The group started with the notion that work should be abolished entirely, that automation was to the point where work is unnecessary. Many of the new members have used the group to complain about crappy employers and to advocate for better pay and working conditions, but that was not the initial goal of the founders.
I am sympathetic to the idea of better working conditions and pay for the lowest wage earners, but they could not have chosen a worse person to represent them. She met every stereotype that someone who watches Fox News would have about a Reddit moderator.
I feel like the anti-work and FIRE movements have seen similar problems in society but have come to wildly different conclusions about how to solve that problem. While we take agency and choose to use the system to get out of the rat race, anti-work chooses to complain about the system and do nothing.
The biggest change that has happened in the last 50-100 years of human history is that for the first time, culture became un-linked from survival. In all of the preceding history of the species, we learned ways of acting, communicating, and behaving from nearby others. It made sense to do so because those others had managed to survive in a hostile world by doing those behaviors, and anyone who picked a wrong set of behaviors was already dead. Up until a couple of generations ago, people who refused to follow the cultural systems that worked in a given place ended up dead from violence, starvation, predators, exposure, etc. So if you refused to eat the food other people in your tribe or village were eating, you starve. Refuse to work? Exile and starvation. Break social norms? Die of violence. Eat food that was not selected and prepared the traditional way? Poisoned. Human systems of existence have historically been quite inhumane, but they enforced a certain discipline that tied behavior to production and the constraints of reality.
Now that we have industrialized production of food, clothing, shelter, medicine, energy, and manufactured goods, it is suddenly possible to survive while being completely dysfunctional. Societies have always had beggars and people living on scraps in the margins, and that's often where cultures sent their mentally ill, but it was a torturous existence where frostbite, starvation, and illness were constantly picking people off. Even in today's cities, homeless people die from the cold every winter, but these situations are rapidly becoming the exception rather than the norm.
To be clear, this un-linking has been a great benefit to humanity. Industrialization has eradicated the severe poverty of our ancestors, eliminated the awful outcomes once experienced by anyone outside the cultural norm, and allowed the flourishing of individual freedom, which has led to an explosion in the sciences, creative arts, and more. It would be foolish to wish we could go back to the rigid, staid cultures of the ancient agricultural peasants, where life was constantly hanging by a string, norm violators were severely punished, and strictly following the culture was seen as the only way to survive another year. Today's dumpster-divers eat richer food than a medieval peasant in a bumper crop year, and work a lot less for it.
Now it is possible to live until one's 40's, 50's, or 60's (old age in historical terms) as an addict, eccentric, or member of a subculture where dysfunctional behavior is celebrated. You won't necessarily die within months if you spend your days begging for change, smoking and drinking, wearing dysfunctional clothing such as baggy pants or high heels, or behaving in a way that makes holding down a job impossible. Everything is in such abundance, so you'll still get enough calories, still obtain enough clean water, and still sleep somewhere dry even if you waste all your time and destroy everything you touch.
This is a big improvement from a humanitarian perspective, but it also means there is no limiting factor reducing the prevalence of dysfunctional cultural memes. The guy on the street corner dressing like a stereotypical gangsta is destroying his economic future, but maybe he looks cool to a kid driving by, because he's not apparently starving or suffering, and he gets points among a certain crowd of similar people for expressing himself in that stereotypical way. Smoking looked like a cool habit when Clint Eastwood did it in the movies, but it doesn't kill people fast enough for young people to learn not to do it. Our country/rock/rap/pop music stars can make songs about beating up women, drinking all day, committing crimes, and wasting money on vehicles, and people sing along rather than thinking about how dumb it would be to actually live that way. Eventually, some do start living that way. They still survive and reproduce their cultural norms, which is different than what happened in the past.
Now you have people forming reddits to bitch about their lives, completely give up any locus of control, waste time, make excuses, and think in increasingly dysfunctional ways that are increasingly unlikely to improve their lives. The failure of these behaviors to achieve results in reality is irrelevant. All that matters is that it feels good at the moment, just like scratching an addiction itch or sitting around the house in sweatpants all day watching trashy TV or TikTok.
Nobody is going to stop you and say "what are you doing? How do you expect to produce enough grain to survive the winter acting like that?" That's what would have happened up until the late 20th century. In fact quite the opposite will occur. The more strangely and dysfunctionally you act, the more followers and subscribers you'll get, the more your music will sell, and the more validation you'll get from a tribe of fellow dysfunctionals.
What's worse is that modern capitalism does not necessarily reward personal functionality or competency. Lots of people work very hard to do a good job for their employers, not waste their money, maintain their health, and align their behavior with what they see other successful people doing. These are exactly the behaviors that led many people to crippling student loan debt, hopelessness about affording a home, social isolation, dead-end jobs, and the experience of watching YouTubers and podcasters getting fabulously wealthy by spreading conspiracy theories to idiots. Those who produce the least are seen as getting the most, which further erodes the link between culture and reality. It's starting to seem naive to a lot of people to think working hard at their McJob and saving money is the way, when everything they see through their screens says otherwise.
I'm not sure where we end up on this process. Perhaps the next recession or severe bout of unemployment will impose discipline and swing the pendulum the other way. Or perhaps we'll see more calls to burn the system down, from the same people who burned the system down by participating in the unlinking of culture from reality. Maybe there will arise norm-enforcing reality-based communities as a form of blowback against internet culture and connected isolation? Or, maybe the decoupling of culture from reality is a natural extension of the decoupling of work from wealth, which has already occurred, and the metaverse will soon finalize the decoupling of perception and cognition from reality, leading to a more pathetic reality for most people and thereby reinforcing itself as a more attractive culture to exist in.
As for me, I've seen enough to pick a reality-based worldview, to shop for cultural values as carefully as I'd shop for a complex machine, to not trust the wisdom of any internet herd, and to be aware that dysfunction is addictive, whether we're talking alcoholism or Instagram.
