Jubilee Praxis
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Keeping Score in Life

Keeping Score in Life

Victorian video game simulation, the drudgery of wage labor under capitalism, and will heaven be fully automated luxury space communism?

July 14, 2025

One of my hobbies is playing large historical strategy video games. I've recently been playing one that covers the century centered on the Victorian era and gives a deep dive into the social, political, and economic dynamics of the 1830s to 1930s while also generating an alternate history through play. There’s not a precise win condition or goal for this type of game, rather you choose yourself how you want to play and what aims you want to try to pursue. In that situation, many look for ways to quantify achievement, and a couple of numbers stand out in online discussion as people’s measures of their success - their countries Gross Domestic Product (GDP - basically the size of the economy) and the Standard of Living (SoL- basically a measure of the quantity and quality of the goods an average resident of the country consumes). Seeing those graph lines trend up brings a satisfaction that is difficult to explain.

Scoring Our Lives

I wonder how different scorekeeping in individual lives really is. Individual GDP is essentially how much money you have, and SoL is basically what you consume. In capitalist America, aren’t these the scorekeeping metrics for many? If you make more money and you have more/better stuff, that means you're doing well. Therefore you have status and are worthy of respect, honor, and admiration. (For some it might be titles, degrees, physical figure, travel photos, etc. but those are topics for another day - in general all come down to external performance and involve consumption.)

On a recent trip, we saw an episode of House Hunters while in the hotel, and the husband of the featured couple stated it pretty clearly. What mattered most to him in their search for a new home was that it seemed big. Not for any practical purpose, but explicitly because that meant they would be seen as successful and it would give them status in the eyes of family and friends.

Whether it’s a big house, a TikTok-worthy pantry packed full of uniform plastic storage containers filled with far more than you could ever need, a luxury name brand logo, or the newest tech gadget, the push toward SoL (maybe better termed "standard of consumption") is an ever-present modern temptation, and not a recent development. The term “conspicuous consumption” goes back to 1899.

The extent to which we measure and perform our lives with these standards in mind may vary widely from person to person, but they are always there beckoning. What might it look like to rethink how we “score” our lives and our society?

Fruits of Consumption

First we might consider the impacts of pursuing greater consumption on a mass scale. In the video game, as in life, higher GDP and SoL are achieved through production of higher quantities of goods at cheaper prices, and that is done through changes in production methods in two general trends: automation and specialization. Production processes once done by individuals working by hand to create a full product as a craft are broken into small steps to be done in assembly-line style by machines or by individuals each doing a small part of the process rapidly and repeatedly instead of being involved with the whole process start-to-finish. The results?

A lot more production, at cheaper prices, resulting in more consumption and a trend towards lower-quality disposable products instead of quality products worth repair for use over a longer lifetime.
Production requires less knowledge by the individual workers, so workers are interchangeable and wages decrease.
More products can be generated with less laborers, so the pool of laborers looking for work increases, driving wages down further across the society (creating competition rather than solidarity among laborers and also driving demand for ever-cheaper goods).
At the same time, production involves machines and factory spaces requiring significantly more capital investment than the simple tools of earlier craftspeople, so investor-owners are required to bring initial capital into the process and they end up owning the profit generated by the efforts of the wage laborers.
More natural resources are needed for the creation and operation of the machines involved as well as the increased output of consumer goods, putting more strain on the natural environment and more conflicts over natural resources and pressure to exploit labor to extract resources cheaply.

All of capitalism’s incentive structures move towards these outcomes, and we’re seeing a world shaped by ever-deeper intensification of these dynamics.

Above all, work becomes a drudgery to escape rather than a fulfilling occupation.

Work is not meant to be an evil drudgery to be escaped. In the Christian narrative, as well as others, work is a good part of human life, but the problem is that we have been alienated from the fruits of our labor. Instead of satisfying work where we create something from start to finish (like God in whose image we are made) and we own the fruits of our labor, free to enjoy or transfer it as we wish, capitalism drives us to unsatisfying work for wages, doing a small piece of a larger process with the fruits of our labor owned by those with the capital to set up the business with its needed infrastructure. Instead of a craft with creative agency, many occupations become mere jobs of rote execution of a small piece of someone else's vision, often one selling others consumer goods they don't truly need for a good life.

