I am a boomer who always vowed I would not be like the parents of my generation who couldn't program the VCR. I clearly saw what you are talking about. Before word processing, people did not expect perfection in documents. Dealt with that. Before voice mail, and then cell phones, you had a slower time frame on communication and more time to think deeply. Dealt with that (the latter changes that are enormous, actually, more than people will admit.) Etc., hundreds, thousand of examples.

But I did not envision the enormity of what is happening.

The technological innovation thing has become a rapidly increasing treadmill, like the famous I Love Lucy episode of a candy factory where Lucy and Ethel cannot keep up. A brother and I were talking about this the other day, we don't want to give up, but sometimes we give up, because we cannot keep up.  Every other day something little happens like they change the access menu on your email, and you waste a lot of time trying to figure out the new way to do something that took you seconds to do the day before. We are always, every day, in school being taught some new tool. Learning the tools is our job. You thought you knew how to use a washing machine or refrigerator and would not have to learn again? Nope, sorry. You thought you figured out how to buy health insurance and could move on to other things? Nope, sorry. You thought you figured out how to use Facebook and Google and could move on to actually using it to communicate? Nope, sorry, new rules and procedures out today and again in a few months. You thought you figured out how to shop online or to track packages online? Maybe so, but that won't last long, it may change tomorrow. Etc. etc. etc.

We have gone so far beyond the meaning of the term planned obsolescence that it really means nothing anymore. Our work is dealing with new tools, every fucking day competing with others who have learned how to use them, in a great worldwide competition.

In any event, I'm following him now. Thank you!

Warning: he's become extremely anti-libertarian and fairly anti-capitalist. The selfishness of those of us who like a little bit of freedom in this or that is the only thing standing in the way of Dan's ideal society. I get this message: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay is the way to socialist heaven, and those that aren't into that are standing in the way. (Hence the jihad against bitcoins. I visualize eventually being made to feel a guilty capitalist for profiting off my knowledge by buying something at a rummage sale and selling it for more on ebay. And gambling, gosh, that would disappear in Dan's world, where we are all happy dwarves... )

Comment didn't take.  Point very well taken.. You cannot retire if you can't!

Who is making and receiving the beautiful chair in a purely communist society is an open question. What is not given in its initial formulation is a method of exchange such as a market where one thing could be the same price of another.  Marx said that sort of method had to be worked out through the “transcendence of the proletariat.” So there is a lacuna in his expression: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

While Lenin understood this gap from a philosophical point of view, he was more focused on his day job of seizing State power than wrestling with the problem. As a “temporary” measure, he invoked the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The guy was pretty good at not letting ambiguity interfere with his agenda.

In the spirit of lacunas, I made the general distinction between the nature of an individual and what binds a person to others. Attempts to separate the two elements go counter to their natural tendency to join together into a whole. In their separate test tubes, they are radical substances, eager to combine with other molecules. I am trying to think through Michael M’s challenge to find how much dignity depends on the act of work through this separation of elements because the idea of dignity itself involves a kind of exchange. Life provides many instances of inequality between self-worth and the respect given by others. It is a rare person who could abide in a place where they have no connection with each other at all.

By not bridging the gap, Marx was keeping within the constraints that he said conditioned Bourgeois reality. With that in mind, a remark made by Michael W discussing the Miya Tokumitsu  article in Slate points to an inconsistency in Marx’s method:

That's a wholenuthercanoworms. Putting aside the long-running socialism/marxism/communism debate, my point is just that Marx, like Steve Jobs, had an elitist view of labor--probably because he was a philosopher, not a diaper-cleaner.

This is a good observation. For my purposes, it is not about Marx’s biases but an adherence to an absolute idea of privacy. It would be easy enough to argue how this adherence contradicts his militating for the abolition of private property. What interests me more is the implication that the idea could survive the end of private property. At the heart of his demand for radical change is the expectation that some things will just take care of themselves.

The talk of letting matters work themselves out through a process without predetermining them reminds me of Hayek whose model of a “real” economy is one where all the participants are as free as possible to combine or separate their efforts and bring about a market whose prices reflect the actual value of things. While Marx and Hayek obviously have entirely opposing views about what supports the life of an individual, they share a confidence that a protean and spontaneous development to expand that horizon is possible if the boundary conditions they insist upon are created. In this way, they are like mirrors placed at opposite ends of a long hall.

As a not particularly transcended proletariat walking down the hall, I am becoming leery of this boundary condition fixation. There is work to do.

"I said something like, "The key is for people to find work they love or like." His response was, "But then, the roads would never get paved." We didn't go into it further, but I assumed he meant that NO ONE could ever LIKE work like that."

And what about working in abattoirs? Waste management? Or even as nursing assistants or morticians? Harvesting fields of vegetables?

These are necessary jobs to maintain 'our way of life'; the ones that always come to mind whenever I hear 'share the work' or 'follow your bliss'.

I wonder under what conditions would I be willing to take my turn at them in exchange for how much bliss.

I would venture that nobody ever "likes" their jobs all of the time.  I grew up in Detroit around factory workers who, if you asked them if they "liked" their jobs, would give you instances where they didn't, but wouldn't be able to fathom the question beyond that.

They were all union members, which means they were working to save their jobs and make them better. They weren't looking to get out of the factories.  When their sons wanted to find jobs at the plant, they couldn't have been prouder.

Some of them loved their work and others couldn't wait to get off the assembly line to do something else.  One guy I knew wrote poetry in his head in order to get away from the grinding sameness of the assembly line, but it would never have occurred to him to look for another line of work.

We lived in blue collar communities in Detroit and in the suburbs and I know firsthand that these workers took a whole lot of pride in what they did.  They wore UAW/Ford jackets and caps (as an example) and the epitome of blue-collar success was a job at one of the Big Three (Ford/GM/Chrysler).

They made good money, they had good benefits, and they had assurances of a good retirement.  It wasn't a question of whether they "liked" their jobs or found them fulfilling.  It was mainly about security.  They could afford a nice house, a couple of cars, and maybe even a cottage up north.  They could put their kids through college if college was what the kids wanted to do. 

Their pride came not so much in what they did at work but in what that job could bring to their lives outside the plant.  There aren't many places where blue collars can have that anymore.  What a pity.

(By the way, both my son and my grandson worked on roofing crews when they were in college.  I can't say for sure that that's what spurred them to keep to their lessons, but they'll both still say it was the one job they actually hated.  Still, there are many men who have made roofing a career and seem to actually enjoy it.)

It seems to me, though I haven't worked it all the way through, that the reason people pay you to do a job is because it's distasteful.  If you liked what you were doing, you would pay them in order to do it.  Isn't that what distinguishes a job from a hobby?

I know there are some people who like their jobs, but I don't think there are many.  That's why they tend to say things like:  "I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this!"

I can see a flaw in my argument:  if true, then the more unpleasant the job, the higher the pay should be.  And it's not like that in real life.  I doubt if being a Director on a board is so much more distasteful than working on a road crew.

is true that you speaks very good

I especially like how the praise in the first three sentences is basically contradicted by the fourth and last sentence. (Luckily, Maiello is a "real" writer without dignity, confusing the whole thing further? )