>“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.”
Capitalists are realizing the fundamental emptiness of capitalism. It's hard to have a sense of purpose when your entire life is spent making a number on a spreadsheet into a slightly larger number for the benefit of someone even more elite than you.
There's nothing inherent to capitalism that requires individuals to constantly be attempting to maximize wealth. And there are ways for a society to discourage such behavior, such as a very high tax rate on income over a certain amount (perhaps 90% on income over $1 million). That would change behavior after a certain point, without throwing out all of the optimizing benefits of capitalism in general.
Yes, the right wing will cry "socialism!", but that's simply not true. Capitalism is still the mechanism that decides winners and losers—there's just less incentive to "win" above a certain amount. At worst (if one considers capitalism as the end goal rather than the means to drive production), it's a hybrid of some sort.
I exist in a capitalist economy. I make a number on a spreadsheet a bit larger and then I go home and live a meaningful life using, in part, the money I've earned doing so. I'd be hard-pressed to do that under any other economic system that's ever been tried.
If you live in the modern developed world, you probably live in a mixed market economy that has incorporated many structures advocated by socialist critics of capitalism (in many places some straight out the Communist Manifesto), rather than an actually capitalist system.
And it's quite likely that, for those outside of the bourgeoisie—and even much of the petit bourgeoisie, as much as many critics of capitalism see them as class enemies—your ability to have a meaningful life outside of doing what is necessary to maintain your condition in the economic system is a direct result of the ways in which you do not live in a capitalist society.
Why? He never said anything at all about Communism or any other ideology being superior in particular. Looks a bit like you're itching for a fight that no one is actually giving to you.
To say that capitalism is empty doesn't necessarily mean you are anti-capitalist. E.g. many people find their job fundamentally empty, and they find meaning elsewhere, for example in their family. But they don't quit their job- it enables them to enjoy their family. Similarly, you can view capitalism as a fundamentally empty, but extremely useful system that enables us to find meaning elsewhere.
I don't see how that follows but I'll answer anyway. One main difference is that the economic gains in a hypothetical alternate economic system could be distributed to you, your peers, and the needy in a more humane fashion instead of the majority of the gains concentrating to the elite.
What is this hypothetical system like, and how is it different from the ones that have been tried, whose proponents would describe in a way similar to what you just said, but have been shown to have the same emptiness problem you attribute to capitalism (as well as some others, like mass murder and economic collapse)?
No he doesn't. Invoking that Communism has problems does not magic away the problems that Capitalism currently has. The two don't bear any relationship.
It does in this case because it's the same problem in both systems.
He ascribed a problem to capitalism that is also a well-known problem of non-capitalism. The same thing happens in both places (actually worse under communism), so the blame is clearly misplaced.
False dichotomy much? The world isn't divided into some platonic form of "communism" and "capitalism." These are just labels we attach to a whole bunch of social and economic dynamics.
Names for colors or kinds of automobile are also just labels we attach to whole spectra of related things, but the words still have meaning and we are able to use them productively.
Responding to a comment like “this red color is agitating” with “you don’t get to complain about red unless you accept all the ways that yellow is bad” isn’t using terms productively.
Life is fundamentally empty. Unless you're religious: you live for a while then you die. Maybe you successfully procreated, and your descendants live until something gets them too.
Eventually climate change, or asteroids or supernova gets everyone left.
Agree with you here, but how does communism give meaning?
For me, I've grown up in a capitalist society, with parents from a communist one. My sense of meaning in life comes from navigating through this environment (our laws, rules, societies, etc.), and trying to make the most of it (and earn a healthy living) to provide for my family, and make sure that I and everyone I care about have long, healthy, enjoyable lives together.
If we were in a communist society (and not one that's post-scarcity which seems far, far off), I wouldn't be able to do this... and I don't know how you can argue that there's no meaning to the pursuit of a better world for everyone (with small exceptions, creating value is necessary for making money in a capitalistic society), reaping the rewards of that value creation, and making sure that it benefits and protects those I love.