A Different Way

But what if it did not end up there? What if our aim, as societies and individuals was the “standard of labor” rather than “standard of living”, a “standard of production” instead of “standard of consumption”? What if we aimed for quality of experience, including our work, instead of quantity and quality of consumption?

A better society would ask:

“How can we structure an economy so that each person has the most satisfying work possible?”
“How can we structure an economy so that each person can exercise creative agency and enjoy the fruits of their labor?”
“How can we structure an economy to allow for rest and quality experiences of life outside of work?”
“How can we structure an economy to place the least strain on natural resources and avoid wars and exploitation?”

These are, of course, big questions requiring big answers. They involve changes to ownership structures (like moves to cooperatives and dismantling the system of corporations and ownership by the investors of capital), systems of exchange (like shifts towards the gift economies that pre-date capitalism and money, where people produce their craft to provide for those who have need in their community knowing they will be provided for in turn rather than working for wages to buy goods to meet needs), and patterns of social organization (shifting towards smaller communities of interdependence able to better meet needs locally rather than depending on wages and purchasing from a global distribution economy).

That feels out of reach for the everyday person, so what does all this matter for me as an individual?

Scoring Differently

What might it look like to apply the same thought processes to our individual lives?

Instead of “scoring” our lives by GDP (wages and spending) or SoL (quantity of consumption and luxury), we'd measure our lives by satisfaction in and impact of the work that we do, and the quality of our life experience and impact on others. Recognizing that privilege can broaden or limit the options we have available to us, we'd ask:

How can I move towards work that involves more creative agency/control in what I do?
How can I move towards work where I see and enjoy the fruits of my labor and experience satisfaction in what I contribute to?
How can I move towards work that produces/provides something people actually need?
How can I move towards work that does not exploit land and labor?
How can I move towards work that leaves time and energy for other good pursuits?
How can I help to facilitate these shifts for others, including in what I choose to consume?

Will heaven be fully automated luxury space communism?

One utopian vision of society is fully automated luxury space communism, sometimes explored in sci-fi such as The Culture series I'm currently reading or Star Trek. In such a vision, technological development allows everyone access to whatever goods and services they desire, produced through machine automation, eliminating the need for work and the competition for goods and resources. I think this is many people's vision of “heaven” - limitless consumption, endless pleasurable experiences, and no work. Implicit is the idea that work is bad and the aims of life are consumption and experiences of pleasure.

I think the Christian vision of the utopian world to come when Jesus returns and makes all things right and new is far different, even if many Christians are inclined to imagine the world described above. In the vision of scripture, work is good, part of what we are made for as humans. Instead of a world centered on consumption and luxury, I think we will instead have a world with good, satisfying work. We will be freed from the drudgery of wage labor under capitalism and be able to craft beauty with full agency over what we do. We’ll work to meet one another’s needs in interdependent harmony free from exploitation and the pressures of profit maximization. We’ll be in a world focused on generating beauty and goodness rather than profit, pleasure, and luxury, treasuring dignity of the lives self and neighbor rather than competing for status. From Genesis’s Eden to Isaiah's swords beaten to garden tools to Revelation’s descent of heaven to the earth, I believe this is the vision of scripture.

Why does this matter? The vision we have of utopia is our perception of what is good and worth pursuing in this life. If heaven is the pleasure of labor-free consumption, that lays the foundation for pursuing automation that avoids work and endlessly expands consumption, with little concern for this earth. If utopia is instead this world made new, with a transformed experience of labor towards dignity, beauty, creativity, and freedom without exploitation of land or others then our aims in this life both individually and societally are similarly transformed.

A Note on Machines and Tools

All of this does lead us to a framework for evaluating technology that impacts labor. When considering a new technology, we might ask, is this a tool that complements and requires individual human creativity and is simple enough to be acquired by anyone? Or is this a machine requiring significant capital investment to acquire and/or that can operate without creative human agency? Such a machine turns humans into what Gandhi called "machine minders”, replacing jobs with satisfaction and agency with wage roles whose fruit passes to those with the capital to acquire the technology.

These questions have been pressed by thoughtful writers since the time of the industrial revolution, and as generative artificial intelligence and other technologies continue to develop, these are among the questions that we must be using to evaluate them, that we might pursue what is truly good.