Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance: the five stages of the Kubler-Ross model, or as I knew of them before I googled their name: ‘the five stages of grief.’ How many of these have we experienced as we come to accept the inevitability of the b-word? We deny its existence by Voldemort-ing its name, we get angry at each other when we bring up dichotomies (no matter how subtle), we bargain on what constitutes an interesting conclusion, and we question the use of talking about anything given the inevitable appearance of the B. Are we ready to accept it? I don’t know. Everything in moderation, including moderation. Let’s work on it, and see how it goes.

Minimum guaranteed income is a wasp nest of interesting and controversial ideas. I’ve had a few conversations with otherwise really objective people who seem to dismiss it reflexively. “There’s no way we could ever pay for something like that,” is the usual response. I wonder if people had the same reaction to free public K-12 schooling in the early 20th century. Without getting into financial minutiae of MGI as a policy, it’s worthwhile to just explore its similarity to universal public schools. Both ideas place a significant fiscal burden on most of the populace, while only significantly helping the lower portion (I would imagine most middle class families would be able to afford some moderately priced ‘private’ school given a significant tax-break from not paying for public school boards). Similarly, they are not both obviously the correct solution to a difficult problem, and may stand to benefit only a portion of the population. In the U.S., as late as 1940, only 50% of all adults earned a high school diploma, and it wasn’t until 1965 that there was a significant federal bill passed that addressed access to primary and secondary education. There’s a big difference between these two initiatives though, and I think it’s the core reason why MGI will never be implemented in its current form in most western countries. That difference is one of branding. Public schools are branded as gateways to a better future. Minimum guaranteed income is branded as a cheat code for lazy parasites. I think we can make significant headway by simply changing the name to something like the “Poverty Protection Grant”. Public initiatives are always about branding (take a look at the renamed ‘Relief Line’ of the TTC, purposely omitting the ‘Downtown’ so as to not offend the suburb votes), and I think this one will take a significant shift in perspective to be palpable to a largely Puritan, ‘work is good,’ public.

The ‘paradox of work’ is also an interesting topic to discuss. Part of me thinks this is all quite straight-forward: we’re terrible at predicting our own happiness. As Jerry Seinfeld said in his interview with Howard Stern (which is great by the way, watch it if you have an hour and a half to spare) “no one wants to do anything.” Who wants to go to the gym? Or go meet new people? Or write a blog post? Psychopaths and 4 year olds. How tropy is the classic sitcom husband who-hates-doing-anything-but-watching-football-with-the-guys become? By the same notion, people think that doing absolutely nothing will be blissful, but end up stuck in a whirlwind of possibilities. I think many of us are not driven enough to just choose something and run with it. We evolved in groups of homosapiens, not independently, and we’ve come to depend on external social pressure. I like to imagine groups of people like a house of cards, each supporting each other, but useless alone.

As for your Jiro-Dream-Town, I wonder whether it’s a town or a ghetto. On many levels, the idea you bring up exists: they’re called maker labs, and Etsy shops, and youtube channels. People like Casey Neistat make a good living by ‘just’ filming themselves every day. With enough skill and hard work, it’s already possible to make a decent living with ‘hobbies, and bits of leisure’, but I wonder how society will look on these people when anybody can do that? With admiration? With disgust? Will it be like the scene from ‘Her’ when Joaquin Phoenix’s friend discovers he’s dating an ‘OS’. ‘Oh you don’t work? How is that? My brother-in-law doesn’t work!’

My favourite book of the last few years is ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Harari. In it he talks about how the most influential thinkers of the last two centuries were not Theologians scouring ancient texts, but philosophers like Karl Marx who observed the society around him, and wrote down what he perceived to be bad and good. One of Marx’s key criticisms of ‘modern’ (i.e. late 19th century) capitalism is that is divorces the worker with the final output of his work. We are part of a machine, but we rarely get to see the end product the machine spits out (if that product can even be defined). All of these low-level ‘jobs’ seek to go back to that direct connection of worker and product. But is that really what we need? Maybe, after all, we’re just like the things that make us up. We’re just like the lonely mitochondria that swims within one of Usain Bolt’s cells. Completely unaware that he just won the Olympic gold.