1997

I love my life and I care about what it gets used for. I realise that my life is a finite thing, it's very short. I look back five years and I've done so much, yet at the same time I wonder where all the time's gone. My time has to be used for doing something good, I want the world to be a better place for me having been here. It won't be if I just do whatever I'm told by someone who's offering me a few dirty coins for doing something.

I think my life's smart and the world is good, but I think how much better it could be if we wanted to make it that way, if only it was everyone trying to make it better. So I do things to try and make the world a better place and encourage others to do the same, and it seems to me that the vast majority of paid employment does not do that. The vast majority of paid employment is about making a few people very comfortable in a superficial way for a short period of time. I want a view that encompasses the rest of humanity.

I want a view that encompasses future generations. This world is for everyone, our lives are for us. The problem with paid work is that it's incredibly hierarchical and it's aimed at keeping most people down for the benefit of the few. The few have the benefit of the hardship, drudgery, and sheer fucking repetitious tedium of the many.

The way that work is just seen as what you do for a living, the way people are judged by what they do for money, this is so outdated. There may have been a time when people did the same sort of job for life, but that does not happen any more. A job isn't something that somebody is, just something somebody does. This is true even with vocational things like being a policeman or a teacher, even people in those professions don't feel like they'll be doing it for their whole life. Thus someone's job becomes less of a yardstick by which to understand them.

And it was always bollocks anyway, pretending that what you do for a living is everything, rather than just what you do to facilitate the things you want to do. Most people don't work because they like to work, they do it because they want a roof over their head and to provide for themselves and their family. They want these things so they find a job that they feel comfortable doing, they might even quite enjoy it, but really they're just doing it for the money. If they were given the same money without needing to do the job, how many people would turn up to work every day?

And the way people who aren't working are seen as "inactive". I can sit under a duvet watching Richard And Judy for years, or I can get out there on road protests, publish articles and do books, yet economically I'm seen as the same thing. People who are raising kids are likewise inactive. Raising kids is without doubt the bravest and most demanding and difficult job that any human being does. It has the longest working hours, it's the most thankless, the most gruelling, and it's the most testing of your resourcefulness and of all your existing abilities. And yet "she's just a housewife".

Those seen as the most inactive economically are the unemployed and parents, and yet the people I know who actually work hardest are all unemployed and/or parents.

You can't judge people by just what their jobs are. People do do things that are not for money, that are for the good of others. People raise kids because it's worth it, but not in any way measurable by money. I've done jobs just for the money, that mean nothing. It was not what I am at all. What I am is somebody who cares about the future. My job didn't give me an opportunity to do that.

People always think that me not working is just some kind of temporary thing, "yes, but what do you want to do?". Like when you're not in a monogamous marital-style relationship and people say "yes, but what kind of person do you want to meet?". I don't know until I meet them. The whole point is that I want to learn, and I won't know what's interesting until I find it. It's learning things and finding new things that interests me, and interests human beings in general. Our greatest drives are to understand and to be understood. All of the human mind stems from these. So how do you know what you want to learn about until you start learning about it?

People saying "what do you really want to do?" are implying that I don't really want to do what I'm doing now. I am doing what I really want to do. What I really don't want to do is the stuff they mean by "what do you really want to do". I don't really want to go and get a job.

I get told "eventually you'll want to settle down (whatever that means) and get a job". No, what I want to be is somebody who cares about the future and who is active about making sure that I leave the world a better place for my having been here. And that means not doing the same task all my life, because my energies are best used on different things, often one day to the next, and certainly one year or era to the next.

Road protesting is the thing I'm doing now, but 15 years ago I'd probably have been more involved in the peace camps, not because I'm following a fashion, but because for the energy I put in, that has the best result in making the future a better place to be. That's what I am, and that means I don't "work".

There's always concern (and quite often pity) for the poverty of the unemployed in cities. I feel sorry for the people with ordinary low-paid jobs. On the streets is the worst, no two ways. But if you have somewhere to live, you don't have kids and you're on the dole, you find ways to do things cheaply. You can buy cheap food and you've got time to cook it, you can hitch-hike instead of having to buy a car or get the train. You've got time to do this. Yes it means spending an hour preparing a meal, yes it takes six hours to travel a distance that a car can do in two or three, but this is taking life at a slower pace, this is not getting a stress illness and instead having time for the people around you, interacting more.

