Work Sucks

I am always astonished at lottery winners who claim they aren’t going to quit their jobs even when they have enough money to live on very comfortably without working. If I hit the jackpot, I would not go back to work, not even to work off a notice period. I might not even bother to call in to quit. No, sir, I’d never work again if I didn’t have to. I’d do work, of course, but only what I wanted to do without regard to compensation. Pro bono stuff, maybe. I would do lots of gardening and home improvement just as I do now in my free time.

When I was a kid, I was taught that “hard work is its own reward”. Now I know that unless you’re doing something you love, it isn’t. Work sucks. In heaven, we won’t have to work. All our wants will be fulfilled without the need for toil. In a heaven on earth, robots or genetically modified apes and monkey butlers would do all the work while humans lived lives of carefree leisure. We could all be Eloi without any Morlochs to prey on us if we play our cards right. The robots or lower primates, or even cooperating teams of them, would have to be programmed/indoctrinated with the principle that “hard work is its own reward”. I really can't see any possible downside to creating a race of super intelligent ape workers or an army of servile robots.

In my upbringing, those who lived by the “sweat of their own brow” held an elevated moral status. This was to distinguish them from parasites, not to glorify hard work for its own sake. After all, hard work was one of the curses God laid on Adam when he was kicked out of Paradise. Presumably, there was no work in Paradise.

It has been said that “work makes us free”, but this is surely a cruel lie. Rather, let us look to bring into being the Big Rock Candy Mountain where they will banish “the jerk who invented work”. I am tired of being a monkey butler.