A paid day job makes me feel like a bee: they take away what I have been working for, and give me a cheap surrogate. They take the honey and give me money …
I mean, really: the most rewarding thing of work is to experience the personal, immediate benefit effectuated by the work done. Such as simplifying a task with a self-made tool. Or feeling the personal success, reward and gratitude after having saved someones life. But if they give us money, that totally annulls this effect, because money is an indirection step. Even worse, earned money does not keep its identity, but aggregates with previously earned money to a lump that we then expend without knowing what kind of work is in it …
The most obvious drawback of this alienation by being paid money is ones motivation to work, and ones motivation to reach good results. Paid work is often even work for people I do not know (such as the users of the products I might develop or produce), which means I cannot derive motivation from my later personal gain from the product, and hence will not have the motivation to get the product as good as possible. Instead, I might just have the motivation to get as much money as possible, while minimizing my effort for the product. This is a de-coupling effect between the real thing and its representation in money; such a de-coupling step is possible wherever an indirection is introduced.
Worst, this indirection step was institutionalized: it’s called capitalism.
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