A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.

If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.

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lurk2 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.

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pessimizer an hour ago | parent [-]

This is untrue. You cannot imagine a world where people, without changing the definition of people, don't need oxygen to breathe.

"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.

	▲	lurk2 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled. If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone). > We're ruled by people who don't work. I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.

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seizethecheese an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.

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skeaker an hour ago | parent [-]

Who is "we?" A utopian society is what we should ideally be aiming for at all times, not some dirty word like you seem to think it is.

	▲	zzzeek 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!

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0xy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.

Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.

Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.

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marginalia_nu an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How are we sure about the direction of cause and effect here? I'd expect more healthier people to self-select the working cohort, all else being equal.

	▲	amanaplanacanal 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah this seems like an obvious confounder.

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pessimizer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?

If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.