If society valued my contribution they would give me working conditions that were decent enough that I didn't desperately want to leave. "Society" is currently extracting way more than a fair share of what people like me (on an average wage) produce so that the rich can indulge in excessive consumption. I don't know how you get the idea that everyone who plans to retire early has a valuable skilled profession and high social power. For a lot of people the focus is on extreme frugility to try to scrape enough money together to have some freedom to spend time doing things you find valuable.

Basically yes, I am of the mindset that I don't owe anything to society. I'm "lucky" to have an average wage and not minimum wage I suppose, especially given that the current argument in society is that minimum wage is not supposed to be high enough to support yourself independently. "Society" has been telling me for years that my essential job that they are so grateful to me for doing is also a drain on "taxpayer money" and that I don't deserve pay rises that keep pace with inflation, let alone average wages.

Oh, of course. Poor people just need to get enough money to own property and build everything required to create an autonomous society.

You have a wildly different definition of poverty to me.

What you are proposing is that "poor people" should all band together and create a new separate society, which is basically communist. Like some sort of left-wing Sovereign Citizen movement.

One big problem with this concept is that you cannot create a new separate economics whilst living in wider society. You still need to live somewhere, and you will need to pay the landlord with money. You will need to pay the electricity bill with money. You will still need to use joint facilities like roads, and the State is not going to happily provide all that to you for free, they will be looking at your new little economy and working out exactly how to value it to send you a tax bill.

While you are dealing with all of these issues, you also have to deal with the people within the group. How are you running it and making sure it is fair? It takes a massive amount of work to manage something like this on even a small scale. So you will need some sort of tax on transactions so that the people putting the time in to running it can be covered. Who is actually going to join if everyone's time is valued equally - it will be a great deal for people whose skills are not valued on wider society, but a bad one for anyone with more valuable skills. So you won't end up with a wide skill set involved, and can't cover the requirements to do everything needed. So for example if you found a farmer who wanted to provide all their produce through this scheme, you could not provide the resources they need to produce and transport the produce. There is a massive difference between "making food" (ie, working at McDonalds) and actually creating food.

Plus what happens when things go wrong? When the person you arranged to come over to help you with something falls and hurts themselves, or they do substandard work that damages your property? Is your mutual aid group providing some sort of insurance coverage? Do you have some sort of dispute resolution process to mediate problems?

Having a strong community that supports members and shares resources can definitely be a good thing, and help to improve the lives of everyone involved. But "quit your shitty job and create a mutual aid network" is not at all a viable path to prosperity (or even to survival).

8

It is less important that our hobbies are something that we are "not obliged to do" than that we are actively engaged in them.

Many people spend their free time in activities of passive consumption - watching TV, shopping and doing packaged, purchased "activities". The only active component is searching for the next thing to consume.

An actively engaging hobby is very different, it involves growth and learning. Many hobbies can be engaged in either passively or actively - think of the difference between a photographer who goes out every weekend to take photos and improve their technique, compared to one who spends hours researching and purchasing equipment but rarely "finds" the time to actually take photos.

The real difference between them is the mindset, and that can be applied to things you are obliged to do as well. My hobbies tend to be extensions of things that are necessary - cooking, gardening, sewing. All can be approached as necessary chores, but an approach of active engagement turns them into hobbies. Even scrolling the internet can be turned into a hobby - although I'm not sure if moderating a group and trying to learn enough javascript to automate things will make me a better person or lead to madness at this point!

I guess my argument is that it is not doing things outside of what we are obliged to that is important, it is doing more than we are obliged to do. It does not matter whether that "more" is different things, or things we need to do done in a different way.