs to go around to cover the huge difference. The "good" from the output of jobs just gets counteracted by the "negative" of the boredom that is also created.
Look fun!!
Look fun!!
Look fun!!
Look fun!!
Look fun!!
I am patient with other construction acts. Some colleagues shake their heads at my willingness to make sure each preparation is done. My form of life is intolerable in their view. It gets complicated in the world of actual production.
So what is your Boredom rate? a/h * hours per time period = B remember :D.
Maybe I am a bad example. I do several kinds of work in the same time period. I have to manage stuff while also making things. That is very different from playing a specific role in a warehouse or factory.
On the other hand, management is drudgery too.
Yeah, I am dodging your formula. I will think about it.
Okay, I'll wait for it :D. If you want, add some more drudgery photos from drudgery jobs.
Just think of the tiniest, minutest, insignificant little part and then realize that someone had to manufacture that, inventory it, ship it, etc. It's mind bogging how much boredom is produced in the modern economy. We must find a way to measure this boredom output!
Sounds like a colossal bore.
Most work is inevitably tedious, dull, dirty, difficult, and a damned drag. That is why they pay people. Nobody would do any of that crap for free.
Just add up the total hours reported by all the workers in the world. Multiply the total number of hours by .93. That's the boredom output. The remaining 7% of hours might be less than boring because some people like routine, and some people (usually liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels) are downright gleeful as they go about their work of ripping everybody off.
So yes, the total boredom output is soooo huge one can hardly grasp it.
Now that was one meaningless, tedious, dull, fucking boring job! It's probably done by a computer now. As well it should be.
I would enjoy using a power shovel to dig holes. What I would not enjoy is getting down in the mud and water on a January day when the temp. was -25F and one had to fix a broken water pipe. Not boring, though. Just horrible.
Not all bad jobs are boring. Many people would rather beg on the street and live under a bridge than drive a mass transit bus (considering what the passengers are like) even though the wages are not that bad. The job (the vehicles condition, the passengers, the regulation, the traffic) SUCKS!!!
Why the hell not? Look, there is something that can be done about boredom. Assemblng parts doesn't have to be a factory version of Day of the Living Dead or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Never going to happen. Silly. Not even really necessary. What is needed is a way for every able-bodied person to have a job which is safe and which pays them enough for them, and their families, to live a decent life with decent housing in a reasonably safe neighborhood, good healthy food, health care, good education for their children, etc. etc. Let's do that. Then we can worry about boredom.
By the way, the photo of the construction workers installing piping in trenches shows them working in trenches which are steeper than allowed by OSHA. Collapsing excavations is a major cause of work injuries and depths and a bad way to die.
Back to boredom for a minute - As an adult, I worked at a Baskin Robins, as a warehouse worker, and as a cabinetmaker for 15 years before I went back to school and got my engineering degree. For the past 30 years I've worked as an engineer. Pay is better. Work is better. But at least 50% of the work I have done as an engineer is boring or worse. The difference is that I have enough control over my work to recognize that even the most valuable and rewarding work includes long periods of unpleasant work. Sanding is boring, but has to be done well and carefully to build attractive, well-built cabinets. Project management is the bedrock on which a successful engineering project is built. God I hate project management. Hate, hate, hate. But I never would have had a chance to have creative control over design projects without sucking it up and doing what was needed. Did I mention I hate project management.
What you said.
An interesting way to arrive at the same conclusion as empathy.
Quoting T Clark
:up: At least, that's how I feel about it.
The principle is sound? I'm not sure I'll be able to afford the $15m garbage pick-up service, but I guess I could get affordable weekly brain surgeries by just waiting at the curb for the brain surgery truck to roll by.
And there is the major point. The output of boredom is soooo huge and most of modern people's lives consist of this. I guess it's worth living because you get to go back to it every weekeday and do maintenance and some entertainment on the weekends. Yeah, life is not an Eden, who said it was. Yet, somehow it's meaningfulness abounds in its routines and the small amount novelty from the routines, and we should put more new people into the world to continue and experience this? Long live mechanical living! Survival, maintenance, entertainment, repeat. This is somehow worth experiencing. People have just got to experience it. Cultivate your flowers. Snap that widget into place. Rake the leaves. Pour the cement. Extrude the wire.
