Kinda, but it's more about consumerism and materialism, which has been propagandize into the citizenry since the end of WWII. If people are always working, they aren't doing much introspective thinking, now are they?

I want a nation of workers, not thinkers.

-John D. Rockefeller

Thinkers scatter energy all over the place, creating strong branches of possible outcomes, workers direct their energy towards specific goals set by the elite.

While that is true. It takes hard work to have a homestead. So choose, humans... Hard work is not bad, but is one fulfilled over the other? Not having to rely on money and the grocery store, but works hard to provide for one's self and family. Nothing is truly black and white. Try being lazy and just thinking, in a survival situation. ;)

Lazy potheads, Hail Israel

It is one way of contributing to society, not the only of course. What is purposeful or not is up to the individual, only they can deem something they do as that.

Hard work is just that that, whether it's a goal that is beneficial remains to be seen, nor is the reward necessarily going to proportionate to the amount of work put in.

It is one way of contributing to society

Not all people who "work hard" are benefitting society. The person who spends their day trucking industrial waste to dump in a river may be working hard but they are certainly not benefitting society.

They are but trucking that waste to a dump. Pretty sure Society would suck without those logistics. And if you think trucking is even a hard job...

Lol…try it. Driving a truck in/through the city all fn day. Bouncing around in the cab…idiot drivers…the numbing humm of a diesel engine all day. It's hard work.

You can use semantics all day but there are many people working hard that are doing nothing good for society.

I'm just saying they're are jobs that are harder than driving all day, I do agree with you that it's a hard job. Most drivers work insane hours too. It's also takes more energy than you think to focus on the road all day maintaining several tons going 70 mph. I was a driver during summers in college, so I know a little bit about it.

I agree with you that there are many people working hard for no reason, nothing to benefit society or move us forward culturally or scientifically. The few that do often have hooks in their back from executive producers or financial institutions. Most people are locked up in the corporate 9-5 spinning their wheels supporting/migrating existing businesses. Some work on 'new' things, but usually these are just copy cats of old things to a large extent, lacking originality.

http://www.channel101.com/about is pretty original. It's an online tv network. I think they're doing one of the best things for society ever. This is truly independent media.

I don't think it's necessarily a conspiracy. I think it's likely that this part of our cultural identity is being exploited. I recommend exploring eastern philosophy to learn about being content. The Tao Te Ching covers about this subject quite a bit.

As a student of history my thinking here goes toward the idea of the Protestant work ethic and the role that played in the founding of the United States, but is it entirely possible that these cultural norms have been exploited so as to leave people running on the hamster wheel forever thinking it's the moral thing to do and that it will eventually pay off? Yes, I think so.

yes.

zero point energy exists. w/ unlimited, free energy, there is no reason why any human should be forced to work.

So true.

No, but laziness of mind and body and general apathy certainly are.

Well, if you choose not to work someone has to work for you. No one eats for free in this world no matter what the system of governance is. That's just the law of nature.

I don't think you need to read about it, just consider it in observation of nature in general. How do you survive without work? Even wild animals have to exert themselves to eat and survive.

How will these automated devices be manufactured if someone doesn't work?

Don't misunderstand me.. i am not fan of the current system wherein people are more or less forced to work for others, have their profits stolen and then told if they do not work within that system they are useless or a criminal. I define work as anything one has to do to provide for themselves and family.

I think what you say will happen and it will really equal more control over people's lives, not less. Then, as far as the PTB are concerned, they no longer need so many masses of taxed slaves. Your worth, in whatever form they define it, will directly tie to your right to even continue to live.

Who is going to manufacture the assembly line equipment, the robots, etc? Those are machines that people make. No matter what, a person made something that makes something that makes something.

But, yes, we should re-examine what kind of hard work is really commendable. We should be able to provide for ourselves and our families like free human beings - where our own labours Always = our own profits. They don't even have to be monetary profits. Growing your own food and bypassing part of that system is one example. They intend to make doing that very difficult.

Another way to look at it...

"Arbeit Macht frei"

There is no benefit from hard work other than ignorance (due to lack of time) and sometimes money.

My very unscientific life study has found that people are wealthy either due to hard work, luck, and family.

But to answer your question, it is purposeful. Keeps the populace busy, tired, and preoccupied. Wouldn't want people with too much time and money on their hands... They might try to actually do something useful.

A lot of other countries also don't realize we don't love to work so much - most of us just 'have to' . In order to get what they desire in life at least. (goes back to others comments about being propagandized into citizens though)
Unfortunately most spend their time at the grave regretting this. People don't seem to understand time = money, or they do and just don't value their lives enough I suppose.

Capitalism doesnt work if people dont work. Plus if all people do is work, it stops them doing other things, like overthrowing a government for unfair wages and corporate tax cuts, gov shutdowns, propaganda, rigged elections, loss of freedom and justice, police state, constant military budget pit of wars, wars that are built on lies, etc.

If people work more and get paid less, then they have to work more to get the same "stuff" others have. Now the difference being that this keeps the workers working, the media and propaganda and culture constantly keeps you wanting more stuff, and those who have no need for such things get to laugh along side the bank.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (The Real Reason For The Forty-Hour Workweek)

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

Emphasis mine. In regard to your question about whether it's purposeful, to the extent that it is intentional, I think that this inertia is the primary goal.

Finding Time

Slowness as an Act of Resistance

...but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties — epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures — that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell. What we cannot describe vanishes into the ether, and so what begins as a problem of language ends as one of the broadest tragedies of our lives.

This is most manifest in the life of the suburban commuter who weekly spends a dozen or more hours on the road between the putative dream house and the workplace, caught in the gridlock of tens of thousands likewise trying to move from the residential-warehousing periphery to the economically productive inner rings. Space is quantifiable and we are constantly taught to covet it (though leisure is advertised too — mostly as vacation packages). You can own those two thousand square feet including two-car garage, and it is literally real, the real in real estate. But to have this space you give up time, the time that you might be spending with the kids who are housed in the image of domestic tranquility but not actually particularly well nurtured by their absentee parents, or time spent immersed in community life or making things with your own hands or doing nothing at all — a lost art. You give up time, and you often give up the far more than two thousand square feet that you don’t own but get to enjoy when you live in, say, a rented apartment in a neighborhood full of amenities nobody advertised to you, because you don’t have to buy the public pool or playground that your kids don’t need to be driven to. The language of real-estate ownership is loud, clear, and drilled into us daily; the language of public life and leisure time is rarer and more complex.

People elsewhere are better at this language. At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives — bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures. These may be the wages of inarticulateness.

I think the narrative serves to dissuade people from thinking that they can just take how they want.

It made sense to have it however, as without it, they would have run the risk of roving bands of barbarians forming.

The "hard work" narrative is going to have to stop when jobs become more automated however.

It is a slippery slope indeed. I believe it's important that the people who feel that way are able to adapt to the coming automation.

During the previous U.S. election it really showed how people are unprepared for it, and how the politicians manipulate the public at large. They'd rather blame the government, and other countries rather than prepare the population to adopt a new economic system.