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it's a matter of motivation
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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This is how you tell rich people have some serious mental health issue.
Decent people would rather a world where people worked because they enjoy that type of work rather than being forced to do it because they need money to live.
If you removed money, imagine where we'd all be as a society without the toxicity of money, wars and hate! :(
Probably dead or living in the stone age.
There's so many jobs that people don't enjoy but are necessary. Nobody enjoys working in the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine. Nobody enjoys collecting your stinking trash. Nobody enjoys sitting in a store for 8 hours a day, scanning groceries. Nobody enjoys working in a warehouse for 8 hours.
However, these jobs and many more are vital for todays society.
You make it sound like wealth and wars are an invention of capitalism and not something that has existed basically since the dawn of time, even as something you can observe in primates, albeit on a much smaller scale.
The reasons those jobs are such shit is also money. A lot of people enjoy cleaning, nobody enjoys being overworked. Normal functioning societies don't leave heaps of stinking trash around, they neatly pack it and the work of a janitor of garbage collector becomes actually enjoyable if you're a proper type of personality.
Hell, my uncle right now works as a part time street sweeper basically for free. He has his basic needs met by other means, and his "job" pays him enough to get a cup of coffee before the shift and a sandwich after. He just enjoys making the world cleaner, chatting with locals, taking care of stray cats, and having a routine. All of that is possible in a world that doesn't revolves around squeesing every bit of labour from people so some pedos can buy themselves another island and fill it with sex slaves
Idk if you noticed, but people won't behave that way if there is no repercussion for it.
Great but some people have more aspirations than your uncle. And I think they should have the chance to achieve that. And I don't think having a clean neighborhood should depend on having that uncle that enjoys cleaning for free.
I mean, yes, absolutely possible without squeezing every bit of labor from people. However, it's not possible in a world without money or capital. The wide-spread introduction of capitalism has DRASTICALLY reduced the amount of people living in extreme poverty. According to https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty , from 1990 - 2025, the amount of people living in extreme poverty dropped by 65%, from 2.3 billion to 800 million. If we extend the timeframe a bit further, according to https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-data-appendix , the number went from 53.9% in extreme poverty to only 5.5% - meaning an almost 90% reduction in extreme poverty. Unless I'm too stupid to do math now.
(ourworldindata.org is a non-profit funded by the university of oxford btw - so it's fairly reliable)
Now, capitalism isn't the sole reason why poverty dropped - it's the combination with effective social policies. Capitalism creates wealth, taxes take a part of that wealth and spread it to the rest of society. That's how it should work and that is also by far the best system we could ever have in place. The fact that america fails on that tax-part is not the fault of capitalism. It's a failure of the government.
It's insane that so many people tried to flee from communist terror regimes, and still try to flee to this day out of North Korea or Cuba, yet people on lemmy will just close their eyes and pretend that communism is the perfect system and every system that fails is just because of the "CIA".
Would you enjoy being a garbage man or a plumber? Or is that work you're saving for others to enjoy?
Doctors make good money and we don't have enough of them because it takes so much time and dedication. You think getting rid of money would help there?
Do kids need to go to school? Five days a week?
Yes. There are easier ways of making money. If you do it just for the money you won't have the mental fortitude to get to the point of making money. Profit motives is about the path of least resistance.
Lol what MD is the goto job for making easy money. Getting the degree is difficult because everyone wants to do that job, not because it's difficult per se
Pretty much says everything about why your wrong on this. Being a doctor is hard. There are far easier career and business if profit is the motive.
Beyond that are doctors that rich? They are wealthy, but the Zucc ain't no MD. Neither is Warren Buffet.
My point is that someone motivated by money will drop out of the MD path. Being a doctor is a career of passion that also happens to pay well.
Engineer is similar. Take some differential equations or read Jackson EM. There are easier things to do for money.
I know someone who make similar to a doctor with a seafood restaurant. Particularly when you consider fewer hours.
And you think your uncle is a scalable solution to a city of millions of people. These positions dont scale. Some quick googling show about a half a millions workers in waste remediation in the us in 2023. Do you honestly think you could find half a million people like your uncle that all live spread out enough to fill all the positions (thats on the low end of need also fyi, not surprisingly they have high turnover and difficulty keeping staff for extended periods) around the entire us and that those people would never lose motivation or get burned out or just tired or stop caring. Because that is what we need and that is a single job for a single industry.
Its not scalable
When you do your scaling you need to scale everything. The adult population of the US is estimated as 266 million people as of now. Half a million is roughly 1 adult in 530 people. Let's quadruple it up so they have nice relaxed works schedule. Let's say now you need 4 people per 530. If you think you can't find 10 out of 1000 people who would do some sanitation work, with no stress and without having to think where their next meal comes from, you just never met people.
And this is the most important part that you seem to ignore - when people's basic means are met, they want to fulfill higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For some that means doing arts or doing some engineering or running a company. For some, and there are s many of those some, that means "it's not much but it's honest work". Doing small visible changes that make the world the better place one picked up piece of rubbish at a time, is exactly, precisely what significant portion of humanity will be doing.
