this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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“Imagine if we worked less. Imagine if we walked around our communities, talked to our neighbors, spent time in nature, played. Imagine if we could read, write, fall in love, without that nagging feeling of ‘needing to do something’; imagine if your life was your own.”

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you cut out consumerism, this is entirly possible with modern technology. Even better, if you are from a rich country, it is possible to do this today, if you are willing to be unconventional. The key to this is to lower your expenses drasticly and have or had a well paying skill(you can do it with investments as well). This works as we did have pretty good economic growth in terms of efficency since decades. So if you are fine with a US 1960s lifestyle the average US-American could lower their spednign by 2/3s. Obviously most of the growth went to the upper class, but it showswhat is possible. Even crazier GDP and primary energy consumption are fairly closely linked. Currently 19% of US primary energy come from low carbon sources. So if you would lower US GDP by 2/3 you end up with a third of energy consumption. If you are able to keep all low energy sources running and are reduce energy consumption by 2/3 you end up lowering fossil fuels cosnumption by over 80%. This is more or less true for all high income economies, but obviously requires a lot of planning on a national scale. On a personal scale it is certainly possible to have more free time, if you go for it.

[–] bouh 5 points 1 year ago

Wage slavery is the only thing preventing the utopia. Way of life is only half the problem. If you take down consumerism and bullshit jobs you can probably have a current working society for 2 or 3 days of work per weak.

An important thing to note is that women are many more to work now than in the 60s, and laundry machine, washing machines etc saved a lot of time taking care of the house.

But today on a personal scale? You need to be rich compared to society for the initial investment, and you'll live exploiting the work of other people. This way of life doesn't scale.