Quoting Bitter Crank
But this is what I'm talking about, exactly. Modern economy is just a huge boredom generating monstrosity that we put more workers in by procreating them. Oh, and that computer program that may have taken over that job, was probably really boring to create for that computer programmer. It just got pushed up the chain, at least for the time it was programmed.
OR, encourage people not to have children, realize that most of life consists of boring routine, and that the supply and demand of the modern economy is maddeningly self-defeating, as the satisfaction from any given output generates the dissatisfaction of large amounts of (so far) unquantified boredom.
I simply want to quantify the amazing heaps of boredom that the modern economy produces, and add that as a factor of disutility into the economic equation- something economics does not take into account. Subjective value-theory doesn't capture it. Subjective boredom-theory will :).
So I guess a question from this is, what does producing more output matter when the collateral damage is this heaping gobs of boredom?
As I said, its circular and self-defeating. And who cares about maintaining a lifestyle
Quoting T Clark
If this just means more boring healthy, safe lives? What is the point? You are losing as you are producing more output. It's as if ALL of what life means is being healthy and safe, and having some hobbies to tide you over in the free time. This is NOT worth living. Safe, healthy lives, of boring work, frustrating hours toiling, or dealing with management/hierarchies, a few hobbies, and vacation days does not mean, "Let's start reproducing more of this!" to me. This seems like a lot of routined, uninteresting days repeated infinitum for future generations to push along to the next generation, to push along, etc. etc. Meanwhile the boredom index keeps getting higher. The circular flow of boredom continues.
I could tell from your posts that you and I share feelings about management.
We've all been through this argument with you before. Many of us don't share your feelings about life. I'm almost never bored. Actually, maybe never. I've done a lot of tedious work in my life, but in most cases I've known that the tedium is necessary in order to complete a job that is worth doing. I like life. I'm not afraid of boredom, cancer, dying, mean people, bad drivers, mosquitoes, ebola, "Two and a Half Men,"
Quoting schopenhauer1
This is about you, not most of us. You need to go get a life. I would have a lot more respect for your opinions on this subject if you would accept and acknowledge that others feel differently and your ideas of what is best don't apply to us.
Right, so while doing boring work, you live in the ethereal Platonic realm and Buddhist nirvana nothingness, in your mind, thus allowing your physical body to detach and do its tedious task :roll:.
Quoting T Clark
AHH, and here is the major conceit. This is EXACTLY what I can say about the decision to create a new child.
I accept and acknowledge that you feel differently about this than I, and many others, do. I agree that my ideas of what is best don't apply to you. So, what's the problem?
If we play out our two scenarios:
My Belief: I think the world is not worth starting for someone else.
Consequence: No new person is born. No one actually exists to "be deprived" of any goods of life. No collateral damage will ensue, of a person who might think life was not worth living. More importantly, whatever the child's attitude, no child will exist that will experience suffering, period.
Your belief: You think the world is worth starting for someone else.
Consequence: A new person is born. Collateral damage may ensue, of a person who might think life was not worth living (counter to your intention). More importantly, whatever the child's attitude, suffering will incur for an actual person.
My belief leads to no collateral damage, yours will. This is all because you assume someone should live a whole lifetime from a belief you had about the world. Yours has real negative consequences for someone else, all based on your view of life at the time of procreation. Mine will not result in any negative consequences (a lifetime chances of experiencing them in fact).
Oh right, and the six "goods" of life are the REAL reasons behind this lunacy circularity (accomplishment, relationships, learning, flow-states, physical pleasure, aesthetic pleasure). That is it, people just NEEEEED to experience these things by living, and going through the circularity. Work-boredom is just the necessary vehicle to allow for these six goods to be experienced.. WAHOOOO!!! Yay, I get to spend most of my life in quiet work-boredom because I can feel physical pleasure and the accomplishment of stuff, and whoaa..friends and stuff too?? Wow life sure is meaningful Mister!! Maybe one day I can spout off a lot of mathematical equations and pouring over Wittgenstein minutia on a philosophy forum too! :cheer: . I mean that's better than drinking ebola infested water out of a puddle scrounging for garbage in a garbage heap!! Clean, safe, living environment is all that is needed.. followed by our "capacities' to allow our goods to flourish!!! YAAAYY!!!!!