And there's a lot of people in the same situation, you get to know people properly and you can find ways to have a good time. The people I know on the dole in cities have a far better time than the people who work, because the workers spend all their money on rent and travel and buying food from shops that are open late and cost more. Those are the people who are trapped, those are the people who are lonely cos they don't have time to involve themselves with other people. They're not getting a lot of money like the wealthy, and their lives are bled out of them so they don't have the energy to get any spiritual wealth that's available to those with time. Yet these are people who are supposedly better off, who are "doing better", are "going somewhere", are economically active. But it doesn't count for anything, there's no quality of life there.

People don't want to work. If it's such a good job, why do they have to bribe me with money to make me do it? Oxfam shops don't pay their staff, people do it because they know it's a good thing to do it, because they are helping a greater good. Whereas when you work in a bank, they have to give you money, they can't get you to do it out of love. Nobody wants to process mortgage quotations because they like it, so they pay you. By giving you money they're saying "We know this is dreadful. It is so bad there's no way we could talk you into doing it, so we'll offer you money".

Imagine if you knew a person who was like that, who said "I know there's no way you can like me, so I'll pay you to be my friend, I'll give you £5 an hour to come out for an evening with me". That's essentially what work does, "We know you don't want to be with us really, so we'll pay you £5 an hour to come and be with us for eight hours a day". No.

No, my life is worth much more than £5 an hour. Not that you even get that, by the time you knock off the hours you spend getting to and from work and recovering from work.

"If only I could do what I want, but instead I'll do something someone else wants and maybe in 40 years time I'll get a few years to myself". You only get one go at life, what a stupid fucking waste to sell it to some other fucker.

Work blots life out, it drains people cos they know they don't want to be doing it really, they get home and they're knackered. And so they spend all they money they get from working on things that help them cope with working. They get a car to go to work, convenience food cos they haven't got the time or inclination to cook. They have to go out somewhere more expensive to have a good time, having to cram a week's worth of good time into one night. I don't want to have a good time in the few hours allocated between work and closing time, I want to have a good time when I actually feel like it, rather than having to fit it in at a prearranged time no matter what mood I'm in. No wonder there's so much violence in city centres at weekends when people with a weeks worth of work stress are given their only time to let off steam, and get full of a depressant drug like alcohol. It's not good, it's not healthy that's why the more industrialised a society gets, the more stress diseases afflict its citizens.

But finally now we have permanent unemployment. They're pretending this is something that should be got rid of, something that is intrinsically bad. No, this is glorious, this is what we've worked for.

Trade unionists fight for a decrease in the working week, yet they fight against unemployment. What they're against is poverty. Poverty is a bad thing, but if people have enough to live on, why fight unemployment? If you want a decrease in the working week it's because you want to work less, so why fight to be in work and renounce time to live your own life?

We've always been told by teachers and Jobcentre advisors that we must "learn to sell yourself". And if we don't? "Er.....you won't get bought".

I was in the post office and there was a bloke in front of me cashing his pension, and his wife was on the pension for the first time. The woman stamping the book noticed this and asked him if he was going to go away somewhere or do something special now he was getting more money. He replied that he didn't know, that he'd not been away all summer, that he didn't know what to do with his time. The woman working behind the counter, in her 50s, said "I know, it shows how brainwashed we are doesn't it, that we don't know what to do with our time when we do get it".

I don't want to be like that bloke and discover that we're brainwashed into work and have to find what to do with my life when I'm 65. I realise that now, and that's why I'm going to really fucking use my life. I'm using it for things that I actually find fulfilling, that I believe in, that is good for me and good for other people too. Even when we like our job and it benefits others, there are always simple ways in which we could make it better for us and others that are denied by the regimentation and the corporate mentality.

On a road protest site, work is done by whoever has the will and the ability. If you see something that needs doing and you want to do it, you do it. If you need help, you ask and get it. You get the opportunity to learn a lot, not just in technical and practical skills, but in human stuff like teamwork, organisation, co-operation. Because there's no hierarchy or competition culture nobody is afraid to contribute, so the result is a fusion of the best ideas.

