Modern Day Slavery

Modern society affords us benefits that our ancestors could only dream of.

Temperature controlled rooms, food storage, and global distribution channels mean that we can live comfortably with whatever products we want.

Yet it seems that as a society, we are more unhappy than ever. Why is this?

I have my reasons as to why I believe we feel this way. And unfortunately, I believe it has a lot to do with money.

This is the first article I am writing in the Saving Series. This series will focus on why saving is the quintessential habit that leads you to your ideal life.

I won’t be writing the Saving Series in order. Rather, I’ll be posting the ones I feel most compelled to write first. You can see where this piece fits into my personal philosophy here.

Let’s talk about happiness, the history of business, and modern day slavery.

Happiness, Money, and Coercion

I believe that there are two reasons for the overall decline in happiness in society:

1. Most people require money to live, and the primary method for earning money is from employment.
2. People forced to become employees due to 1 surrender their time and life force as part of the exchange.

A reward for working a job has traditionally been a living wage. Unfortunately, modern life (especially in recent years) has eroded the ability for the average citizen to comfortably meet their survival needs through their wage. This may or may not be intentional, however the end result is the same: people are struggling.

This change has occurred due to many factors, including centralisation of business ownership, stagnant wage growth, and rising costs of survival needs.

Survival refers to meeting your basic human needs: water, food, shelter, security, and warmth. To use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs1 as a reference point, this would refer to your physiological and safety needs. You need to provide your body with the nutrients it needs, rest comfortably, and store your things safely.

There is one thing that solves all of these problems: money.

Money

Money is required to live in our society. We buy everything we need – from basic goods to luxury items – with money. We work hard to get more money, and we spent a lot of our time worrying about money. So what is money?

Money is crystallised human effort. Humanity creates goods and services, and we can exchange those things with each other for money. That said, money is inherently worthless, and only has value due to society accepting it as a medium of exchange. Therefore, society sets the value of money (and the goods and services exchanged within it).

Goods and services that society values more attract a higher price than others. Similarly, employment that society deems to be of higher value is compensated at a higher rate than other employment.

The more money you have, the bigger the share of humanity’s collective efforts you are able to purchase. And there are only two ways to increase the amount of money you have available to you:

  1. Earn more.2
  2. Spend less.

Earn More Spend Less

One of the fastest ways to increase your income is to find ways to utilise the skills of your job outside of your job.3 Whether through a side hustle or starting your own business, creating additional sources of income is essential. Without creating alternate income sources, you are beholden to the rates of pay made available to you by your employer.

That said, many struggle to achieve the first option. Earning more is often outside of many people’s control. Collective bargaining efforts by unions and other bodies often control the rates of pay in specific industries. And if you’re skilled in an Award-based role4 (teaching, nursing, construction, and many others), your ability to negotiate your rate of pay – and to perform identical work yourself – is severely limited or impossible.

If you do not have the ability to control your rate of pay or your hours of work, then spending less is the only short-term option available to you. This often means foregoing luxury or frivolous spending to stabilise your situation. This is not ideal or recommended long term, but the pain of destitution will be greater than the sadness of not buying your favourite things now.

So how did we get ourselves into this situation? Why are so many struggling, despite us having the best technologies and facilities and overall highest quality of life of any generation in history? I want to try to explain this through a short history lesson.

Centralisation of Ownership

Around two hundred years ago, it was rare to see a corporation that sold “everything”. It was customary to visit the butcher, baker, greengrocer, and dairy farmer individually to purchase the food you needed. Nowadays, almost everyone does all of their shopping at a supermarket.

In the past, each member of the community took pride in being the provider of a specific trade for their community. This was especially important as most people lived in smaller, closely-knit communities. As a result of their community’s reliance on their trade, they were compensated fairly (though not fantastically) for their efforts.

Due to the industrial revolution, many businesses with enough capital to expand were able to mass produce goods at a rate and cost that manual labour businesses could not compete with. As a result, these larger business could sell their products for a fraction of what these small businesses could offer.

Over time, this increase in competition forced many people to close their businesses. However, their need to earn a living never went away. Many of these people were essentially coerced – through threat of destitution – to take jobs in the factories that produced the goods they used to produce.

And as expected from the increase in productivity over time, workers were able to produce more and more of those goods for their business.

Technological Advancement & Wages

Surely giving these workers access to technologies that increases their output is of benefit to everyone, right?

Yes and no.

Technological improvements have meant that we can produce more things, faster, easier, and better than before. The rate of growth in the last hundred years has been especially rapid.

But if workers are producing more, then surely they would receive compensation proportionate to the value of the work, right?

Wrong.

And on and on the centralisation of businesses went, until we could buy everything we needed in a single store. At least we can choose which megastore we buy from..

How Does This Relate To Being Unhappy?

I believe that this centralisation of business ownership is the cause of our collective unhappiness. Though not directly.

Centralisation of business ownership funnels business profits to the owners of the business. This should be encouraged – business owners are responsible for its success, and assume risk for its failure.5 Profit is the reward for innovation.

However, problems arise when businesses continue to withhold the rewards of increased productivity from their employees. Productivity refers to the value of an employee’s labour. Businesses must always pay employees less than the true value of their labour. Otherwise, it would not be worthwhile for the business to hire them and remain profitable.

