Story Time!

I used to study mining engineering at the University of Western Australia. It's a big, lovely campus full of intellectual snobs, rich kids and high schoolers who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives except make money. It's also is the place where I met some of the best friends I have, so I guess it goes both ways.
While studying there, I used to spend some of my breaks in the co-op book shop, just reading any random thing in the section at the very back. The reason for this was two-fold; I'm pretty ADD so I couldn't commit to studying for any long period of time and there was no free internet access so it was the best place to just read whatever and let my mind wander, and also because no-one would scold me for reading and not buying anything because no-one would see me. I usually just flipped through anything that looked interesting, reading odd pages here and there, but I remember very clearly once reading an entire book, cover to cover, one fateful afternoon. The book was called The Underachiever's Manifesto and it would have to rank as one of the most philosophically spot-on books I've ever read. Every word just dripped with truth, it was beautiful.
The underlying message of the book was this; We're all working too hard, we've made a fetish of the overachiever. We've come to idolise those who work their lives away achieving everything that everyone else wants them to do, and this is more responsible for the health problems and relationship breakdowns in the first world than anything else.
Think about this for a while. We're expected to take our work home with us at school, at university and in our careers. We're expected to cherish overtime. It's frowned upon to take breaks and seen as lazy to not be constantly thinking about the demands on you. Anything that could harm our future employment prospects is advised against, regardless of how fulfilling or entertaining it is. Our entire lives are built around the expenditure of our energy to hoard goods and expend more energy keeping the system going.
I'm not living in a naive fantasy world, I know that in reality you need money to live. This is an inescapable fact of existence, death and taxes, all that jazz. However, I find it incredibly bizarre at just how pervasive the "live to work" idea really is. We can convince ourselves that we "work to live" but realistically, this isn't true. Very few people can honestly say that they fit their work around their life. This is messed up on a fair few levels.
Yeah, I'm a socialist. I do believe that all the work that needs to be done in order to give everyone an equal, high quality standard of life can be shared equally among all people. I do believe that striving to keep up with the Jones' is a culturally destructive practice. I do believe that some people's desire to be successful harms not only themselves, but others. There's a finite amount of money in the world (anyone who denies this doesn't know dick about economics. One unit of currency represents a percentage of the overall wealth of the nation. You can't just print more because it devalues the currency and screws everyone over, see German pre- and post-WW2) so in order for you to get rich, other people have to get poorer. Fact. Your desire to be a millionaire can effectively be translated into a desire to take the wealth from other people and put it in your pocket.
So, I've been called unambitious. Why? Apparently my goals in life are lazy. What goals, you ask? Work a job I don't hate (preferably like, and with any luck that'll happen), make enough to support myself and any dependents I may have in the future, own my own house and have enough time for my hobbies and friends. That doesn't strike me as too selfish, and with the exception of the first part (some jobs are shitty, but they do need doing), there is enough wealth in Australia for everyone to be able to do this. The problem is, when you start tacking more demands on top of this, it all starts to fall through.
If you want to own 5 properties, that's 4 properties at any given time that aren't being used by you, but are unavailable for purchase by anyone else. So you're fucking up the housing market and making it harder for people (especially young people. Like me, for example) to own their own home. And don't just say they should just work harder and make more money because, as we've discussed, not everyone can do that, by default. Not everyone can be rich.
The problem isn't that poor people are lazy and stupid. This is some bizarre, objectivist viewpoint that, for some reason, is really pervasive in right-wing philosophy. It's not grounded in reality, it's babies first philosophy for those who don't understand sociology or economics. Or empathy for that matter. The reason there's a massive wealth disparity in every country in the world, and in the world as a whole, is because in order for you to have more, someone has to have less. The problem is that people are greedy and want to one-up everyone else. This is childish and impossible.
The free-market is perfectly natural? How about go fuck yourself, you've demonstrated a brilliant lack of understanding on how society functions. Humans are a social species. The reason we have every advance ever is because human knowledge is collected and shared throughout the species. The reason early man flourished is because a group would take down a kill for the entire tribe to feast upon. The belief that humans are competitive and not co-operative is not only wrong, it's anti-science, anti-history and an ideology that sets back the human race's constant struggle for an easier existence with stubbornness and bullish ignorance. The belief that you, and you alone, are entitled to the sweat of your brow is anti-human and makes you a selfish douche that doesn't deserve to live. If you honestly believe in the awesome power of the individual and that your only goal should be to get as fat and wealthy as possible, get the fuck out of my society and my race, we don't want you. Everyone's sweat belongs to everyone.
I don't mean to get angry and ranty here, but I'm tired of selfish arseholes who get high off other people's shoulders all the while congratulating themselves and masturbating to their own brilliance, and I'm tired of being told that I'll have to work myself to death to be like them. Fuck that. We're all in this together, and you're not a genius visionary by trying to get ahead at the expense of others. You should be fucking thankful that natural selection stopped being relevant since we started engineering our own environments, because you're exactly the kind of selfish, self-destructive dickhead who'd leave the wider safety of society and forcibly remove themselves from the gene pool. Only now, you don't remove yourself from society, you just exploit it, you douche. You might be savvy, but you're also a self serving, unlikeable douche who deserves nothing but expulsion and censure. Fuck you, fuck overachievers that help them and fuck Republicans/Labour & Libs/Conservatives/every right wing party.