If you starve to death or succumb to the elements, does that serve your personal sense of purpose?
The idea that I inherently serve an important purpose is already narcissistic and reactionary, reminding of the beliefs of Elon Musk or Benito Mussolini.
If you think your individual life is more important than your values, you don’t actually have any values.
And if I can do those things, why should I do them for money? You are all but outright stating my life is only as valuable as the value of my work.
This is ableist, speciesist, and classist outright, and leans into sexism (women exist to breed more working bodies) and homophobia (less valuable because they aren’t breeding) as well.
Why should I participate in that? Why should I encourage that?
The only time it makes sense to tie survival to work is when the work is sanitation, medicine, food production. Raking leaves in particular is evironmentally destructive (a tidy yard supports no life outside of usually a single usually invasive usually selectively bred species), and typing papers in academic settings is often busywork related to examining loyalty and “work ethic” of the person who is meant to be writing it which also consumes energy and resources that could be spent in many other ways to much greater effect on general welfare and personal mental health. Why should I do those things? Because people who aren’t thinking about anything but their personal gain want me to?
I’d rather die, and if starving weren’t so tortuous and slow, I would have let myself die long ago. This world is twisted and honestly, your advice kind of is too, and the fact you (and nearly everyone, generally) see it as normal and acceptable is even more twisted.
I mean, I will do that. If I dislike someone or think they’re genuinely a bad person, or too rich, or whatever, I’ll take as much money as I can possibly get from them.
But how do you build a life when you see financial transactions as inherently predatory and will only participate if it’s with someone you think deserves to have less? Especially when those people also generally make the worst and most unreliable customers?
It’s not about the value of my work, for me. It’s about the idea that material or financial “value” can ever be compared with or placed above the value of life, wellbeing, contentment, and so on of those actually involved.
Huh, what timing! Must be a coincidence.
Sigmund Freud was mostly entirely off base, but the Death Drive/Thanatos seems legit. Likewise, everyday sadism is included in the expanded “Dark” traits based on some pretty solid experimental evidence.
Of course, that also implies the desire for expansive domain (or “property”) correlates directly with the desire to harm others for the mere sake of it. It’s no surprise we see evidence of both together so often.