Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1tdrd5w/about_wanting_to_work/

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The original was posted on /r/antiwork by /u/OneOnOne6211 on 2026-05-15 09:41:04+00:00.

"Nobody wants to work anymore" is a common mantra among certain corporate propagandists and self-pitying CEOs. However, putting aside that they've been saying this for literal centuries as a tactic to bully people into accepting low wages, I kind of want to examine that claim in the larger context of humanity. Specifically evolution.

Now you might ask what evolution has to do with this. But it's actually a lot.

First it has to be established that evolution is a process that takes place over enormous timespans. Millions of years is a relatively small amount of time. We only split from Neanderthals about 500.000 to 800.000 years ago, and they're extremely similar to us. So that is a blink of an eye. Evolution has been going on for literally billions of years.

So, how long has civilization been around? Depending on how you look at it, about 10.000 years. And industrialized civilization? That's about 200-ish years.

Now, I want you to remember that our fundamental needs and desires are shaped strongly by evolution. Sure, nurture builds on top of that. But there are still fundamental things that humans tend to have.

And what those things are, are adjusted to the way we lived as we evolved. And how did we live?

Humans lived in small bands of a couple of families. Our days looked something like walking around with other people talking, hunting game together, gathering berries together, making kids, etc.

So what desires do we have because of that? We have a desire for social interaction, because the social groups were fundamental to our functioning as a species. We tend to like adrenaline producing activities like hunting. We like to... reproduce, of course. We like feeling connected to others and we like feeling useful and meaningful to those around us.

That's also why someone might go through the trouble knitting a sweater for a loved one despite not getting paid anything for it. Because us giving them that sweater is its own reward. Because it plays into our need for meaning, feeling useful and feeling connected.

So people actually DO want to work, in that sense. We want to do things for other people, especially those we love, but also our broader communities. We crave meaning and connection and purpose.

That's the context we evolved to live in.

But modern, industrialized work completely destroys that.

If you work in a factory making clothes, you will see hundreds of pieces of similar clothing go through your hands a day. You have no creative input on what those look like. You do not make them start to finish. You are one cog in a machine. And you will never, ever, ever see the person who wears the shirt that you just made.

And of course, you have to focus on the work. Talking with each other all the time? No, you have to keep up the pace because time is money.

This completely destroys the actual incentives we have biologically to "work." It destroys our connection to others, because we'll never meet the people who benefit. It destroys our creative input, it takes away our agency, it reduces our ability to socially interact with those around us.

The modern work place is simply antithetical to human nature. That's it.

Money has become the only motivation you have. And that is not how human minds evolved to work. Modern work strips us of so many of the things we need that it's no wonder that it drains the life out of so many people, and people hate it.

It estranges us from ourselves and others, when in our historical environment it brought us closer.

Now, I'm not suggesting we should go back to living prehistoric lives. I like modern medicine and clothes and housing and computers. So part of this cannot be helped.

However, it is easy to see how work could be adapted to at least better conform to our basic needs. How it could be adapted to prioritize profit less, and prioritize those basic needs more.

That's what should happen. But it will never happen so long as those making the decisions are rich people who are only driven by maximum profit. That needs to change.