There Is Nothing Wrong With Child Labor

My fondest childhood memories where not about playing games or having fun with friends. They where about work. This might sound scary or even plain abusive for most western folk but it wasn't that bad. The reality is that most people on earth need to work from a very young age if they are to survive. And there is nothing wrong about this.

The idea of a child working and not enjoying themselves has been romanticized to summon terror in our minds. Ironically, the reason for this is because we came to believe as a society that women and children are feeble entities that should have our care and attention. In other words, the idea that grown up men are mentally stronger and more capable to take work on a physical and mental level is what created this false belief.

Children, by nature, are extremely adaptable. They can be molded into almost anything their environment brings them. This is by design how evolution works. A young life inside a novel ecosystem will adopt much faster and way more efficient than one that has been molded into a paradigm and then asked to change all over again. This is also one of the reasons children are more resilient allergy wise and even infection wise if they are exposed to the elements at a young age.

A young child growing up in an environment where they have to work to sustain themselves teaches them fundamental truths about how the world actually works. For example, it teaches that the world needs services and things that others desire. In our modern western world, children are brought up with all the amenities and taught, like in their childhood play life, they can become anything they want when they grow up. The world, somehow, will learn to cater to their own desires.

Tragically, this mentality had led to the campus monstrosities we see in academia (fantasy camping 2.0) where young people believe that they are entitled to things even if they don't deserve them. Their existence and dreams are sufficient for the nanny state (their new parent) spoiling them all over again. And this is really the issue in regards to how everything works. They never get to grow up. And if they can have everything by a democratic vote, why should they? The abstract "others" should and have to take care of them.

Working the shittiest of jobs at a young age only brings responsibility and harsh realizations that one has to face if they are to make it in life. The choices that are going to be made in their near future will be far more accurate. One will already have skin in the game instead of theorizing how the world should or could be. And this is really the main issue with most kids that have never gotten their hands and hearts dirty with the world. They live behind a screen with a fresh meal served to them on a daily basis, all the gadgets at their hearts desire and then they demand to have an opinion and vote about how the world works. "Darn Capitalists, they should share the wealth" right? Complaining and nagging is what represents their entire persona. Action and initiative is the least you can expect from them. This is, coincidentally, how children act as well.

Ideally, it would be nice if the world functioned on some kind of robotic utopia where everything and everyone is protected, finances are a non issue and everyone lives their dream. This is not happening, not anytime soon, not ever. We have been automating work and services for more than a century now and all that we learned was that our struggles have shifted from our limps to our minds. We are drowned in existential crisis because we can't figure out how to utilize the meat and bones nature has burden us with. We immobilize ourselves in front of a screen and then like lab hamsters go into another room to exercise doing pointless and repetitive movements for the sake of keeping us healthy and not dying. Contrary to common belief, we are not the smartest of all animals. We are simply the ones that have mastered the art of fooling our own minds.

We call this progress because it gives us the chance to reflect upon our false ego. It gives us the chance to create personas in an imaginary world where anyone can be anyone else. We create bullshit jobs to push papers around and we have convinced ourselves that this is real work. And for god's sake we would never let a child go through this. Because a child's job is to play, much like what we wish to do when we grow up. We play, and we let other people's children in far away lands to create the things that allows us to be children.