A Life Of Labor

The only way to fully avoid work in this life is to be dead.  To eat, drink, or prepare food, one must expend some degree of effort, no matter how small.  To exercise or engage in hobbies, one must put forth some amount of mental or physical effort, with these being types of work although they are quite different from the more specific kind of professional work the word is often reserved for.  Work and utter inactivity are more genuine opposites than workplace labor and the pursuit of activities in free time are.  Some people who long to be free of the workplace or especially from workplace exploitation might not have yet realized the different kinds of work are not all professional, and there is no way to truly escape some of them without allowing oneself to perish.

Collecting food, hunting, cooking, setting up and maintaining shelter, migrating, or defending oneself are all forms of work, but they are kinds of labor that do not require participation in a society structured to make people's lives, at least on a scheduling level, often revolve around professional work.  Someone who is against work itself on a moral level is an irrationalist; he or she is lazy, selfish, and generally stupid enough to think that their personal preferences dictate logical truths and moral obligations.  Even if professional work was evil, it is not as if work itself would be removed from human life altogether by abolishing the social construct of employment.

Whoever thinks that a life without bondage to the workplace--and in American culture and others like it, the workplace is indeed often oppressive--would be a life without any troubles or effort is a fool.  In fact, some people would have to work harder or longer just to survive without a civilization than they would under the horrors of the American workplace.  This does not mean it is not irrationalistic for a society to be set up so that the majority of its members' (or most of its members') lives must be spent primarily on laboring for a likely exploitative organization.  A person can certainly be mentally fixated on deeper things like reason, God, or friendship even as they exert immense psychological or physical effort in professional work, but their outward life is in many ways consumed by the social construct of the workplace.

Work itself is not the issue inside or outside the context of societies.  As long as humans need food, water, and physical safety, there are activities that they will need to do in order to secure these things as individuals or as groups.  Even if all societies and thus all workplaces vanished from the planet, the need to work in order to achieve these goals would not disappear as well.  Human life is such that work is inevitable unless someone is content to suffer and die without resistance, or to pay someone else to complete their tasks, to rely on their benevolence, or to force them to be their caretakers.  Labor might be objectively intrusive into one's life or subjectively unwanted, but it is a pragmatic cost that must be paid in order to survive.  There are also luxuries that working professionally for compensation allows for which are unobtainable by just living off of nature.

Workplace oppression is contrary to truth and justice rather than work itself.  That laboring outside of the professional workplace for survival, comfort, pleasure, or for the sake of a pastime is undesired by some does not make workplaces either benevolent or cruel by default.  Professional or not, the kind of work and the extent to which it occupies people's time are the major factors that would determine whether it is morally legitimate. There is no valid philosophical objection, not one that can be proven in light of human epistemological limitations, to work itself in all of its possible manifestations; only assumptions, contradictions, or emotionalism would have certain people believe otherwise.  Similarly, that work is on some level almost completely unavoidable does not make it the central part of reality as a whole or human existence in particular.