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>I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.

We've wasted enough time debating semantics.

>I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience.

This may be true; I have no horse in this particular race. The substantive issue isn't which class is more represented among the non-self-actualizers, but what proportion of people fall into this category and what a post-work society looks like for them. I don't know how we ended up spending so much time on the tangential point of who are the non-self-actualizers.

>This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.

I'm not sure I understand what this means, but this doesn't sound right. The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world, the fact that people move frequently and so do not have "roots" in their local community, multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people, and so on.

>And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.

Similarly, I'm not sure this gets the cause and effect correct. We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.

>This is some revisionism.

Perhaps if you were more interested in understanding my points than finding things to nitpick, you would recognize that my point about being non-judgmental was towards my characterization of the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers, and how the working class fits in. You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.




> The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world

Where do those competitions and pressures come from? If someone feels a strong pressure to make a career for themselves, to get out of their hometown -- that doesn't read to you as being something that's related to the status we've placed on career and work?

What do the stats say about why people typically move away from their hometown communities? I'm going to guess that job opportunities will be a pretty large proportion of answers in any survey about that.

> multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people

Hm.

> We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.

I disagree, but sure. It's hard to clearly establish cause and effect when looking at correlations, and there are multiple ways to read the correlation between a decline in social institutions and an increase in people using work to self-actualize. I'll grant that.

----

> You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.

You very literally, directly compared people who have trouble finding meaning outside of work to idle children.




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