People will come to realize that they can choose not to sacrifice 8 hours a day serving someone else — other than themselves.
I like your article, and mostly agree on your analysis of the human condition in our modern first world society, but I feel this conclusion is a little bit too short-sighted. It may seem like an ideal to serve only oneself when you are bound by the chains of wage slavery. But once you break your chains, you quickly realize that there is very little purpose in it and that a self-serving life is vain and pointless. Life is only meaningful to the extent that it is spent making other people happier.
The crux of the matter is that, unlike our current paradigm where looters are stealing your wealth under the false guise of common welfare and forcing you at gunpoint to contribute to the so called "common good" by subsidizing the life of millions of ungrateful parasites and their corrupt masters, one should be able to choose what purpose to pursue, whom to help, and in which way.
But idealizing a future where one would only care for one's own life and family is like barking up the wrong tree all over again. Another guaranteed waste of time that will let you feeling vain, empty, and more miserable than ever. There is a reason why most lottery winners end up poor and depressed in spite of having once achieved the much sought-after feat of reaching financial independence.
I think the best thing one can do for a fellow human being is to be selfish themselves. I am not a hardcore Ayn Rand-ish but it seems logical that once one establishes the belief that they want the best for themselves, they will inevitably end up helping others in order to get there. We are social animals. We are bounded to help one another. The question is not whether we will help each other but who we will choose to help.
Exactly. When people are able to stand by themselves and for themselves, they can make educated decisions about who to help and why. They can reason their sense of empathy. Today, with the current system, we are passing down the ball to the next guy. My grandma used to tell me that back in the day everyone helped each other due to lack of central government. If someone was hungry then someone stepped in. If someone was homeless, the same. Today though our fake "altruism" through governmental control has turned us more or less into apathetic human beings. This is far worse than pure selfishness. It effectively disables members of a society into doing the greater good by removing their sense of duty while they remain with the false belief of altruism.
I am not idealizing the future. I am far from a utopian. I believe that decentralization will simply remove central power from all parties and thus enable multiple revenue streams which can empower independence. Heck, even bosses will not even bother to have someone for 8 hours under their thumb. They too will have to branch out mostly through freelance rather than renting an office space — (accumulating more and more expenses under a new environment that will be massively antagonistic).
Thank you for the thoughtful comment.
good points recursive, but I think there is some merit to the idea of people breaking free of the current paradigm in a selfish way, and becoming selfless gradually after. I think it's human nature to want to help others (or at least I prefer to think that) but the way things work now people are greedy or will do things that hurt others in some way for personal gain, otherwise good people aren't willing to help because they don't have much help for themselves, and then scares of the future have them hoarding anything they do have to give to their family. Once things are more advanced and society-based I think people will be more generous without any incentive. In the end though, I think Artificial Intelligence will be the thing that changes everything, blockchain technology is amazing, but there's no telling what AI will come up with.