This also works in another direction: billions of people who would be doing something grand and moving humanity further, are stuck in mundane repetitive broken jobs they hate, because they're stuck in this cycle of needing to grind to survive, without having a moment to breath, which slowly kills every bit of light they once had a potential to have.
That half a million is an extreme lowball number based on a single waste management company. And no i dont think you'll find 10 in every thousand evenly spread that will want to do this for fun. Those half a million people turn over every couple of months with pay and benefits. And this will apply to every industry and every critical need of society. Theres already a massive shortage of medical personelle and that pays better than most of what were discussing. No it just xoesnt scale
I just think it's boring that you think money is the only reasonable motivator for these people. There are other forms of compensation and appreciation. And it's not the only option available to us. It's crazy to me that people understand the idea of countries that have military conscription but can't fathom the idea of a system of workable civil conscription.
As I see it you successfully identified a problem and a solution, but that does not suggest that that is the sole or even best solution.
Where did i mention money at all
Believe it or not I’ve actually met someone who enjoys this line of work. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Paraburdoo Australia and loves the heat. So not exactly nobody..
Okay, let me rephrase it: Not enough people enjoy working the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine to cover the global demand of rare earths.
Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money, out of the other ones, a few would be rendered obsolete without profit motive (pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium, and why would you need someone scanning groceries if there was no money?). What's left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever. It's not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.
Trust me, bro
Because this is the most efficient way of keeping track of how many goods leave your moneyless store, and ensuring assholes aren't just taking everything for themselves and hoarding it. Tracking how many goods leave the store at any given time allows you to order an appropriate amount to keep things in stock so that people who need things don't go without, and is especially important for perishable goods like fresh produce.
People have different skill sets and specialties. Many jobs take years of training and practice to reach an acceptable level. Also, you just invented state-sanctioned slavery/a non-military draft. What do you do with someone who refuses to perform their lottery-assigned job?
That's literally the system we have now, but more authoritarian, since someone has to decide what is a "luxury good" and how much undesirable work is required to attain a given level of luxury.
Citation needed. Concerns: authoritarianism; scaling; maintenance of the modern standard of living
I didn't cite sources because the literal decades and decades of refutations to your arguments already exist.
But I will leave you with this: Why do libraries work?
If there are so many refutations, then it should be trivial to point me to one. Assume I am an idiot who doesn't know how a search engine works - I very well might be. Would you be able to point me to one of these innumerable refutations that would disprove me - otherwise, how am I to learn?
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you explain your point of view, I can explain mine. But I will point out that libraries are not a full, functioning society - just part of one.
Fine. Sure. A few starting points since you asked in good faith:
For historical examples of non-market/cooperative organization, see Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990), which documents real communities managing shared resources without privatization or central coercion. David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years also covers many societies that operated through reciprocity/obligation rather than modern monetary exchange.
I can point you to some great podcasts if you want.
For historical examples, Revolutionary Catalonia (1936–39) and numerous Indigenous communal systems demonstrate large-scale cooperative production/distribution outside traditional capitalist structures. See the previous Debt: the First 5000 years and just SO MUCH research. Maybe Orwell's Homage to Catalonia would be a good place to look.
My library point wasn’t “libraries are a whole society,” but that they demonstrate distribution based on shared access/need rather than direct purchase can function effectively. Public institutions already allocate many goods/services this way.
As for undesirable labor, societies don’t need to choose between “profit motive” and “slavery.” Additional leisure, prestige, reduced hours, or enhanced benefits can incentivize difficult work just as effectively as wages. Automation can also reduce much of the repetitive labor currently done purely because it’s cheaper than innovating away the need for it.
I’m not claiming a moneyless society would be simple or easy—just that the idea humans can ONLY organize through profit incentives is historically and empirically false.
If that was even remotely possible, companies would've done that already. Every company tries to cut staff as much as possible.
Which requires research, which requires investment. Much of the research we currently have only exists exactly because of funding, and a lot of funding is done by companies, not by the government.
I like the "whatever". Let's just introduce a shitty system that also potentially forces people to do work they don't want to do and they get like a bar of soap or "whatever" as reward..
I don't know where these people lived that you talk about, but it certainly wasn't on this planet. Such a system has never existed.
Society would collapse.
While working out of enjoyment instead of necessity is a noble and good goal. There are jobs that no one enjoys. Money can be used as an incentive to motivate people to work on jobs that aren't that enjoyable, but still necessary.
Which jobs? Most of the time there are people enjoying something you wouldn't expect
Going into sewage vats and breaking up solidified waste and oil clogs
Deep sea oil rig repair
Underwater dam repair
Driving public transportation (not enough to maintain a system)
Elder care (there is a worldwide lack of people willing to clean up piss and shit of often angry, sometimes aggressive people and deal with regular loss for bad pay, much less in an ideal profession freedom world, relative to the amount of people needing care)
Forensic pathology is something that very very few people enjoy also, but is very needed.
