Copiosis is a fully-designed economic innovation offering a path to a regenerative, global, resource-based economy. Since we’re implementing the innovation, we know big barriers keep humanity feeling stuck where it is if we don’t solve them.
Those barriers include the notion of “work” and “jobs”.
We know political leaders, academicians and economists put extreme value on these. Yet, that emphasis blocks us from a world possible today. A world where neither work, nor jobs offer value.
For decades humanity put emphasis on job creation and work. Indeed, most people believe work not only offers income opportunity, it also offers meaning. The problem with finding meaning in work comes when employers take that for granted, then profit from people’s yearning for meaning and in the process create wage slavery.
Some don’t understand what wage slavery means. Here’s wikipedia’s definition:
“Wage slavery is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. It is usually used to refer to a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.”
It’s pernicious and pervasive
Some won’t argue against wage slavery being a problem, but they can’t bring themselves to seeing it as something humans can solve by making people free. Of course our freedom reads like this:
Make. People. Free. Those three words scare people who casually approve wage-slavery. Such people include – oddly enough – not only those who are the slaves, but also those who are not, yet still depend heavily on the wage-slave status of others. Thus wage slavery remains pernicious and pervasive.
“Yeah but, if you give everyone the kind of freedom you’re talking about, then the things needing done no one will do,” some say.
It’s remarkable so many people come back with that answer, while not realizing such thoughts endorse wage enslaving others!
Our collective attachment to jobs and work creates all kinds of dynamics. These dynamics give rise to ongoing tensions between worker unions and management. Rather than seeing workers and managers on the same side, suspicions on each side pit these groups against one another. Resulting tension increases costs, inefficiencies and, sometimes, causes consumer harm.
People aren’t insane
Still, recent events might just destroy wage slavery once and for all.
Those recent events: the one-two punch that is COVID-19 and now the Delta Variant, and the Federal Government’s stimulus check legislation. The fed’s pandemic response sent money to tens of millions of Americans in 2020 and 2021. Many welcomed those dollars. Some warned such payments would cause more harm than good.
They got it backwards.
For the first time in decades employers face a worker shortage. Why? Because many workers eyes opened amidst the pandemic. Those folks, happy with getting federal stimulus money, often in larger sums than their paychecks, now refuse returning to work.
Doomsayers think that’s because these people are lazy. But what’s shocking everyone (although it shouldn’t) is this: Offered the option between wage slavery and freedom, no one in their right mind would choose wage slavery!
Work people won’t return to involves low pay, long hours and grueling work schedules often under hazardous conditions. Some even include dealing with assholes and sexual harassment. Indeed stories detailed in this podcast confirm these claims.
No wonder people say take these jobs and shove them.
Imagine the future
So government checks, far from making people lazy, gave people room and time to think. They gave them time and choice. Given that, they question whether it’s worth trading their time, under harsh conditions, for meager money. Actually, they don’t need to question, they know.
These people aren’t going back to these jobs. Indeed, they’re telling employers to stuff them where the sun don’t shine. Literally in some cases.
Imagine a future where everyone gets similar choices. Who on earth will work such jobs…unless.
Unless working those jobs make them rich.
That’s what Copiosis offers. Rather than letting a dumb market decide what value looks like, Copiosis says, “everything a human does creates value. Some acts create lasting value. Others create more value than any economy can measure or reward.”
Feeding people, for example, creates massive value. A cook preparing food for people should be rich. And that person’s work environment should be luxurious. That can’t happen today. But in the future, in Copiosis’ future, it’s a no-brainer.
Some employers’ knee-jerk reaction go farther than calling people quitting their jobs lazy. They also blame the government for enabling people’s laziness. We say government leaders giving people money opened doors to a better future. One few imagined. A future where people are free. Free for real.
In that future, those working crappy jobs get rich. Those working jobs no one want to do, but someone needs to, get rich too. Until automation either replaces them, or makes that job obsolete.
No money in the world
Employers can’t understand why people don’t want to work these crappy jobs flipping burgers or waiting tables while constantly facing harassment and worse. We think they need a new perspective on what these jobs are like. Don’t know what they’re like? Read some examples as well as how it felt when these former workers opened their eyes:
Like this bar worker’s quote, taken from that aforementioned podcast.
