What if in the future, everyone refuses to do any job that they don't want to do? I'm big into refusing to do any kind of work that to me is not absolutely joyous. I love being a YouTube creator full time because all the videos I do are out of love. I do them because there's nothing I'd rather talk about, because I love sharing something that's useful for you, and I refuse to do any kind of work that's not done with that energy.
I refuse to just show up and get a paycheck because I have to, because I need to pay the bills. I haven't worked for money in a long time. Some people are like, well, that's nice for you, Jerry. We can't all live like that. I say that's not true. We can all live like that, and here's how it would work.
How "do only work you love" actually works
If all of us refuse to do work that we don't just want to do so much that we'd be happy to do it for free — how do I know I'd be happy to do this for free? Because I've done a lot of it for free for a long time, and I've started new YouTube channels where I am doing it for free. I make videos. I get no money out of doing them, like this Jerry Banfield Thoughts channel. I just love doing these videos.
If all of us do that, there are some jobs that people might refuse to work full time. For example, I wanted to be a garbage man when I was little, but there's no way I would be a full time garbage man. Maybe there wouldn't be anyone who would feel a desire to be a full time garbage man to work 40 plus hours a week driving a trash truck. In that case, you might wonder, well, how are we going to get the trash picked up?
Take turns on the dirty jobs, like a volunteer fire department
What we would do if everybody — we all made a collective agreement, like, look, I'm not going to go to work just to get a paycheck if I hate doing the job itself. Then there'd be a lot of jobs, like maybe making stuff in factories, maybe taking out the trash and some of the other dirty jobs. You wouldn't have any full time workers for those jobs. What we could do instead is we'd all just pitch in and take turns.
I would love to have a little shift doing the garbage truck once every week, once a month. It would take a relatively small amount of people if nobody was willing to do full time garbage trucks. It'd take a relatively small amount of people in a community to pitch in, like how some communities don't have enough people to have a full time job. If you don't have a full time fire department, what you have is a volunteer fire department. A few people volunteer and it's like, hey, I'll do the fire department if we need it.
If we did the same thing, we could easily have all of our dirty jobs manned by regular people. People like me — I'm a YouTuber, that's my job that I love, but I could easily go take four, eight, ten hours a month to drive a garbage truck. Because I wasn't doing it full time, I'd probably enjoy the different experience. I'd love to go drive around for a day in a garbage truck and dump trash. Since I wouldn't be doing it full time, I could easily optimize that time and listen to a bunch of audio books, take a friend along and chat, and make it something fun that would be a new and different experience. I would feel really good helping the community out in that way with something that was really necessary.
The guy fixing a pipe in St. Petersburg on a Sunday
I was walking by a guy on the street today, workers for the city of St. Petersburg, who were working on a Sunday afternoon on a broken pipe. I said, hey, I really appreciate y'all being out here Sunday. The one guy, he's in the hole digging, and he's like, man, I wish I'd have stayed in college. What I said back is, the work you're doing is valuable. We need the work you're doing. Because he was fixing a pipe that was leaking, somebody needs to do that, or right now the water's shut off to my house. I really appreciate the people out there doing that work.
Now, if he worked all week, and then he's doing overtime on Sunday, he's probably not happy to be out here. But if he wasn't there to do his job, someone in the community would have to pitch in and do that instead.
"You couldn't train everybody" — yes you could
The first argument people will make is, well, you couldn't train everybody to be garbage men. Well, you don't need everybody to train to be a garbage man. You could easily have a class and a ride along or field training. We could easily make the transition so that whatever you wanted to do to pitch in and help the community, people who already know how to do it could train you.
And sure, would things be a little sloppy? Would there be more garbage truck accidents? Or would you have things not working quite as smooth with civilian volunteers? Perhaps. But what kind of difference would that make, set against people not doing a job they hate just to get paid? How many people would feel more of a purposeful life who are doing full time jobs right now that they hate, and they could switch over to doing a bunch of different things for the community?
There's enough for everyone — the only thing stopping us is how we think
The way I see it, there's so much material wealth in the world that we easily have enough to give everybody. The only thing stopping us is the way we think. Literally, in my view, that is it. For example, if you're like, well, there's people starving, we don't even have enough food to feed people — I don't believe that's true. The amount of food we feed just to animals alone is, as I understand it, enough to feed people many times over on this planet. And all we need to do is think differently, and that'll happen.
