Reddit is home to a slew of niche groups, but all-encompassing categories are there as well, uniting all of the other, smaller communities as a bonus.
One such giant is r/jobs, Reddit’s community for career advice and other job-related content. As of this article, it’s home to 1.5 million members and is ranked the top 1% by size.
Incidentally, r/antiwork is an even greater community of people, ranking as the same 1%, but having 2.8 million members.
And you’d be surprised how massive the movement has become over the years. Outside the internet, that is. And it’s more than just (or as much) going against the system of having to work a third of your life—it’s also a philosophy and a push towards a better work life.
The concept rejects the idea of hustle culture and working ourselves to the bone. That only brings about burnout and physical as well as mental illness. Heck, it’s not even against capitalism, but rather that particular breed of workplace that considers its employees as assets and not humans. Its goal is a world where folks don’t have to sell their labor (and their souls) to survive.
Bertrand Russell actually wrote quite a bit about not working. In his essay In Praise of Idleness, he points out three key aspects:
First is the idea that you get better with work. As in, the more you do it, the better you become. That is, however, not really the case as, at extreme levels, pretty much everything is destructive, and work is no exception.
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According to Russell, the idea of working hard goes back to the Protestant idea that good works will save your soul. Great on paper, sure, but working yourself to death while you’re considered God’s creation and should treat your body as a temple is counter-productive. Such an extreme puts jobs that demand hard work into slavery territory, and the modern world has no place for it.
The second part is the idea that meaningful work is born of leisure. And that empowers creativity. Granted, of course, that you find time for such outlets.
But the problem is that once a person turns their hobby into a full week of daunting activities, their capacity for creativity is beyond drained and the hobby is no longer a hobby—rather a chore.
