Born into this consuming world, production becomes a virtue.
Work has been taught as this ennobling practice, while laziness is demeaned, and freeloading is looked down upon.
How noble is toil?
That depends on how you define ‘work’. There’s a big difference between the Shakers and Microsoft.
No, it is not.
I think work is nobility-neutral. It’s cool if you work only becasue you want to, and it’s cool if you don’t.
Work is extrinsically valuable due to it’s result, it’s result extrinsically valuable due to our perception of it, our perception intrinsically valuable to itself. I think…
I don’t think you mean that work is intrinsically valuable due to its result.
To evaluate if work has become a virtue consider how many of the people you know identify themselves using their job or the product of their job, i.e. money.
Then evaluate what you, personally think when you meet someone who admits he is unemployed or doesn’t want to work.
Finally evaluate what standards your culture uses to determine worth or value.
Lots of people identify themselves by their job, and set their own value by how much money they make.
However, it was not clear in your OP that you are seeking a common value. I find that question uninteresting - at least so far. Personally, I don’t much care what someone does for a living, or how much money they make.
When I meet someone who is unemployed, or who doesn’t want to work, I am likely to wish him luck, because that can be a difficult way to live.
As for your third requirement - entire books are written on that. Don’t have time even to begin on that one.
My goal is to explore the value of liesure in a post-modern industrial society that has raised production, and its prerequisite consumption as its prime measurment for contentment and how working or not working factors into interpersonal relationaships.
Oh, I see.
No you don’t.
It ain’t gonna happen. 
Satyr,
I have a suggestion for you: write poetry or rap music instead. You may have more success achieving your “goal” that way.
???
Who says “consumption” is a unit of measurement for <insert whatever is is that you are actually trying to explore>?
How do you measure “consumption” anyway?
I know far too many people who work hard just to get something they do not need. They will kill themselves in order to get what the Jones’s have. They will put themselves in debt for 30 years just to have a pretty facade of a home. Which kills me to no end, they will work their butts off to own things that they have no time to enjoy.
No credit cards here, our contract on this home is a short one to pay off. We drive old vehicles, have used furniture, if we need something or want something that we cannot afford, we barter or wait until we can buy it without payments and interest. We get to spend time together in this beat up old home and we enjoy the hell out of it. We enjoy working because we are not doing it just to pay off debts or keep up with others, we actually have jobs we enjoy doing. That it pays the bills and keeps a roof over our head is gravy. For us if work is not enjoyable then quit, find something else. The only profit you get to take with you is your memories. If you can’t enjoy what you have then what is the point? Some how I never understood why having what others have is so important. Sure we have financial problems and sure we have life beat the crap out of us, but, at least we don’t have a dozen useless anchors around our necks like those around us. We can tread water much easier than they can.
You know when we lived in the city the people were worse than what they are in the country. You don’t see everyone out here playing the Jones game, there is enough , but, the numbers or the ratio is less.
Is work noble, only if you do it for noble reasons, its not virtuous either unless you do it for virtuous reasons. We are humans, we are not noble, nor virtuous.
And what is my “goal”?
I’m sure are familiar with this,
These days myself I think quite well of working with passion and also working to survive or “make a living”; and not so highly of “jobs”, “salarymen” and income for status. This is probably a common view.
La foutaise.
Or, “proving” what you have assumed to be true.
Right, it’s all part of the brainwashing that we all go through living in an industrial society. Your TV set holds all the answers.
Think about how much people care about celebrities, even on the news. Kids are taught to look up to those who have money, and then they have that set in their mind that money=success. Turn the kids into drones, let them go through the cycle and repeat with their kids.
Industry is a god damn mess.
These days myself I think quite well of working with passion and also working to survive or “make a living”; and not so highly of “jobs”, “salarymen” and income for status. This is probably a common view.
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Making a living implies working to survive and you survive by prostituting yourself to gain access to resources nature provides freely.
And the shame associated with not working or how access to women depends on it.
And your goal is, what?
What assumption are you trying to prove with the above sentence and why?
Oh dear, what tangled webs we weave.
The self-righteous are unaware of their own actions.
Abstract and Automatic America. We are constantly bombarded by commercials and incitements to buy something else, something bigger, something newer, something better. This should in some way fill up the void life constantly presents us, that internal, metaphysical void of living, at least in our tribe (aka Western Civilization).
So, no matter how much you try to avoid “keeping up with the Jones” you will be forced by your own mind to go out and buy something, to do something, to do something about it (“it” being any dissatifaction your mind invents that you have).
So are you satisfied ? Hell no, no one can ever be satisfied with just existing, with absolutely nothing at all, with absolutely no goal at all, with absolutely no desire “to improve”, to get ahead, to get better, to “progress”. No one can live doing absolutely nothing at all. But real achievment and progress occurs the moment you truly realize that everything you want or need has absolutely no value whatsoever.
You only need WATER to be alive, you just NEED TO DRINK WATER, once you have that you have everything that is possible to have and everything you will possibly ever need. Once you learn to live doing absolutely nothing at all and desiring absolutely nothing at all then you have really achieved success.
American Capitalism is indeed a very sophisticated mental jail, it is all programmed from the outset, the idea of success, the idea of competition, the idea of getting ahead of your neighbor, of getting ahead, of achieving compared to someone else. Inequality is the real lifeblood of this system, the higher the inequality the higher the voltage to get the circuit running, the more fun it is to succeed and hose the other, crush the other to dust, the real ideology of this system is extremely violent, that is why America is an inherently extremely violent society, loves wars, loves bombing, that is why military expenditure is the only form of socialism the USA accepts, the public pays to crush some enemy for any reason at all, neither the enemy or the reason really counts, only the act of crushing is of any value, the act of winning, of beating “them” up.
We play the stock market, it is an abstract poker game, put in the money, make your bet, get a profit. But behind the scenes that profit is crushing millions of workers all across the globe in untold numbers of ways, but you don’t know or notice, you just have to get the profit, profit is ethically correct, we believe in god and profit, but the third world worker that is being payed 50 dollars a month for 12 hours a day is irrelevant, and hell the guy deserves it, he didn’t work hard enough, he didn’t study, he doesn’t have the right skill set.
Beware, health care costs will keep on rising forever, it will be alot of fun watching more and more americans not being able to pay for it and blaming the socialist government for all the problems.
College education will keep on rising forever, but you need a college education to get “a good job”, it will be fun to see millions of americans that can’t pay for it anymore definitely doomed to low paying jobs because “they didn’t study”.
Aside from the fact that the relationship between intellectual work and pay is no longer guaranteed, it was really never guaranteed, it was successful only when everyone was a farmer and the few who knew how to read and write, who were lawyers and dentists and businessmen were payed alot because intellectual skills were scarce. Today there are more and more intellectuals, people who studied in college, but companies don’t really know what to do with them, don’t really need them.
What is needed is the illusion that intellectual work and skills will bring higher paying jobs, but the real goal is to keep on paying the colleges for the illusion, something that will never return the price paid.
Beware, the system loves self criticism, it reinforces itself by incorporating all criticism inside itself, the criticism too becomes a product.
The very fact that it can incorporate anything at all and package it including these ideas is what makes it so successful. And indeed it is completely automatic, at this point, no one is pushing the buttons behind the curtains because there are no buttons, the is “no chief” or “group of obscure manipulators”, there is no curtain because it is simpy the “operating system” of Western Civilization, it is the software that this “tribe” has been programmed to follow, but no one programmed it.
All these discussions sound so 1970s hippy like, don’t they ?