More boring is not just... more boring, it became unsustainable at least 4.5 billion people ago. Capitalism is predicated on expansion: expanding extraction and production, expanding markets, expanding volume of business activity, expanding profits, expansion expansion expansion. The regime of constant growth has been in place for quite a long time, now--several centuries--and the climate crisis, plastic in the oceans, too much population, and so forth are all a consequence.
The recognition that the world is unsustainable is profoundly alienating. We are stuck with the world in this unsustainable situation until natural forces intervene (which will be ghastly). It makes everything that is done a pointless nightmarish treadmill.
Were I to be as pessimistic as you, my route would be through contemplation of the unsustainable future. I just don't see a way of our species, and quite a few other species as well, making it through to the other side. "It was good while it lasted" is one response. A less sanguine response is that if it is not good in the future, then it wasn't good in the past either. What looked like great progress was actually a great disaster.
Agreed. But, we are looking from two different angles. You are talking about ecological disaster, which very well might be inevitable. What about the idea about "progress" to begin with? We have people like Michael Faraday, Boltzman, Volta, Ampere, Watts, Boyle, etc. We have the person who invented the transistor, the microprocessor, (or teams of people). "Progress" happens when individuals who are minutia-inclined and intelligent work with materials and get outcomes that "make stuff happen" with them. Entrepeneurs finance this and bring it to market as usable products (using other engineers). This creates really boring jobs, that create outputs so people can pay for them and use them in their spare time.
Bitter, I would like to make a series where I interview all the greatest minutia-mongerers and boredom-braggadoccios alive and ask them, how their mind works.. What is it like to monger all that minutia so well, and what they think of the consequence of bringing it to a production setting whereby millions of boring minutia-mongering (but uncreative) jobs come about as a result of their initial creativity. Because that is what progress is.. the incremental push of more mongering of minutia from ideas that came before and applying it to some materials in the present, experimenting and getting a result that "does stuff". The consequence is the collateral damage of environmental degradation. Perhaps, more minutia mongerers can progress our way out of it, most likely not. But the collateral damage of environmental degredation is not my focus, but how and why the minutia mongering continues, and the collateral damage of work-boredom, rather.
Also, I'm trying to convey that the six "goods" that life is supposed to be experienced for, and the experience of having to overcome challenges (like work-boredom) just don't make sense in the first place.. Hence my critique on the inane circularity of work to make output, to entertain and live, to work to make output.. etc. There is just our restless wills which need stuff to happen. Minutia monger progress is just the latest version of this...It is restlessness personified. The goods are not that good, but we cherish them enough that we need more people to experience the circularity of our lifestyle.
I did not mean for the thread to be about paying people based on boredom. Rather, I want to quantify boredom in some way (like we try to quantify subjective-value in current economic models when making demand curves), to show how much boredom-disutility is actually created with all this "progress". Oh you created a new widget that needs new jobs! Great, how much boredom-disutility is now going to come of this? In other words, the economy should really be measured in terms of how much boredom-output we are generating, not just product/service/wage/work output. What are outputs except the things that are ENJOYED by people? How much dis-enjoyment comes out of all that "satisfaction" from the outputs themselves?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Whatever turns you off! Whatever makes one wish for the death of the last human... Ecological collapse, progress on a stick, extruded ennui, minutia mongers, boredom braggadocios, or titan of tedium...
If we're doomed anyway (many think we are) we might as well enjoy the show. Throwing in the towel, leaning back against a tree, and just observing might actually have some salvific power. Ceasing to strive, is, after all, the opposite of what has gotten us to our sad state of ourselves being bored to tears by technological production even as we breed our way to a more complex destruction.
A good new word for my list. Thanks.
God knows you need them. Let's start a collection.
@schopenhauer1 Funnily enough, I had just been thinking along related lines when I came across this discussion. When most people speak of “work”, they refer to tasks that they would not voluntarily do but require some form of monetary incentive for due largely to the boredom you mentioned. And so when we put efforts into what we enjoy doing and for which no pecuniary recompense is forthcoming, we are widely regarded as “not working” and by extension of not being productive. Of slacking off, lounging about, or—with vicious ethical precision—of being takers rather than givers. So why is it that work, that socially necessary currency of mutual respect, should be generally defined as boring with non-boring alternatives treated with such suspicion, and what does that say about the way we live now?
