Socioeconomic system; a hellish design
CMV: Choosing a career you don’t enjoy just for the money is better than choosing a career you enjoy but doesn’t pay well
Our interests don’t always align with good paying jobs. If yours do, good for you, but you’re an exception. That’s why there are so many starving musicians and freelance writers. So many people decide to choose a job that they enjoy when in reality, the job they enjoy is unrealistic and pays like crap. I’d rather be an engineer or mechanic who hates his job and is financially stable than an unemployed illustrator who couldn’t make his rent last month. The funny thing is, many people who make their passions their career end up hating it.
You are right, but only in a reductive sense. To summarise my argument, if I were to design hell, I would use with the very same socioeconomic system.
Yes, if you live and work to make money, you can have a better standard of living. This is objectively better than not being able to afford to support oneself.
Yet, what do we mean by better here?
The strategy you propose is the best approach to survival within the current socioeconomic system. I agree that it is a reasonable life strategy to adopt. Yet, let’s look at the bigger picture.
It forces everyone to do something they do not necessarily enjoy just to get by. What does this career actually contribute? Does it create any meaningful change, does it make the world a better place, does it inspire others, does it create any real value, in any sense other than just monetary value, and value for oneself.
If everyone follows the same approach, then everyone spend their life working to make money, no-one would enjoy what they are doing in the process, and there would be no meaning to any of it. People live and work only to escape it. Freedom comes at a price, both monetary and loss of innocence. Indeed, one could argue that one becomes corrupted in the process, and serve as the new demonic overseers who gatekeeper the path to freedom by continually elevating the price; making it ultimately inescapable.
If one were to design the perfect hell, this is exactly what I would have everyone doing.
I’ve mentioned value creation; let’s examine what value money add’s to one’s life? You can live without fear of ruin, you can buy nice things, you can have nice experiences. Yet, is there any sense of duty that comes out of this success? Great, so one person has escaped the trap, but now that person is in a position to add real value to the world and create meaningful change, what now is the motivation to do so? More often, once one has wealth, one uses that wealth only to create a passive source of income for oneself, to ensure one never has to go back into the very system they’ve escaped from and live a life free from any reciprocal responsibility; a culture that is purely extractive, with value only withdrawn and never re-invested. They spend their entire life struggling to make money, then actively earning money, then passively earning money, then accumulating money. When one considers the bigger picture, they never do anything meaningful with it, outside of meeting their own self-interest. Is this a meaningful life well spent?
Introduce a hierarchy, where the most successful become so by living off the labour of others, and no-one ever has enough to live in comfort, except those at the very top, who lack self-awareness or any sense of collective responsibility. The whole system forces people to compete, to climb over each other to succeed, then feed off each other, and then sit in comfort on the back of others, uncaring about the others who have been and continue to be trampled under their feet. By necessity, as one becomes more successful, one tends to becoming less caring about the collective as a whole. The system creates the very devils who lord over the rest, perpetuate the same system, and force everyone else to struggle within it.
So far, it all fits the hell analogy very nicely.
So, everyone either lives in perpetual struggle to survive, the fear of economic ruin, trying not be crushed by the system. Those who do try to add real human, non-monetary, value in society, to help, to teach or care for others, does so with the knowledge that they will struggle to survive in the current system. Yet, they choose this in spite of this, with the foreknowledge that they will not make huge amounts of money, and do so anyway. Can you imagine a world in which there are no teachers, no carers, no nurses, etc? Indeed, one could even say that the system exploits their desire to choose a meaningful career by forcing them to accept lower wages. Either that, or individuals become so focused on their own struggle to make money and succeed, to escape the trap of fearful struggle to survive and the work they hate, that they don’t see the bigger picture; to see that it is the system itself that is the problem, so lack an awareness of the system they are part of and have escaped from. As such, they don’t feel any responsibility to help others out of the same trap, or help change the system itself, or use their wealth and position to help others or add real value back into the world. They either live a simple life of supporting only oneself and one’s family, insist that if only others would do what they did, then they could be successful too, or instead live a life of self-serving and self-centred hedonistic pursuit and creating more wealth and luxury for oneself.
Now, let’s add to this picture, evidence from the contemporary world around us; we’re all fighting each other, or becoming apathetic; young women are now trying to make money by selling their bodies online, and youth and beauty are now reduced to commodities for exchange. It would seem that sex, greed and power are society’s motivating forces, and also dictate its values. Add to this perpetual war, plague, fires and floods, and the whole world become a marketplace, not just the temple. (Arguably, though, the world is the temple).
To me, it looks like we’ve actually creating a literal hell on earth as well. Add to this, forewarning of a potential extinction level threat, which people still aren’t taking sufficiently seriously. So far, it is all very biblical.
So, yes, whilst I agree with you, that focus on money is the best strategy for survival in the short-term and from an individual perspective. I hope you can also appreciate that this is unsustainable for the long term, and that it is the socioeconomic system that is the problem. Finally, I hope also that you can appreciate that the very focus on making money, doesn’t help or encourage one to develop a bigger picture perspective necessary to understand the system one is part of.
Tl;dr - I would design hell around the same socioeconomic principles: force every to compete against everyone else, keep everyone so busy that no-one realises what they are doing and what they are helping to create; a system that is creating a literal hell on earth, complete with hell fire and devils lording over the rest, and keeping us busy, dumb or making slaves to money or labour of us all, and reducing human interest to the purely economic.