“This pandemic opened my eyes to a lot of things. Just realizing that the situation I was in at the tiki bar just wasn’t good for me. The service industry gets crapped on more than any other industry. It’s the worst of the worst people coming out during the pandemic to go out to eat.”
“You really want to deal with somebody screaming in your face that the pandemic is not real? And guys just thinking that they can just touch you and that’s OK?”
“When you step back, you realize things. Like, oh, that was happening, and that was not cool, and I don’t want to expose myself to stuff like that anymore.”
“I made considerably more on unemployment than I did working. I worked hard before that. So I really thought, like, well, this is a good chance for me to just sort of take a rest. And then…I started to notice how well rested I was.”
“Bags that were under my eyes forever— for years— went away. My feet stopped hurting, and I never had really thought about how much my feet hurt all the time, but they did. My back stopped hurting. I was going to bed at a reasonable hour and waking at a reasonable hour. Rather than going to bed at, like, 4:00 in the morning and waking up at 11:00 AM. I was eating healthy and exercising.”
“My girlfriend and I were going on daily bike rides at the time, all over the city. We went out and saw places that we’d never seen. And granted, everything was closed, but it was spring. Oregon is beautiful in the spring, and there were all these things that I never, ever had time to experience.“
Keep passion alive
“I also got really into cooking at home, because I really do love to cook. It was a hobby of mine before I lost my job. You know, there’s this adage that my dad used to say to me. My grandpa used to say it too.” Take what you love to do—your hobby— and make it your job, and that’ll make you happy. But I actually 100 percent disagree with that now.”
“If you take your hobby and you make it into your job, your job being something that you have to do every day, whether you want to or not, you’ll end up hating your hobby. I know that’s true for me. There were lots of days where I had to go into work and it’d just be like, I really don’t want to do this. I’d be thinking about it, and it’d be like, I really don’t want to have to make this food again.“
“I’m so tired of making this food— somebody else’s food, the same thing over and over and over. So during Covid, I’d be making meals at home, and I got really into it. I’d make, like, the best version of some kind of takeout that I could make. Like, a full-on Indian meal or something, with naan and a bunch of different curries, or tacos from scratch, homemade pizza.”
“And that was really fun for me. I got to reconnect with this thing that I really do like doing. And I just started to think that this is how I’d like to live. I’d like to feel rested and well like this all the time. Not have this just be some kind of little vacation? So I started thinking like, well, why am I really doing this?”
“Is this serving me, or is it just serving whoever my employer is? And the easy answer to that question is, it isn’t serving me. It’s serving whatever my employer is, hands down. For all of my 20s and the first three years of my 30s, I have worked in the service of someone else. And I was making $3,000 a month, maybe $3,200 a month.”
I don’t give a sh*t
He goes on…
“The truth is that I think these benefits will run out the first week in September. Rather than rush back into a restaurant job that’s going to exhaust me, where I will have no energy or no presence of mind to work on these creative pursuits I enjoy doing. That doesn’t seem like a good answer. So I think maybe I should be a little bit more picky.”
“I don’t want to feel like I’m settling for something. Tons of people I know in the restaurant world. I can work, like, in any scenario I want, pretty much. And so some might feel that I’m being irresponsible by making that decision, but I don’t really give a shit what they think.”
“These are the decisions that I need to make for my life and my own well being, and I do not expect things to go back to normal in terms of staffing just because unemployment benefits are over. I think a lot of people are like, I’ve had it. I’m done with it. I can’t do it anymore. And I think it’s a wake up call.”
The wake up call we see wakes people up to a new future. One where people don’t work. Instead, the world is full of people living their passions. Meanwhile the world gets along just fine. In Copiosis innovation eliminates most crappy jobs. The rest automation takes over. On the way to that reality, those doing crappy jobs get rich.
That leaves everyone sleeping, eating, living and loving well. In the wake of that, wage slavery and the idea of “earning a living” get left behind.
In its place comes a full, rich world. A regenerative world Copiosis creates.