Arguing with @schopenhauer1 can seem like a pointless exercise. No matter how often you tell him you kinda like your life and don't feel like things are so bad, he refuses to accept that most people are glad to have been born. His inability to recognize that others don't see things the way he does makes it hard to take his arguments seriously.
Decent housing, healthy food, health care ... wouldn't it be nice if our education was actually focused on teaching us how to create decent housing for ourselves, how to grow healthy food for ourselves, and how to take care of our health?
We do care about housing, food, health, but we often don't care about our boring job, we just do it to get indirectly the things we care about, so I see a huge inefficiency here, I think we would be much more productive if we were directly working for those things we want, and we would be rewarding ourselves accordingly.
And it would be even nicer if each family was given at least a small plot of land, we all inhabit the Earth yet it is seen as normal that a few own most of the land, which leads many to be forced to get a boring job or end up homeless.
I think just those two measures would eventually improve the lives of many people. In the current system there are plenty of bullshit jobs and jobs that make the lives of others worse, which induce huge inefficiencies, so I don't think giving a job to everyone would improve things that much. Able-bodied people rather ought to be given the opportunity to work for themselves, to build their house, grow their food, take care of their health, that work would not be effort wasted.
I have three children. Youngest 29. Oldest 37. All three went to college, although only one graduated. Two of them are now farmers and the third became a butcher, then moved on to bartender. All three are very good at what they do. They did it on their own initiative, so the opportunity is there for people who want to do it. Giving people land won't work. Most people don't want to build their own house or grow their own food. This is not a realistic alternative for the great majority of people.
Some of us have not only thought about some of the profound things we might do -- we did it. I spent 2 years in VISTA (now Americorps) working with children at a mental hospital in Boston. Later I volunteered much time and some money for a socialist organization. I worked very hard for 4 years doing street-level safer sex education in the early days of AIDS. In the 1970s I volunteered lots of time for the then-new 'gay liberation' movement.
I did these and other activities because I think life can be made actually meaningful by the better kinds of work we do, voluntary as well as paid. Like most people I have spent a lot of time working jobs that were tedious and dull. They were socially useful but personally not very meaningful. That's just life.
Other members of TPF have also made significant personal contributions to the life of their communities, more than I have.
So, what would be a significant personal contribution that you would like to make to your community?
Just take, for example, all the focused attention it takes to get a box of strawberries from a farm to your table. It's very complex, and that includes produce grown within 100 miles. Picking strawberries, for instance, isn't a mindless job. Pickers have to identify which berries are ripe enough but not too ripe -- it's not a "grab everything that is vaguely red" type job.
I've grown strawberries in my garden--they weren't worth the trouble. Raspberries -- much easier, because they just take over and rule. The soil on my lot is either poor or way too shady. I know how to grow vegetables and corn, but one needs a large garden, decent soil, and little shade to grow a significant amount of food for a family. Plus, I'm getting a little old to undertake urban agriculture.
We moved into our house in 1979. When we got here, there was a small garden including a few unhealthy strawberry plants. My wife is a gardener. She completely reworked the garden and always kept those strawberries around out of sentimentality, even though they never produced more than a few berries for 40 years. Then, this year, we have gotten 10 pints of the best strawberries I ever tasted - red all the way through. I've never seen anything like it except in a farmers market in Paris.
What's my point? Hey, you brought up strawberries.
Absolutely. But not everyone can be a Jack Kerouac watching the world progress away in tedium.
I agree. I would suspect because non-boring alternatives would leave little to be desired for getting all this "stuff done". Someone needs to make the water meters, no? Someone needs to make the bricks, the sidewalk, the electronics on your air conditioner, the copper that transmits bits of information, the etc. etc. etc. ..someone has to monger all this minutia!! Someone's happy invention on a team somewhere in GE corp. makes it that millions of tedium has to get done to produce it for the output.. My point is, how do we quantify all the tedious boredom such that it is measured against the "satisfaction" of the output?
Your garden is just a hobby.. You need the plastic, the concrete, the pipes, the water, the billions of other things that engineers and happy inventors thought so that there can be output which costs billions of units of Boredom to produce. Your hobby garden is someone else's widget hell.
