Jobs and Employment: Rethinking Work in a Post-Money World

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Jobs and employment sit at the centre of modern economic life. From early childhood, we are taught that the ultimate purpose of education is to “get a job,” that the purpose of getting a job is to “make a living,” and that the purpose of life itself is to become a productive, money-earning member of society. Jobs are portrayed as the gateway to dignity, security, respect, and even identity. Without one, a person is considered unsuccessful, a “loser” or even irresponsible.

But this entire framework is built upon a money-based mindset—a worldview in which the purpose of human activity is not to contribute but to earn, not to serve but to survive, not to express one’s gifts but to “be employable.”

From the CES perspective, this framework is both flawed and unnecessary. It turns human creativity into a commodity, converts time into a tradable object, and forces people into artificial structures of work that often produce nothing of real value. A post-money economy invites us to re-examine the meaning and purpose of “jobs,” and to imagine a world where work serves people rather than employers, profit margins, or political agendas.

1. The mythology of the job

In today’s money economy, having a job is seen as the purpose of life. A job is the mechanism through which we obtain money—nothing more and nothing less. Whether the job is meaningful, socially useful, emotionally fulfilling, or even ethically acceptable is secondary.

A job that brings in no money is not considered a job at all. Caring for children, supporting aging parents, maintaining households, helping neighbours, volunteering, growing food, healing the sick outside the professional system, creating art without commercial intent—none of this “counts.”

In the logic of the money economy, you only matter when someone pays you.

Unemployment is treated as a catastrophe, not because it means people stop contributing, but because it means they stop earning. Without money, society assumes a person is lost, dependent, or broken—even if they are actively caring for a community, teaching others, or producing value outside the formal market.

2. The job as a mechanism of extraction

Most jobs are not designed around human needs; they are designed to generate more money for the employer than they cost in wages. If a job does not produce profit, it disappears.

Thus, a job is not primarily a service to society—it is a unit of money-making power inside a business.

A business, in turn, is defined not by what it provides to society, but by its ability to make money. Whether the product or service is genuinely needed is irrelevant. If demand does not exist naturally, advertising creates it artificially. People are convinced to want things they do not need, and then jobs are created to manufacture, market, transport, sell, and dispose of them.

As a result, many jobs are little more than waste-production units:
work for the sake of money rather than value.

3. The psychological prison of employment

A job can be a kind of prison:
a space where a person must sit for fixed hours, repeating fixed tasks, generating wealth for others. For many, the job is an enclosure—of time, of creativity, of autonomy.

We accept this imprisonment because the alternative (no job) is considered worse. The entire structure keeps people compliant: fear of unemployment replaces love of the work.

4. Job scarcity as a feature—not a bug—of the money system

There are always fewer jobs than people who need them. This is deliberate. Scarcity keeps wages low, competition high, and populations dependent. Governments promise “job creation” as if jobs were an end in themselves.

It rarely matters whether these jobs are meaningful. What matters is that people stay busy, controlled, and economically absorbed.

5. Work outside the money economy disappears from view

Human societies do not run on paid employment—they run on enormous waves of unpaid, uncounted activity. Every day, millions care for others, build communities, solve problems, innovate, create, repair, plant, teach, support, and maintain life.

But because this activity does not generate money, it is invisible in GDP. Money “blinds” the economy to all value outside itself.

6. Reimagining work in a mutual-credit economy

In a moneyless economy like the one emerging through CES, the concept of a “job” changes fundamentally.

A job is no longer a prison, because there is no boss extracting profit from the worker’s time. There is no need for meaningless jobs, because there is nothing to gain by producing goods nobody needs.

Work becomes a relationship, not a transaction.
Contribution becomes the measure, not employment status.
Activities become valued because they meet real needs, not because they generate profit.

Instead of labour being trapped inside institutional structures, people offer what they can, when they can, based on skills, passion, and community need.

7. What replaces jobs?

We may need new vocabulary. Instead of “employment,” we may speak of:

These are not forced; they are chosen. They are not “owned” by employers; they are undertaken by individuals.

8. A working world without employment

When profit no longer defines the value of work:

Instead of a labour market, we get a value ecosystem.

9. Education changes, too

Education stops being an investment for future wages. It becomes a process of discovering abilities, cultivating talent, and learning to contribute meaningfully to others. True learning becomes accessible, joyful, and lifelong—not a competitive sorting mechanism for job placement.

10. Society becomes healthier

A society in which work is self-chosen, community-oriented, and divorced from profit will naturally be:

We begin to measure success not by GDP but by well-being, connectedness, creativity, and ecological harmony.

Conclusion: Toward a post-employment world

Jobs and employment are not timeless institutions; they are artefacts of the money economy. They exist to serve the logic of profit, not the logic of life.

The CES vision is not a world without work—it is a world where work is liberated from money, hierarchy, dependency, scarcity, and compulsion.

In such a world, human beings are free to contribute, create, help, innovate, and build without needing to justify their existence through “employment.”

The future of work is not jobs.
The future of work is meaning.
And meaning emerges not from employment, but from contribution.