Livelihood Traps #

The Problem #

Many people are not able to live in accordance with their values because their work constrains their behavior. When their values come into conflict with those of their employer, often people cede to the employer’s values because they don’t want to lose their job. In America, losing your job means losing your health insurance and potentially having a hard time finding another job.

This dynamic leads to persistence of inefficient and often harmful status quos. For instance, there are many jobs that are “bullshit” in that they don’t contribute meaningfully to society, or even detract from it. People with these jobs are often aware of this, but they don’t want to lose their job, so they continue to do it and even defend its existence!

Politicians often pander to large electorates of people with jobs on the sole platform of maintaining them or making more, nevermind the usefulness of the jobs in question. This makes me sad.

For some, their job also becomes a part of their identity, and then they start defending their job for more personal reasons like these:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/157690414/so-what-does-drive-political-disagreement

Value Displacement #

Many people get so immersed in the culture livelihood traps have built that their core values themselves dissolve, or become a low priority. In their place, people value things that lead to them having success in their environment, such as:

• Presenting a self image that powerful people who control employment will like. This leads to behavior like:
  • Working hard on resumes / portfolios of work.
  • Being very agreeable when with these people, ceding to their value system.
  • Taking on work that the powerful people want done, regardless of personal beliefs.
• Related, increasing your “social status”
• Increasing your salary
  • Choosing work that pays more over work that is more important as dictated by core values.

I’ve noticed this happening to me when I take actions to chase promotion at work over doing other things.

Value “Shortsightedness” #

Another related phenomenon I’ve noticed in myself is a “shortsightedness” when it comes to values. I personally know that certain behaviors make me feel good regardless of how they serve my core values. These include:

• Showing other people how to solve a problem they are stuck on. For example:
  • Answering questions on message boards at work and outside of it.
  • Teaching other people technical skills.
  • Automating work that people were doing manually.
• Solving approachable problems myself. For example:
  • Rock climbing
  • Playing video games
  • Programming
  • Small home improvement projects

Another way to say this is that I can be prone to getting “nerd sniped” (https://xkcd.com/356/), and can be very happy when immersed in some new problem.

The problem here is that it is easy to just find the easiest path towards immersion regardless of the larger values the problems I’m solving serve. In other words, I’m so “shortsighted” that I act without considering any values at all!

Solutions #

• Government-provided health insurance or even income
• Make it easier / less risky to create startups. For instance by:
  • Improving social safety nets to reduce reliance on traditional employment.
  • Weakening intellectual property laws so that more information / software infrastructure is freely available to build upon.
• Build systems that make hard, important problems more accessible for the average person to start working on.
• Easier ways for people to self organize to retrain for new jobs. This could be accomplished via making interviews at companies based more on skill demonstration and less on credentials.