Urine farmer (hunting luring, sprays for animal repellant)
Coal miner
Any precious or rare metal or stone miner
People love intellectual jobs, creative jobs, and some public service jobs. It is much much harder to find people to do body-destroying terrible-condition manual labor jobs. Ideally those are the jobs to be replaces, but of course capitalists want to replace the former category of jobs because those cut into their profits more.
I can't imagine anyone enjoying being a correctional officer enough to do it for free. Or waste management (sewage).
Why do you assume that we'd need correctional officers in a world without money?
Because people murder each other for reasons other than money.
Some yeah, but undoubtedly not enough to keep it working. For example i doubt that many people enjoy working at garbage disposable or basically any waste disposal. Of course these jobs should be fully operated by machines. Or any assistant jobs in manufacturing or jobs that operate in shifts.
I met a guy last week who was unusually passionate about water filtration and wanted to make a business globally. People are wonderfully weird.
Great, and how many of those you think exist?
And how many would we need to run the global water filtration systems?
Indigenous peoples figured this shit out before centralized governments and computers, I'm sure we can think of something.
But those were significantly smaller groups of people with significantly worse quality of life.
In addition the ones that got bigger naturally evolved centralized governing structures. Even before that all the groups had leaders or some group(elders) making decisions that can effect the whole group.
Cleaning a outhouse after 50 people from time to time, isn't that big of an issue and can be done just for the good of the whole group. It can be easily done in rotation or a group just gets together in an afternoon and digs a new one.
Doing the same after 100 000 up to 1 000 000+ people is in orders of magnitude more difficult and time consuming.
Same applies to any governing structure. Even the idea OP brought up needs a governing body of some sort to allocate resources and work plans.
Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need. I hate doing dishes, but I do them because I hate living without clean dishes even more. Everyone understands sometimes we gotta do stuff we don't like doing for a greater good. Acting like we need a wageslave class to do menial tasks otherwise we'd just let our world collapse is insulting our collective intelligence. We can share the burden.
Sure is a good thing doing this dishes is the most complicated and least-pleasant thing people can do...
Who's gonna volunteer to go through years of training specializing in commercial diving in wastewater to treatment plants for free?
Someone who wants to live a life of luxury and comfort in a world with wastewater treatment plants, knowing that everyone else is also pitching in and doing their part.
Someone who wants to live in a world without billionaire pedophiles in power doing nothing but hoarding all of the wealth and abusing women and children.
Someone who cares about the wellbeing of their community and is motivated by that, rather than by selfish greed.
In other words, anyone. Everyone.
That seems kinda too idealistic view of the world.
I know much more people who, if not directly forced, would let the dishes or basically any environment around them completely mould and break down before even considering cleaning up even just the mess they have left behind, than people who altruistically do clean up after themselves and others.
I do agree that living in a cleaner and nicer society should be enough of a motivation and for some it is, but there's not enough of us.
We can already observe it in many public spaces where trash gets left laying around even if trash cans are available or public bathrooms or showers or my favorite example in the gym where plates get constantly left on the machines and cable attachments just piled up wherever those fell.
I'm not suggesting that we just leave everything to chance and just hope society maintains itself, I'm saying that we can structure society in a way that everything that needs to get done still gets done without the profit motive, because everyone inherently understands that if we evenly and fairly divide up the work that needs to get done, that they're doing their part to live in a better world - does that make sense?
Yeah it makes sense and I'm not actually that much against the idea. I'm not that fond of the current wage slavery system either.
I just don't trust general populations altruism that much to believe it would work on a large scale without any sort of a positive Incentivization in addition to just keeping the society running.
I don't think we need to fully rely on altruism - humans can be selfish and we need to take that into account, and even make use of that tendency for us to want to feather our nests.
I believe that we can create an awesome society based on anarchist principles - freedom, liberty, bottom-up structures, socialized and democratized control of the means of production, and so on. If you're interested in learning more, I'd recommend the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime, and/or an anarchist FAQ if you're more of a reader.
You might want to read up on the bystander effect. You do the dishes because no-one else is going to do it. But as soon as there are others who can do the job people will just stand around and let other die before they put in the effort.
Don't you think there is some way we could structure society to counteract that without creating an underclass of wage slavery?
Yes, paying more for the shitty jobs.
Do you think the capitalistic system is going to just pay people fairly out of the goodness of the hearts of the ruling class?
How can people be paid the value of their labor while still generating profit? Profit is, by definition, the extraction of surplus labor value. Under capitalism, inherently and definitionally, no member of the working class is ever paid fairly.
No, never even implied that. But in any system we need something that can be exchanged for labor in carrying quantities so we can give more to the people who do the shittiest jobs. Whatever system you come up with, it's not going to work without money.
If a medium of exchange for labor is indeed necessary, I'd say it should be measured in labor hours. We live finite lives, measured in minutes. A minute of your life is worth as much as a minute of mine, wouldn't you say?
I would have no inherent problem with a system that tokenizes labor hours in some way. The problem is private ownership of the means of production and profit itself.
The problem with labour hours is that it doesn't compensate for more (or less) hard or unpleasant work.