Is that what he did?
So, these tools were made once and have lasted many years. Very simple metal working, wood turning for the handles.
I suppose packaging seeds was a boring job. And somebody had to drive around the countryside stocking seed displays in hardware stores. Hey, you could do that. It would be fun. Out on your own; going into small town hardware stores, selling seeds and preaching the anti-natalist gospel.
If you want to know what was boring, it was canning hundreds of jars of food every summer and fall. It was tedious and hard work at the same time.
Yum. Sounds healthy.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I suppose this would be ideal..I'd use the spade to dig the ditch I would inevitably defecate in, and sleep under the bridge for my shelter as I peddle the seeds to the hardware stores :).
Quoting Bitter Crank
I can imagine!
But you agreed that the great majority of people want decent housing, healthy food and health care, so people want these things but they don't want to work for them directly, they prefer to do something else?
If you focus on people who love their job and earn decent money in a society where they are constantly stimulated to buy the latest shiny thing, watch the latest movie, play the latest game, take care of their persona on social media, then sure they don't care about building their own house or growing their own food, other people can do that for them.
But when you focus on people who hate their job and earn just enough money to pay for rent and food, and have a poor health because they're constantly stressed because of the job they hate that they have to go to every day, and 40 years later they're still not owning a house and they live in poor health or die because of it, I think these people would have liked to have the opportunity to work on building decent housing for themselves and grow some of their food and take care of their health, making use of what they would have learnt in an education that taught them to take care of themselves.
It's misleading to look at what I'm saying through the prism of our current society and our current education system, our education system doesn't teach us to take care of ourselves but to become a useful tool doing some specialized task, so then by the time we become adults who don't own any land, who don't know anything about building a house or growing food, and who have to pay rent, what other choice do we have besides taking a job serving as a (more or less) useful tool for others? By that point building our house or growing our food doesn't seem like an option at all, we feel like we wouldn't have the skills nor the time, and if we hate our job then that takes a toll on our physical and mental health that cannot be reverted by simply trying to take care of ourselves on the weekends. And then some decades later people wake up asking themselves, where has my life gone?
So yea if you love your job and your kids love their job, giving a job to everyone seems like the solution. But when you look at all the people who hate their job and all the negative consequences that has, more jobs doesn't solve the underlying problem.
And I say a good job with enough pay to live a good life is good enough. As the wise woman said, the ideal is the enemy of the good. Good enough is good enough.
Good housing, good food, good health care, good education, good jobs (that people actually like)--all good and desirable things. No one will argue with you that these are not good. The issue that is arguable is, "How?"
Well, start by radical changes like getting rid of the capitalist economy which drives a lot of what is you are identifying as bad. People will then have to organize their lives along different lines: cooperatives, community based food production/management, very locally controlled schools, focus on public health promotion more than terminal disease treatment, and so forth. Work will have to be organized quite differently than it is now, and so on.
All this might produce a simpler society where people were much happier. Or maybe not.
Large populations either maintain complex systems or they crash and burn. Nowhere can hundreds of millions, billions, of people be fed, housed, and cared for without extensive networks of technology and trade. "A simple good life" of the sort you are suggesting can be had only in very protected environments for a small portion of the population--not only the rich, but of course being rich helps.
Even at a time when the world's population was much smaller, when aspirations for goods and services were much more modest (say, the average person in the mid-18th century) having "a good life" was still complicated--involving trade, imports, exports, a complicated supply chain of food, goods, and services.
I empathize strongly with people who are dissatisfied with their work lives. I'm retired now, but much of my time working involved unsatisfactory work experiences. I put up with it, like everybody else does, in order to continue getting paid. There isn't any solution to the problem of unsatisfactory work, poor housing, poor education, poor health care, poor food procurement systems, and so forth WITHOUT radical changes. A thoroughly organized, unionized work-force would be one necessary step. A very strong progressive political party would be another minimal step towards extensive change. Involve the mass of people in demanding and forcing change, and you can get big changes.
Let me know as soon as you figure out how to organize and unionize the people. It's an uphill struggle, not because people are stupid and uninterested in something better, but because there are power forces interested in keeping things the way they are. You have heard that 1% of the people own more wealth than 90% of everybody else? Well, they are very focused on keeping things that way, and they own the means to do it.