In corporate culture, whether it be in the workplace or at school, you'd have to study treehouse building in a stuffy and limited way. If it were in the workplace it would only teach you what the company needs you to know, if it were at school it would be theoretical and dull. Then everyone would take an exam and the top scorers would be the treehouse builders, the rest written off. This is how competition culture works and it is an outrageous, degrading process that wastes human minds and human potential. There is no excuse for people leaving school illiterate. It doesn't take ten years to teach someone to read and write, it means they have been ignored. And similar crimes are committed against all of us.

Human beings are multi-taskers, nobody is only good for doing just one simple action their whole life, yet jobs have been Henry Forded into being as close to one repetitive task as possible. How are we ever to find out what we're good at? Freed from jobs, we can find out lots of different things, we can help each other find out more. The scientists can help the environmentalists, the artists can help the scientists, we can show each other new ways of seeing things, which is the foundation of any great cultural renaissance.

It's like my friend Karl says; in any occupation you must feel four things:

1. That your existing skills are being utilised;
2. That your skills are being improved;
3. That your work is of benefit to the wider community;
4. That you get your just rewards.

Anything missing and the work will leave you unsatisfied. And almost everyone in paid employment doesn't fulfil those four criteria, which I think are as near as we can get to absolute truths for human work.

People can easily come up with ideas for useful occupations for themselves. We currently waste a lot of human potential on making weapons that will never be used (and cause far greater human waste if they are used). In the UK, taxpayers' money subsidises the arms industry at over £10,000 per job per year. Even the workers know their industry is shite (solidarity was expressed by the British Aerospace workers for the Ploughshares women who smashed up a Hawk jet at a BA factory), but they are given no chance of changing it.

In 1976 the Combine Shop Stewards Committee at Lucas Aerospace published 150 of the best ideas that Lucas workers had designed as alternatives to arms production. They were fucking amazing, and included a hybrid power pack that combined a small petrol engine with an electric motor. Used in a car it cuts total fuel consumption by half. They also designed a train/bus hybrid which could revolutionise transport in countries with vast areas of dispersed rural population, and loads of other things in alternative energy, medical equipment, oceanics, remote control devices. Lucas management and the government carried on with subsidised arms manufacture.

Humans are able to do far more and far better things than the jobs they are given. They will come up with the ideas themselves, given the opportunity. They don't have to be bribed or blackmailed, they soon get bored with watching TV and wanking, and want meaning. People aren't afraid of hard work, they just hate unrewarding work, work that demands a lot for not enough good reason.

Jobs tie people to the rule of clocks and to routines. People get up before their bodies have had enough sleep, they stay awake (usually getting stuff ready for work) long after their bodies are ready for sleep. We all know how crotchety we can get when we haven't had enough sleep (again, the hardest workers of all, parents, can give the best testimony of this), yet most people in paid employment spend their whole lives like it to a greater or lesser degree. When you hear that Thatcher used to sleep four hours a night, you understand her a bit more.

After a while in this snappy semi-sleep deprived state it becomes as good as you ever get, your usual state. People expect you to be like that (including yourself), and yet you know it's wrong, it's not really you. You start to resent who you have become. And if you resent yourself, how can you ever truly love the existence of others?

No wonder these workers, like the starving with their faces pressed against the window of a building in which a great feast is being prepared, resent the freedom of those outside the tyranny of the clock—the unemployed, travellers, beggars, artists. They know they should feel sorry for beggars, but their resentment of their own lives under the meaningless will of others and the clock's reign of terror means they resent those who are free from it, no matter how wretched. They tell each other "they're all rich really" stories to remove the guilt of passing a helpless homeless hungry person.

They have this discomfort, but can't admit it is envy. Deep inside those who live by routine know it's crap, but don't see a way out. Those who are outside have achieved the workers big ambition, so they must be thought of as having a good time (or perhaps just irresponsible). Either way, they are jealous or resentful, and hence the tabloid stories of beggars with BMWs, or of road protesters having an easy life sitting up a tree all day taking heroin (sitting up a tree for eight hours in sub-zero February is a soft option?).

The worker organises their whole life around earning money, and money is the compensation for the shit they have to go through, the only thing they get to make things better. They can't admit to being jealous of someone without money, so they get these tabloid stories which let them justify their resentment. If beggars really did get £1000 a day, the worker would do it too, but they know these stories are lies.

They pretend they wouldn't do it out of self-esteem or out of liking their work. But how much self-esteem can you really have just giving your life to someone else to do with as they wish? And if everyone likes their work so much, why is the National Lottery so popular? Over 90% of British adults have played the National Lottery. The Lottery says that money = happiness, which is a lie in itself, but that's not the real point for what we're talking about here. The real deal in work terms is the Lottery offers freedom from work, and most workers, by buying a ticket, are declaring that that's what they want.