I never said anything about communism, and neither did the GP for that matter, you can blame Jon for bringing that term to the table.
>My sense of meaning in life comes from navigating through this environment (our laws, rules, societies, etc.), and trying to make the most of it (and earn a healthy living) to provide for my family, and make sure that I and everyone I care about have enjoyable lives together.
> If we were in a communist society (and not one that's post-scarcity which seems far, far off), I wouldn't be able to do this
Why not? It's just a different environment, different set of rules, and different challenges. Some people navigated communism well and found meaning, many others did not.
The GP seemed to be using the label of capitalism to apply to sociopathic profit-seeking-for-its-own-sake, as opposed to the loosely defined economic and political model of capitalism. In that sense, what they're saying makes a lot of sense.
It lacks objective meaning (that we know of or if that can even exist), but that doesn't stop me from assigning it, and operating on, subjective meaning. In fact, I can't even stop myself from doing that. It's almost as if the brain evolved to run on silly fiat meaning for its survival.
Well in that case, since the universe itself is ultimately doomed, why not delude ourselves into believing that there is, in fact, meaning in our lives so that the remainder of our life isn't spent in misery?
I submit that the "fake" subjective meaning and some "real" objective meaning are indistinguishable.
And how do you know that the black of our heat death isn't the white of more universes and civilizations than there's ever been before but which we'll never see not that it matters except in an absurdly selfish way? :3
That's what a Nine Inch Nails song taught me once.
(But, given that we don't know what most matter or energy that makes up the Universe is, it feels a little silly to anchor meaning to current cosmological knowledge. Maybe a nice meaning to adopt is to improve that knowledge because we might discover ways to insulate against heat death indefinitely or something. Although you likely won't be doing that at the salaries in the OP.)
Nothing lasts forever. Eventually the heat death of the universe will come for humanity, no matter how many solar systems you imagine we might colonize.
> Life is fundamentally empty. Unless you're religious
There are more -isms than those.
In Sapiens, Harari argues ideologies such as capitalism and communism and belief systems such as your company serve the very same purpose: to give life a meaning.
To me, it appears akin to fairytales we tell our children.
> Even though, in theory, the investments he makes each day help fund pensions — and thus the lives of retirees — it’s pretty hard to see that altruism from his window office in a Manhattan skyscraper. “It’s just numbers on a screen to me,” he told me. “I’ve never met a retiree who enjoyed a vacation because of what I do. It’s so theoretical it hardly seems real.”
Helping other people is meaningful. When the work is alienated from the people you're helping is when a job feels empty. It seems particularly common in high-paying jobs - or perhaps certain jobs are high-paying precisely because they're so alienating.
It is the false premise that employment in a capitalist system exists to provide meaning or value through work, that work is noble or carries some implicit moral weight or dignity of purpose.
Work exists to allow you to enrich the capital ownership class, of which you are likely not a part (if you were, you wouldn't need to work to eat.) That's it.
And yet, when I look around me I see a bunch of older colleagues, some of them older than 65, who rode the same wave from smallish to a pretty big company. Like me, they could afford to not work anymore, but they keep on working anyway.
They have exactly was the article describes as essential features for job happiness: respect from people they respect, working on something that make the world a (little) bit better for others, and lots of trust and autonomy within the company.
I don't really care about heavy claims like moral weight or dignity of purpose. But what I do know is that it provides immense amount of satisfaction that I wouldn't want to do without.
You and your colleagues are lucky and privileged to be able to find satisfaction in work, but that's still orthogonal to the purpose of work. Enjoying one's job is a coincidence, not an expected result.
Meaning can absolutely be found in life, one way cited throughout history across many cultures and religions is directly helping others (charity, teaching, medicine).
Capitalists are realizing the fundamental emptiness of capitalism. It's hard to have a sense of purpose when your entire life is spent making a number on a spreadsheet into a slightly larger number for the benefit of someone even more elite than you.