[kniyogi]

Originally Posted by seanner689

It's not assuming that you'd be willing to clean restrooms ... maybe you'd just opt out of the restroom timeshare and would only use the one at your house. Maybe you'd carry around a portable toilet/flask type device for going to the bathroom. Maybe we'd adopt outdoor bathroom-type holes in the ground for peeing that would get cleaned by the rain, women would carry a tool around so they wouldn't have to sit. maybe you'd subscribe to some other bathroom model. It's about making conscious choices. I think that a lot of people would sign up to maintain a bathroom if it meant that they didn't have to squat on the street to go to the bathroom, and people would probbably be a lot neater in public restrooms once they started having to clean them.

Well the devil is in the details. We can theorize about a society in which people consciously take time aside to focus on "purpose-less" activities, or we can try building one successfully. 2000 years back we had such "simple" societies. But did we not build modern sewage systems and toilets so that we had more time for "higher purpose" activities ? So either we move towards more automation to give ourselves more time for "high-purpose" activities or we start going back to a societal system in which we spend time doing such things ourselves. My skepticism comes from the hand-waving involved with such theories and their inconsistence with reality.

The reality is that if people don't want to do a job anymore, we will find a solution. It's been happening for the last 100 years. Look at construction, for example. Go to some third-world country and you'll see guys working in sandals and ball caps working on live circuits, walking across beams 100' in the air etc. Here (in Canada), the pace of construction is much slower sometimes because people are refusing to do that kind of stuff. At the site I work at right now, some work is on hold until the plant shuts down for a month in 2011 because of safety concerns. At first glance, putting a 3 day job on hold for 3 years (and thus delaying project completion) seems like a massive, huge inconvenience ... but once you set a standard for what you are willing and not willing to do, the solutions are what they are.

But aren't those guys (the ones working in sandals and ball caps) salaried workers too? They are not doing out out of a higher purpose in their life--money is their motivation which is provided by someone "managing" them.