Antiwork

I also value the ability to give something back to society through my work

To clarify: work need not be "compulsory" in order to give back to society. I have contributed towards multiple Open Source software projects, been a moderator of a small & then another medium-sized Reddit sub, written the sole content for many a wiki page and aided the creation & extension of far many more others, etc. - not one bit of any of that gave me any direct monetary compensation (though may have helped me get other jobs, from polishing those skillsets), but was all fulfilling and helped my common human to enjoy their leisurely pursuits, and that was enough for me.

And doing that kind of non-compulsory work I feel like adds to my freedom, rather than detracts from it. For the same reason that walking or cycling to some places enhances my enjoyment of life, rather than always having to take a car - and yet I have also been without a car entirely for certain periods of my life, and yes that too was constraining. It is best to have choices imho, from my own direct & personal experiences.

The scenario that Wall-E describes is that they leaned so heavily into their "comfort" that they literally lost the ability to have choices anymore - instead of being able to choose to sit, or stand, or walk, or run, or bike, or swim, etc., their only "choice" was to sit in their chairs. Period. This is not "best" - this is not maximum "freedom": when you have zero viable alternatives, that is in fact no choice or freedom at all. Leading up to that: sometimes you have to stand up, even if you don't feel like it in the moment, in order to preserve your ability to stand up in the future. And if not, well that's your "choice" - but is it though, if it is not one based on informed consent?

Why I say the latter is that, remember that the OP graphic specifically precluded automation: it talked about living like a king, eating Doritos, "while other people do all the hard work". Essentially it advocates that we all be like Elon Musk, playing games all day long and then taking credit and all the monetary rewards resulting from that hard work of others. The implication even goes further: that we would be forcing others to do our bidding as our slaves (colonialism = do that to "others" abroad, vs. inflation where we do it to our own citizens at home). To that I say fuck that noise! But then we got off on this other tangent, which is: what if other humans didn't have to be slaves, and robots just did all the work for us? Okay... that's not nearly so ethically unsound as the OP. But my point was that it is still far from the ideal, unless we made (non-compulsory) work a part of the balancing of our lives - exercise and rest, not one or the other but both.

TLDR: When we become reliant upon the machines, that’s when they own us rather than the other way around.

I am not advocating for slavery here, e.g. as opposed to having robots do our work. On that point I think we are in agreement - it sure would be nice if robots would take over the compulsory stuff (NOT HUMAN BEINGS USED AS SLAVES!!1!!), to allow us the freedom to live however we choose. So moving on, next: if we sit down into those couch-chairs, then we make slaves of ourselves, i.e. our comfort takes precedence but at the cost of our autonomy, whereupon we have lost something - our freedom to choose what to do next. So my note was a cautionary tale, to be mindful of the balance, as opposed to the overly simplistic "work=bad (always)" mindset that was so prevalent in that sub, even before bots took it over. In the OP graphic, the second meaning of ditching work would be unquestionably good, but the former one of ditching work MINUS THE HUMAN SLAVERY PART would not be a uniformly positive outcome... and in fact I think it would be quite negative, overall.