2016-12-10

reason #21,066 reason to distrust all scientific studies

Originally posted November 21, 2016

 I see a lot of people claiming that jobs are good for people, because jobs give life more meaning. They point to studies "showing" that people are happier when employed than unemployed, even when "controlling" for just giving people money. Needless to say I haven't read any of these, because I am not in the habit of filling my brain with motivated bullshit.

Now first of all, really? Do you expect me to believe that someone who cleans toilets for a living is happier than they would be if they didn't have to do that? That's retarded.

But more importantly, this motivated reasoning is failling to take into account that not having a job gets you yelled at all the time. "Get a job!" people yell at mendicants. They really do that, all the time. And it's not just yelling. The whole American culture is infused with an ethos that being unemployed makes you worth less, that you're not earning your keep, that you don't deserve to exist. Unless you're a child, woman

I've spent years unemployed before, and I'll be unemployed again, probably soon. My quality of life is easily lower having to work all the time than not. Work sucks. This is the most obvious thing in the world. Which is one reason everyone wants to get counterintuitiveness points for pretending it doesn't. But the bigger reason, as far as I can tell the reason it's achieved memetic fixation, is that people who have jobs really hate them, and resent people who are able to get away without having them, and resolve the cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that jobs are actually good.

No.

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