As technology has improved, the value each employee can produce has increased greatly. Unfortunately, the gulf between the value of an employee’s labour and the wages they are paid have grown to untenable levels. Productivity has skyrocketed, while employee wages increase at a disproportionate rate to the value of their work. In addition, when factoring inflation into this issue, employee wages are lagging if not entirely flat.

This phenomenon also has the direct effect of separating the value of the employee’s work from the compensation they receive. For example, if your employer pays you $30 per hour to perform a job, then the value of the work must be worth more than $30 per hour to your employer. If it wasn’t, your employer wouldn’t offer you the job.

Money & Meaning

Not only has the amount of money the employee receives proportionate to their output decreased, but our attachment to that output is also lost. It can sometimes be difficult to find pride and meaning in what you do if you are merely serving the interests of a large corporation. This is especially true if you are working in a role or industry you don’t enjoy.

Modern society prevents us from finding a solution to the productivity value versus wage value issue. It is simply a part of modern life. Shareholder demands ensure that businesses maximise profits.

We have seen that businesses will achieve their profit goals by whatever means necessary – including laying off hundreds or thousands of staff without warning. A full-time job is no longer a source of security as it was for previous generations.

The value of employment has eroded to no longer provide enough for families to thrive, not allow for employees to find meaning in their lives, and in many cases, attempt to make it difficult for employees to improve their situation.

Society

My view of society is built on bleak (but realistic) irrefutable truths:

1. Business ownership as a percentage of the population is underrepresented due to the overwhelming presence of large businesses.
2. The vast majority of people in our society are employees for another business.
3. Businesses that hire employees do not pay employees the full value of their labour.
4. A society has been created where most people are forced to opt in to becoming employees due to lack of other opportunities to make money.

The rise in employees versus business owners provides a stable source of workers for corporations to utilise the labour of. This provides governments with predictable amount of tax revenue from payroll taxes as well as income taxes.

The standard path for a person is to work a full-time job for many years, save for retirement (often with the help of mandatory retirement account payments), and retire in their 60’s.

This trajectory isn’t for me. I know it isn’t. And it’s my responsibility to find a way out for myself.

I believe there is only one way to succeed at this game:

Stop playing it as soon as possible.

You have to find a way to not have to spend all of your money. Find a way to avoid spending the rest of your life working for someone else. You must be ruthless with your financial decisions if you wish for your situation to improve. When companies playing the game can be this ruthless, then you must achieve the same level of ruthlessness with your own finances.

Modern Day Slavery

When discussing my personal philosophy, I noted that if one does not have control of their time, then one could be considered a slave.

Of course, the quality of life we enjoy today is vastly different to the average life even a hundred years ago. This at least makes the idea of modern slavery bearable.

But to ignore the facts of our society only serve to turn a blind eye to the facts of the lives we live today.

We live in a world of absolute abundance, yet we are driven towards endless consumption.

We have the ability to provide the basic human needs for all, yet many find themselves struggling or starving.

The time we have available to ourselves while working a traditional full-time role undermines every aspect of a healthy lifestyle.

Increases in the cost of living6 continue to make meeting basic needs more difficult than it should be.

All while the value of the work we provide is being extracted from our labour by mega-corporations.

We live in a society of enslavement – modern day slavery. And saving is the only way to get a chance to break your chains.

Closing

This is easily the most negative piece on my blog so far. I’ve built my career on the ethos that everyone deserves to be paid correctly.7 I now believe that this goes deeper – that everyone deserves to receive adequate pay for the value they provide. And I don’t believe our society incentivises this sentiment at all.

Humanity does incredible things. We are all capable of amazing things in life. We just need the time and space to be able to think about what that is, and then to execute.

But it almost seems as though life is set up in such a way to prevent people from manifesting their ideal self, and keep them trapped in modern day slavery.

That’s the future I want to avoid.

I want people to feel motivated to save, and to help them avoid falling prey to the pitfalls of modern society. I want people knowing that they’re creating a life they genuinely love – not working towards an idea of a life they can possibly live in the future.

Being able to Choose Work You Love, that rewards you with the income you deserve.

That’s the life I want to help you live.

Thank you for reading.

I very much hope that you enjoyed this piece. If you’d like to read more, check out previous posts on the blog, and follow me on X @ScottOnFire.

  1. There has been criticism about the usefulness and practicality of this hierarchy across different cultures and demographics. However, the benefit of categorising survival and personal concepts into a prioritised hierarchy cannot be understated. Use your judgement to decide how to prioritise your own needs rather than trust the way it is presented to you. ↩︎
  2. I’ll be addressing the challenges of increasing income in detail in my Work Series (coming soon). ↩︎
  3. I appreciate that this is not possible in every job. But one early on in their career could pursue a career where this is a possibility. ↩︎
  4. Modern Awards are an Australian labour law structure that determines the rates of pay and other conditions that relate to employment in specific trades or fields. ↩︎
  5. Though most of the time this risk is absolved, due to separation of person and business liabilities through company law. ↩︎
  6. What a horrible term. ↩︎
  7. I have worked in the Payroll and Time & Attendance technology space for over half a decade. I was responsible for either paying employees directly, or configuring the automatic tools that calculate correct payment for employees. This ethos has deep meaning for me throughout my career. ↩︎

Scott