Give me freedom from quotidian burdens (and/)or give me increased soci(et)al acceptance of the idea of a serving class
In the modern world, the average middle-class professional (among others) is far too burdened with tasks ranging from “bullshit jobs” (e.g., jobs that don’t meaningfully contribute to the improvement of the world, or aren’t necessary) to interactions with bureaucracy (e.g., government, taxes, insurance, unnecessary regulations when attempting to, e.g., start businesses) to chores (e.g., cleaning, cooking, eating). Instead of undertaking grand endeavors, spending time in happy pursuits, and generally self-actualizing toward our greatest possible ambitions, our time is misallocated on a huge scale to these burdensome and ultimately meaningless tasks. This is one of the GREATEST TRAGEDIES OF ALL TIME.
One of our great quests is to eliminate the necessity for these tasks for those who do not desire to do them (i.e., the majority of people)—whether by automation, by policy, by reallocation, by influence on individual and societal narratives, by fire or ice. Free up this time and allocate it toward the flourishing of our souls.
When we cannot eliminate tasks, let us reallocate them. If you don’t want to, you shouldn’t have to handle your own interactions with bureaucracy or clean your own house. But the modern liberal-progressive partisan recoils from 1800s aesthetics, from having a secretary and a maid, seeing an elitism that should be buried in the past and that ey must disavow. (Now, an Instacart shopper, perhaps, is a modern maid, and an Uber driver a modern chauffeur, but these are only acceptable to modern liberal-progressive sensibilities because they fit within our structure of alienation and atomization. It would be tacky to have a real maid.)
Well, I am perfectly happy to own my elitism. More people should have servants, and so more people should be servants. Let specialization progress—allocate the chores and quotidian burdensome tasks to someone whose job it is to handle them, and let us spend our own personal hours and they theirs on working to bring about fulfilment and beauty and joy.
(Ideally, all of the hours of all of us will be personal hours, hopefully via automation. Employing people to handle these tasks is an interim solution.)