Somewhere along the course of human history, a decision was made that we would all go to work each and every day. Why do we do this?

I think the decision
was made for us Christian, by the necessity to survive! Even in the
most abundant environments, with enough fruit, vegetables and game
for all, it was necessary to hunt and gather most days, and on
off-days to make shelters, weapons and clothes, and to cook and
preserve food. If we had only stuck to this, at least we would not
have had the misery of agriculture to grind us down!

Of course agriculture
worked in respect of increasing food security (and population), and
ultimately led to a position where we could indeed have some people
idle, or some days off. Putting aside the obvious abuse of these
surplus bodies by warlords and priests (themselves necessary to
protect and organise the new economy), in essence the redundant
bodies (the 'agricultural surplus') now had to exchange something for
their food. They could be soldiers, book-keepers, craftsmen (making
agricultural tools or weapons for example), or if they were lucky
they could be bards or artists as people looked beyond subsistence
for their satisfaction. If they were unlucky they were the abused –
slaves.

Following the
industrial revolution and increasing agricultural efficiency,
non-subsistence exchange went through the roof and power shifted from
those who controlled land to those who controlled 'capital' or
'money' (the tokens used to value units of surplus human time, and
the things they would exchange for it). I think the main reason most
of us end up exchanging our surplus on the same 5 or 6 days a week,
is because it make sense in most cases for us all to be doing it at
the same time!

It is worth noting that
during the hunter-gatherer period, Greater Europe could barely
support a  population of less than one million; at the peak of the
pre-industrial era that figure had risen to around 200 million; and
we are now looking at over 700 million. How is that? In a word,
productivity – how much value we attach to each unit of surplus
time, and how much we can do with it.

If you are clever,
lucky and brave enough, there is nothing to stop an individual in a
modern regulated economy from coming up with an idea, seeking
'capital' and seeing it through to being successfully exchanged for
the products of other's time - providing us wage slaves with the
means to exchange our own time for it's current value in tokens. If
that individual can now escape from the rat-race, good luck to her!

For the rest of us,
it's 5 days a week or nothing :-(

When you really think about it, the fact that we go to work every day is really strange. Putting aside the obvious reasons like making money and keeping a roof over our heads, why do you think we put ourselves through work? What happened in our history that made work the very fabric of society?

There are activities we all need to do to survive - and most of them look nothing like the cubicle labor we associate with work. Most of the times it's a continuation of school-style control. It's soul-sucking at best and pathological at worst.

Okay, maybe that's a tad extreme.

I think the important thing to recognize is that we're all typing on laptops. These laptops can create wealth for us now.

You have the power to look at your employer and decide whether or not they are leveraging your or you are leveraging them. If you're being taken advantage of then leave! There's never been a better time.

For many reasons:

1.) Bartering. As humans, if we give you something, we want something in return. We use money now. So now we work the job of our choice, earn money, and we use it for the things we need and sometimes the things we want.

2.) If keeps our country and society alive. If every person is expected to go to work, then stores can remain open, plants will get power, customers will receive service, etc.

3.) It advances our society. Expecting everyone to go to work allows places like Walmart to remain stocked and McDonald's to sell their food.

4.) It's productive. If we go to work every day so we can keep ourselves alive, we're being productive. Going to work is what gives us the money we need for our food, and keeping a good hygiene and helping us live longer.

5.) It's better. If we go to work so we can earn money, we don't have to give up some of the things we already have for trading with other people. Years ago, some families would sell their children because they needed food and a much richer family could feed.

I don't think a decision a was made. I think our jobs were a natural evolution from what people did to survive. If you go back to early man there were hunters and there were gatherers. Each did their part to survive as a group. As civilizations formed it just became more complex and bartering systems formed. From there currency took over to make things less complicated.