econ, not so fun.

Just read this in my macroeconomics textbook:


'A person's spirit can be broken by a long period of desiring work but being unable to find it. Research has shown that crime, mental illness, and general social unrest tend to be associated with long-term unemployment.'



To the first sentence, people don't DESIRE work, they require it. It's how the monetary system works and it's what we're conditioned to believe. To the second sentence, here's solution that no economics textbook will tell you: eliminate employment and you eliminate unemployment! When we start to calculate numbers like 'employment', we turn them into another statistic. We sit there and analyze it until we come up with yet another theory or model, allowing us to forget how absurd the idea of 'employment' is in the first place. The fact that we even have a word for the amount of labor being implored, shows how much of a work-centered society we live in. Why are we so submissive to the idea that amount of work you do correlates with the level of success you attain? It essentially implies that the amount of hours you spend doing task x positively correlates to the amount of money you attain. So the more hours of our life we waste working, the less life we have to enjoy when we actually stop working. I'm not saying employment should be banned and we should all laugh and grow fat but I do believe that we need to step back and think about the concept of being 'employed', of being another statistic for future generations to passively learn and analyze in mundane macroeconomic classes. Econ, not so fun.