As people get older, they often come to realize that any job that puts a roof over ones head, food on the table, and allows quality time with friends and family, is meaningful work.
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If they have to choose between a meaningless job and starvation?
Cool. Now grow up and do some meaningful with your time. And so should I.
>"In a system where, as Gorz puts it, “we produce nothing of what we consume, and consume nothing of what we produce,” it is up to each and every one of us, connecting with others as a collective mass, to regain control over the meaning of work and over the determination of the needs that legitimize it. This is also the way for us to question the disastrous impact that the economy is having on the environment through its blind logic of profit and growth."
I have volunteered at the foodbank and with the homeless. I got paid nothing, but it had an effect on the world that aligned with my values and provdided meaning, but it was effectively useless for me.
As a random example of this kind of thing: I saw a manager spend a month manually tallying up the disk usage on a fully virtualised storage array… VM by VM, volume by volume. Not realising that as a consequence of the layers abstractions, the resulting numbers will be totally meaningless. I.e.: an empty 2 TB volume might need only a couple of gigabytes on the array… or the full 2 TB if someone had accidentally “full” formatted it… except that deduplication was enabled across volumes, so… who knows!?
The only number that mattered was the post-dedup allocated block count which the storage array conveniently provided on the status screen. At the time it was 1%, which translates to “don’t worry about it”.
He worried about it. Spent weeks and weeks with Excel tallying up the total, getting nonsense, trying again, over and over.
You see, two decades earlier, storage arrays didn’t dedup, VMware was not a thing, and there wasn’t a nice neat little percentage that they array itself could report. You had to tally up each volume in each server, it was the only way. So a policy was written that it’s someone’s job to go do this every six months or whatever.
So this guy followed the policy. He tallied things up.
Like a meat robot following the last instruction left by a deceased master.
It was depressing to watch.