Notes to Self on the Value of Jobs

These are some notes to myself on the value of jobs:

 

There is no such thing as unskilled, just unpopular skills. 

 

Some unpopular skills are unpopular for good reason, but there are also a lot of things people do to hold society together that they can't get people to pay them to do.

 

The longer I live, the harder it is for me to find truly lazy people. It is easy to find people who, for various reasons, waste a lot of energy doing things that don't add value to the world, but many of those get paid a lot for what they do anyway. (And then we find ourselves back at the question of why some skills are popular.)

 

Money is a proxy for value. It's a poor proxy, but it isn't money itself that is the problem until the causality inverts and money starts defining value. 

 

Also, it is hard to have things of value unless you can exchange them, and it's hard to exchange them without a proxy of some sort.

 

And it is impossible to contact without interfering. You can't move without contact at some level. Not interfering is not really an option.

 

Refraining from exploitation is closer to being possible, but that requires understanding one's own value system, and it is the lack of understanding the value system that causes problems with proxies for value.