One of the memeplexes I revisit, and seek to untangle, at least in my own mind, is where a Protestant idea of "work" meets a Physics one. We have the work ethic, versus the idea of wasted energy, i.e. leakage away from the real work getting done. But to what extent is "work" in the eye of the beholder observer?
For example they say a steam engine leaks energy away in the form of heat and noise, but what if your main purpose, as a steam engine, is to entertain with your noises, while heating the room? As a side benefit, you also power the whole museum. That's not your paid work though; you do that for free. Yes, I'm addressing a steam engine here.
Maybe there's nothing deep here. I'm drowning in the shallows, where many drownings happen. Yet it seems the idea of a work vector, along which no waste is happening, is really in a multi-dimensional space higher than the eye can see.
Invisible means complicated. Side effects may be main effects.
This was the charm of the honey-maker moneymaker bumblebee concept: that cross-pollination is precessional to what the "bees" (moneymakers) are about. The flowers use them to exchange genetic information (get the real work done).
I find it hard to get away from the idea of a taskmaster, the Protestant, very puritanical about what "work" means and quick to call anything "entropy" that is not strictly to his liking.
The fragility of his mindset in the face of even minimal chaos, as he sees it, is not a mental condition we would welcome or wish to nurture in ourselves. We want our physics meaning of "work" to stay pure of such an influence, unaffected by the religious mores of some random republican farmer, newly emigrated to North America from some homestead in Eurasia.
I take comfort in how many humans are in retirement or "at the ready" but not really doing anything in terms of directly constructing infrastructure. We already have a huge carrying capacity with respect to people needing food, shelter and healthcare, and from whom little is asked. They've performed their service already. We either call them "veterans" or "retired".
We only need so much infrastructure. Cities for the sake of cities are not really a social good. From a movie-making point of view, we need a balance between plot-advancing box office action, and locating sites to build sets. Sometimes the movie is about the making of the movie, which is what we think of as real life.
Choreography, script writing, is the name of the game i.e. what will the lifestyles be like?
Saying they contain "a lot of leisure time" might be a moral judgment, like when the honest work of a homemaker, caring for kids, is somehow really "leisure time" because "unpaid".
The guy with the job, the breadwinner, was the only "worker" in the family, whereas caring for other animals only counted as work where animal husbandry was concerned, as when raising sheep or other livestock.
Then both parents "got jobs" in the nuclear family model, leaving the suburban home mostly empty during the day (the kids were in daycare), with the urban office space mostly empty at night, and jammed freeways in between.
And then all these ideas about "net worth" seem rather morally perverse, as if dropped from the sky by some giant egg laying monster. The moneymaker game seems to casually assume ownership of the public's good words, as if entitled.
In the physics world, just breathing is work. It's work to pump air in and out of the lungs. It takes joules, and a minimum amount of muscle power.
Given breathing is necessary to life, no puritan is in a position to argue that no useful work is being done. Ergo, why not pay this person on a per breath basis?
That proposition takes the breath away, in some circles, because isn't the whole point to make life support hard to afford? That's an old school belief with its hands on the steering wheel to this day, according to lore.
The gymnast does a "workout" which we call "work" whether or not she or he is paid as a professional gymnast. Many professions put a premium on looking one's best.
So that's spending energy to better one's physique.
Sure, much energy is lost to heat and sometimes noises, but a gym wouldn't be a gym without all those vibes. In that sense, nothing is wasted, as entropy is factored in as a necessary feature, not as a cosmic defect or original sin.