That's why I'm making this video: to plant a new idea in your head that you could start imagining a future where all of us do valuable work for the community and all of us do work we love. For example, my wife and I were talking about this at a fast food place last night. It's like, well, what if nobody wanted to work? What if nobody wanted to work at fast food places? Well, a lot of people might just microwave the food at home themselves instead of going out to eat somewhere that then microwaves the food in the back for you and then serves it to you. And others of us, we could just walk in. I went to a burger place to eat yesterday, a vegan burger, and I could walk in and flip a burger over on the grill and I could make my own burger myself. And maybe people take turns volunteering, you know, managing that. Or maybe one person would love to work in an environment where all they did was help other people make their own food.
The only thing stopping us from progress, I believe, is our own unwillingness to accept new ideas and to think new thoughts and to seek out new thoughts.
Original thoughts versus the negative projection of the future
There were some people in open chat, and I love hearing and seeing what you're thinking about — that back and forth is a lot of what we do together inside the Jerry Banfield Family. Some people were talking about this negative projection of the future where we're just all in some kind of a lockdown, like a financial lockdown, where the government's got total control over citizens. My take is, I'd encourage y'all to stop thinking like that unless you'd like to experience that.
This is the kind of stuff I'm thinking about instead. I'm thinking about things I've never heard anybody else say before. I'm getting original thoughts, and I'm sharing these original thoughts, and I'm picturing a future where each of us does work we love all day, and from doing that, people have way less addictions. This is the same reason I keep choosing a hopeful story over a fearful one even on hard days — I wrote about one of those in how my mind went to fear, but I chose faith.
What I learned as a correction officer and a police officer
What I noticed is, when I was a correction officer, for example, I would have liked to go be a correction officer a few hours a week. When I was a police officer, I would have loved to take a shift or two a week as a police officer, but being a full time police officer and full time correction officer was way too much. It was a lot of stress, and it was too much time. It was too much exertion. Some days it was too much boredom.
Other places, where they don't have enough people for a full time police department, they have volunteer police departments where you just have someone in town volunteer. It's like, hey, I'll be a police officer. Something like that, I would have loved to be a police officer and not work so much. All the jobs I saw, though, were full time police officers, which often came with overtime. Then I was stressed out. Then I drank to try and cope and blow off some of the stress. Then that set up this negative reinforcement cycle. A lot of people I see are in this negative reinforcement cycle, and work is the key place you can make a change to that.
Imagine doing work you love all day
Let's imagine a future where all of us do work we love, where none of us have to go to a job we hate and then try and deal with it through addictions, which then further poison our life and ironically make us even less powerful. Imagine being able to just do what I do, all day, every day. I do stuff I love to do and I'm happy to do. I would be happy to help my community out more so that other people didn't go to jobs where they feel like an indentured servant, where it's like I have to do this and I have no choice.
The surprise: the cushiest jobs need this most
Here's the biggest surprise. Some of us have jobs that actually pay very good. My job, lots of times I feel like I'm not really doing anything. I'm not really doing anything useful. I look at that guy out there working, digging a hole. This guy is doing something useful. His work matters. Lots of days I feel like my work doesn't matter. I could just not make these videos and it wouldn't matter. His work is serving our communities in a way we can physically see, like dumping the trash, digging a hole to fix the water, putting together somebody's house.
And we all have different interests. Maybe some of you are like, oh, disgusting, I never would take the trash out. But you would probably like to do something that I might not want to do. Maybe you'd be like, hey, I can do a shift in a factory and put stuff together for a day. That might be fun. So you do the shift in the factory. I take the trash out — and I'm getting my hair stained, and I'm saying this ironically. A lot of us that have jobs where we don't feel like we're actually doing anything for our community, if we did take a shift at a fast food restaurant or a factory or a trash truck, we ironically would feel better. A lot of the problems we have are a function of not feeling like we're doing anything useful and feeling like we're not serving our community.
I think not only could we easily eliminate all the jobs that people don't want to do, but all of us pitching in — and some of us that have the most luxurious situation, like me, you don't get much of a better situation than I've got. As a full time YouTuber who gets to work from home, I've got it real good.
Why I go to Alcoholics Anonymous five days a week
But the one area I need help in: I need to feel like I'm doing something to serve my community. And that's why I go to Alcoholics Anonymous five days a week. That's serving my community. I go, I'm raising kids, I'm present in my relationship, I go to yoga. And that gives me a much deeper connection to my local physical community. That hunger to feel like I'm creating something instead of just taking is a thread I keep coming back to — like the day I wrote about resentments, abundance, and 11:11.
So let's imagine a future that we all really want to experience. And let's see what happens. If you enjoyed this, you can keep going with my newest videos in my Life playlist.