Strike! Magazine

Unconditional basic income is unconditional, so it doesn't have the downside of conditional welfare: people are afraid to earn too much money because they'll lose their welfare income, and then they're in danger of losing that new revenue and they can't get back on welfare right away so they're up the creek without a paddle. So they cling to the safety of welfare. And this + minimum wage laws keep them from developing themselves and creating monetizable value that builds on itself year after year.

And this is similar to the threat of losing your steady paycheck if you don't behave, as is evidenced in part by the great grandparent comment. There is a lot of dysfunctional politics and dynamics that comes from being in that sort of situation and environment, which pg's essay "why nerds are unpopular" describes at length. Incidentally, pg is also very anti FTE personally, likening it to eating roadkill.

Look at it like this -- can you work on your own awesome project that will change the world? Not if your employer wouldnt be pleased. Maybe you'll sneak around like a kid does. If you work for a bank, can you take a position as a CFO at a startup? I have heard people say they can't do this, or that, because their employer wouldnt like it. I've seen tons of people sitting around and pretending to work, because their employer was covering the risk, but they are afraid of losing their job. It's a conditional paycheck that by definition demands your full time for whatever odd job…

Passion is overrated. No, worse than that. All that advice about "finding your passion", etc. for work, is corrosive.

Oh, yes, there are people who love X, make a career out of it, and continue doing X for the rest of their life and are successful.

While there are people who love X, trying to make a living doing X, only to find it's not a viable career. Only, their "passion" makes them continue to do X far longer than they should, causing them to burn out.

There are all sorts of fields where the number of passionate people are far greater than the number of available jobs. Look at people who are passionate about dance, or sports, or horses, or art. Only a few of them can make a living from it. Yet everyone successful had to be passionate about it.

Now, get this. There are also people who start doing Y because a job is available, and find that, after a while, they enjoy doing Y. Some even find they are passionate about the job. Others use the money from Y so they can do what they are really passionate about as a hobby.

(And sometimes that hobby can, over time, become a career. I knew someone who was a manager of the grounds crew for the local cemetery, and a hobbyist woodworker. There was enough demand for he work that he now makes custom furniture for a living.)

The worst case in this scenario is to find that they really don't like Y, but nothing says you have to do Y for the rest of your life, and at least you have the money saved up to support you while you switch…

Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is:

How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

>Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really…

A perennial topic of discussion among creative people.

Your issue with distractions is almost certainly a negative. Sometimes you've simply got to face those head-on. It's very, very difficult to handle both these and creative work. A sense of fatality about whatever's causing the distractions may help -- there's something to be said about Ashleigh Brilliant's "I feel much better now that I've given up hope".

Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow is probably the canonical reference. Read it. He's also appeared in multiple interviews (I encountered him a couple of decades back during a long road trip through the back country, it was a wonderfully serendipitous discovery).

I also listen to numerous interviews with authors, musicians, artists, and similar creative types, including occasionally scientific researchers. I'm finding these to be increasingly interesting with time. The task of getting yourself into a state to allow creativity or problem-solving to emerge is one shared with many others.

As for my own observations:

• Routine helps. Having a regular "beat" to my day provides structure.

• Recognizing my own limits and rhythms is key. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, there are many forms of physical exercise and fitness practices. For many of them, a relatively brief training period (as few as 4 minutes, generally up to an hour or two, rarely more) provides optimal benefits. Rest and recovery are esssential. I'm finding similar patterns in mental tasks: …

To my knowledge however, I am unaware of any situation where an open allocation culture has been successfully retro-fitted to an existing corporate environment (if you know of one, I'd be interested).

That is hard as hell, to be honest. Paradoxically, I think it requires a top-down commitment. Companies usually want to try this sort of thing incrementally. So they put their best people into an R&D group that has a fair amount of autonomy. However, over time what seems to happen is that it's resented and attacked, and eventually has to spend more time fighting political battles than innovating. At that point, it's often just as underperforming as the rest of the organization, the experiment is judged a failure, and that autonomy is taken away. It's the "fish frying" problem (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).

I'm also skeptical in relation to how well an open allocation culture would work out once a company grows beyond a certain inflection point. I'm not well read enough on this matter to put a stake in the ground and define that exact inflection point.

Gore-tex uses open allocation and is large (almost 10,000 employees, if I recall correctly). What I don't think OA can survive is too-rapid growth. I think it can scale to thousands of employees. I don't think it can tolerate personnel growth at the 100-150%/year levels that VCs want to see.

Bullshit Jobs, a 2018 book by David Graeber, discusses this phenomenon pretty extensively and calls for more research. His rudimentary theory is that people who aren't contributing to society know that they aren't, and it makes them miserable. People have an inherent desire to change the world around them, and most professional jobs are actually mostly nonsense. This results in professionals being depressed and feeling hopeless.

There was one study the book cited, "Taxation and the Allocation of Talent", which was particularly interesting. As it's abstract says: "Estimates from the literature suggest that high-paying professions have negative externalities, whereas low-paying professions have positive externalities."[1]

As a successful lawyer who quit that profession and became a software engineer, writer, and startup founder, all of this really resonates with me.

The book is an outgrowth of a 2013 essay that got re-printed 100s of times and spurred some polling.[2] I recommend at least reading the essay. It has a lot of implications for economics, business management, and various other fields.

[1]https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/693393

[2] "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/