Workers want out. Why else spend all week talking about the weekend? And all year talking about the two weeks holiday? Why else play the National Lottery? Shouldn't we abandon the fruitless waste of waiting for the Camelot plc knight in shining armour to rescue us and do it ourselves? Shouldn't we have more than two days out of seven to be happy? Shouldn't every day be a holiday?

All great civilisations have been built on slavery. Our culture's wage slavery IS a slavery: a slave is someone who works under a master they can never be the equal of, performing whatever tasks the master requires. In return they are fed and given accommodation. This is exactly the arrangement of everyone who does a job they dislike in order to pay the bills. It is nothing short of mad to take part in the deal that is work: to sell yourself into a life of slavery and then hope to earn enough to buy your freedom back.

We work hard for negligible reward and in doing so we grind our souls to dust, all so that we can buy products made by people in even worse conditions elsewhere. While we are wage-slaves, we still enjoy a standard of living that is, like all civilisations in history, built on the slavery of many for the benefit of the few.

These days we're too squeamish to have the slaves in our own houses or on our fields, so we hide them away out of site in the sweatshop clothing factories of Indonesia, the electronics factories of China, the cocoa plantations of Ghana.

The real crime is that none of us need to be doing this, and in doing it we drag ourselves down not only as individuals but as cultures, as a species and, with our overconsumption of irreplaceable resources, we take other species with us too.

If we take the power out of the hands of the short-sighted, competing, militaristic few, and instead put a fraction of that effort into eliminating the drudgery of the workplace, we could all be free to take care of ourselves and each other. The freedom to be owned by no-one but yourself, the freedom to become yourself.

It is not selfish to want this freedom from work, because it is not a privilege. It is absolutely possible for humans to reorganise themselves so that none need be held in this slavery ever again, and instead be free to do what they want, to discover what it is to be human. This would take less effort than we currently put into ruining our fellow humans and our natural environment.

The only privilege in this issue is the present privilege of those who take the benefits of our labours. We spend our whole lives working only to give the results to someone who has far too much already. We are a society of the hungry, busily chewing our food so that we can spit it into the mouths of the grossly bloated. These overfed overlords tell us that there can be no other way. A hundred years ago they'd say that we weren't worthy of this nourishment. When we proved that wrong, they told us there wouldn't be enough for everyone, so we were greedy to want it (look at those who tell us this!). Now we are realising that this too is a lie.

The need to eject ourselves from the work ethic of industrial society is rapidly becoming vital for our very survival. We can have a decent standard of living for all if we understand that a standard of living is not determined by our level of consumption but by our level of happiness. It will mean simpler ways of living. It will mean more of us work on the land and less of us in the call centres, which isn't too bad a deal. More of us will see the results of our labour and feel justly rewarded.

Let's embrace this opportunity of real freedom. Let's step off the treadmill with its unchanging view and look at the majesty and splendour of this earth.

Freedom from slavery has never been easy to achieve, and in the immediate aftermath it is difficult even to sustain. In the USA, many freed black slaves found that they'd been granted the freedom to starve to death, many came to resent their liberation. But who would seriously suggest that we were better off with enslavement?

We know we have to radically restructure our lives if life as we know it is to survive on this planet. This can only be done by getting people to see the bigger picture, to start really caring and loving this life and the earth that sustains it. This, in turn, can only be done by assuring people that it's safe to look beyond themselves. Everyone who's ever lived close to the breadline knows that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values, but in point of time. But beyond the basic needs, much of our consumption is actually poisonous, both spiritually and physically.

We have to stop the wastefulness of consumerism, competition and hierarchy, and give a decent basic standard of living to all. If it is possible to do this for everyone, then everyone has a right to it.

Once we're given the breathing space to look around, slow down, to stop being human machines, we will rediscover the joy of being part of the web of life. The incredible industrial development we have seen in the past 200 years must be pulled back from killing us and our co-habitants. The de-intensification can free us from the selfishness that treadmill wage slavery has subjected us to, and lead us into an unprecedented age of enlightenment where we choose to live simply because we have a deeper understanding of what is truly rewarding.

It is time for us to stop working and start living.