Takasaki’s face lit up at this reply. He was very relieved that I’d finally taken the bait and shown an interest in this somewhat controversial topic, which he’d brought to the table knowing full well he might turn me off completely. And while I was mostly just being polite, he had piqued my curiosity about work—albeit in the same way one might find a history program and get sucked in to watching it. I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who lived in the days when work was still an everyday thing for a majority of people.
“Well, I can only assume you’d feel a lot more stress than you do now,” I said. “I mean, when you have a job, you generally have a lot of responsibilities, no? Imagine being under that kind of pressure, day in and day out, where one little mistake could screw things up for a lot of people, and maybe even cost you your livelihood. It’s kind of stressing me out just to think about, honestly.”
All of what I’d learned in school came back to me now. To have a job meant donating your labor to an employer, taking on responsibilities, and suffering potentially brutal working conditions in exchange for some form of compensation. And once you got started, it wasn’t easy to change your mind and resign. Though I wasn’t entirely sure how that meshed with the whole “free labor” idea I’d read about, which supposedly allowed people to change jobs at will.
“True, but you also had the right to choose what you were or weren’t willing to put up with,” said Takasaki, almost as if he’d read my mind. “Everyone had the power to choose their own career. Though obviously, that all depended on your ability to establish a working agreement with your desired employer—er, that is, the people who gave out the jobs.”
“Couldn’t you also just work for yourself, though?” I asked.
“Well, yes, in a way. Supposedly there were people known as ‘freelancers’ and ‘sole proprietors’ who did essentially what you’re describing,” he said, spouting highly specific terminology right off the top of his head. He was clearly more passionate about this subject than he initially let on. “Basically, they were people who did their jobs all by themselves without having to answer to one specific employer. But even they had to participate in the system somehow, trading their goods or services in exchange for remuneration. Because you can produce as much product or content or services as you like, but it’s not work unless you get paid for it.”
“Right…” I said.
The concept of payment was about as foreign to me as that of work. Obviously, people still produced plenty of things themselves in the modern era. But we couldn’t really call it work, because nobody was compensated for their labor. For most of recorded human history, when people performed a job, they got paid for it in the form of “currency,” which they could then use to “purchase” whatever needs or luxury items they could afford. The exchange of currency was an advanced form of barter, but the whole system of wage labor had already been abolished by the time I was born. My only firsthand experience with money was a vague memory of my grandfather showing me some coins and paper bills he’d kept stashed away from his own youth. To think our entire society once revolved around the exchange of those little pieces of paper. Such was the nature of the monetary economy.
“God, it all sounds like such a pain in the ass,” I muttered, letting my disdain show with a disgusted sneer. I knew it probably wasn’t the best way to endear myself to a man on our first date, but I couldn’t help it—the mere thought was enough to annoy me. Thankfully, my date was kind enough to laugh it off.
“Yeah, definitely not the most efficient system, was it?” he said with a chuckle. “Imagine if every time you wanted to do or get something, you had to first convert something of yours into money, then go reconvert that into whatever it was you were originally after.”
“What a waste of effort. So pointless.”
“Mmm… I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. I think there was definitely good reason to have a system of stockpiling value one degree removed from the flow of trade, at least in the context of the time. You have to remember that scarcity of goods and resources was a big deal back then, so you couldn’t always just get exactly what you wanted right when you wanted it.”
“Right, so you’d have to wait, but you could hold on to the money in the meantime,” I said.
“Easy to forget now that we’ve got more than enough of everything for everyone, isn’t it? Obviously, it helps that we mostly only produce things to meet the precise level of demand now, but still. I mean, do you have any idea how small people’s houses used to be back then?”
“How small?”
“Like, one bedroom or less, on average.”
“How is that not a human rights violation?”
He burst out laughing at this, but I remained completely stone-faced. I genuinely could not fathom anyone ever living in a space that small. Hell, even dog houses were typically a bit bigger than that.
“Just wasn’t enough housing space for everyone,” he explained. “At least not where the jobs were at. There weren’t dozens and dozens of vacant houses sitting around, waiting for anyone to move in.”
“But weren’t they building new ones all the time?” I asked. “Surely, you could eventually build enough to meet demand…”
“Not when you can’t afford to service and maintain them all properly.”
Finally, I saw his point. Right, of course. In the past, all of the necessary work to build, clean, and maintain housing stock was done by people. And that work cost time and money.
“In this modern era,” he said, “we can clear out as much land as we need, build houses as big as we want to, and easily keep them in perfect shape even when they’re vacant. But back then, there just wasn’t enough labor to go around. Or land, or houses, or resources, for that matter. So all people could really do was live in these tiny little dwellings, save up their money, and wait around until one of the few houses that not only met their needs, but was also within their means came on the market.”
“When you put it that way, I guess it makes sense that there wouldn’t be enough. Humans can only produce so much by themselves, after all.”
“I know it’s a little hard to imagine nowadays, but yeah. Back then, they didn’t have what we have now,” said Takasaki wistfully. He took a reverent pause before intoning the name of our benevolent provider. “They did not have Titan.”