And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:
Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:
•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),
•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.
I’m not a representative sample, but…
…my hobby is my job. I learnt to code and to build stuff as a hobby, and now it’s my job.
I don’t think I could exist without designing and building something interesting. Even if I know that someone out there does it better. Because I want to understand the process and be able to alter it. I’m OK with someone else doing something that I find boring. If the subject interests me, I want to do it myself.
As for the concept of being free, if someone said “you’re free now”, I would ask “in what sense - am I free to stop paying taxes and repaying debt? can I finally squat land, start a license free mobile phone network and start practising medicine, or free in some other sense?”. I would likely conclude that I’m not free yet, and mutual dependencies are in fact quite numerous.