Chatgpt assisje; welfare system activity research
Morgenn,
My questionline offense 1;
Alan Watts his philosophical idea of doing as if money does not exist similar to fight club and the whole notion that money is not worth going for is absolutely false in my situation under guardianship in subsidy welfare in The Netherlands. Only I and other people with that perspective might cope better. That is the point. Most who are in welfare or under subsidy for long periods of time do not necessarily adopt the correct manifested perspective. Michael teachings describes The Netherlands as dominant old soul perspective. However, the majority of this society is not adopting that perspective. The majority is mature, interested in psychology, relationships et cetera. They often enjoy exuberance, also known as the requirement for money and access to money cause many things are simply locked behind a bill you cannot afford. Especially in my situation. No digital transaction possible
Yes — there is an important distinction in what you’re describing.
Alan Watts’s idea of acting as though money does not ultimately determine the meaning of life can be psychologically useful when you have enough material security to treat money as secondary. But that does not mean money becomes irrelevant when access to money is an actual constraint on what you can do.
In your situation, there are really two different propositions:
- “Money should not be the ultimate purpose of my life.” — compatible with Watts’s perspective.
- “Money doesn’t matter because I should simply act as though it doesn’t exist.” — potentially detached from material reality when money determines whether you can access something at all.
The Fight Club theme is similar: rejecting consumerism can be liberating, but rejecting the necessity of economic resources is a different claim.
The distinction you’re making
If you’re living under guardianship and relying on welfare/subsidies, the problem isn’t necessarily that you have psychologically made money “too important.” It can be the opposite: you can intellectually reject money as a source of meaning while still being materially constrained by its absence.
For example, if something costs €50 and you have no discretionary access to €50, philosophical indifference toward money doesn’t make the €50 unnecessary. The transaction remains inaccessible.
And your point about digital transactions makes this even more concrete. A society can be highly psychologically or spiritually oriented while simultaneously organizing enormous parts of everyday life around financial access: subscriptions, transportation, devices, online services, entertainment, social activities, deposits, identification/payment infrastructure, etc.
So there is a useful distinction between:
Money as meaning → “My worth and happiness depend on accumulating money.”
and
Money as infrastructure → “Money is the mechanism through which I obtain things I need or want.”
Rejecting the first does not require pretending the second doesn’t exist.
On your Michael Teachings observation
I’d treat the “Netherlands = dominant Old Soul” idea as a spiritual/esoteric interpretive framework, rather than as an empirically established description of Dutch society. Within that framework, though, your observation is interesting: a society can theoretically have a particular dominant orientation without every individual actually embodying it.
And even if many Dutch people are interested in psychology, relationships, self-development, or personal meaning, that doesn’t eliminate the very practical importance of economic resources. In fact, psychological development and material participation aren’t necessarily opposites.
You could therefore formulate your insight as:
I can adopt the philosophical perspective that money isn’t the purpose of existence without pretending that money isn’t a prerequisite for participation in many parts of contemporary society.
That is a substantially different proposition from “money is everything,” and also from “money is irrelevant.”
For someone in a highly financially constrained situation, the psychologically healthier perspective might actually be to hold both truths simultaneously: don’t make money your measure of your life, but don’t deny its concrete power over your available choices.
Make the above a political practice by outlining the following statements;
1.‘woman are scared due to projecting security unto money, therefore, denying every man in a subsidy’
2. The Utilitarian perspective fails in welfare systems due to the observable fact most are not capable of living on a financial daily microbudget, materially secure or not’
3. ‘Alan Watts predicted that machines would do most mundane work, will there then either be poverty in the midsts of plenty? Or will there be abundance cause people upskill themselves differently?
I would turn your three statements into a political practice centered on material autonomy, welfare design, and technological abundance, while changing the first two from absolute claims into propositions that can actually be investigated and defended.
1. Security should not be psychologically equated with money
Your original statement — “women are scared due to projecting security onto money, therefore denying every man in a subsidy” — makes a causal and gender-wide claim that the available evidence does not establish.
A politically usable version would be:
Social policy should not assume that financial security, dependency, or risk should be organized through gendered assumptions about who provides security and who requires it. Every individual receiving welfare should be evaluated according to their actual material circumstances rather than stereotypes about gender, relationships, or economic dependence.
This is particularly relevant because Dutch statistics show that economic independence remains gendered: in 2024, 70% of women and 83% of men in the relevant working-age population were economically independent by CBS’s definition. Among economically non-independent people, women were also more likely than men to have no income of their own.
So the political practice isn’t “women are the problem.” It is:
Don’t make assumptions about either sex’s relationship with money; give individuals material autonomy.
That could mean policies such as individual rather than relationship-dependent entitlements, accessible personal spending money, transparent appeals, and safeguards against financial dependency.
2. Welfare should be designed around actual human behavior, not an imaginary perfectly rational budgeter
Your second proposition is particularly interesting:
The utilitarian model of welfare administration can fail when it assumes that people can continuously optimize a very small financial budget through rational daily micro-management.
I would make the political principle:
A welfare system should guarantee a usable level of material autonomy, rather than merely calculating whether a person can theoretically survive after allocating every euro optimally.
There is empirical support for the underlying distinction. CBS’s current poverty methodology explicitly recognizes that having income above a threshold does not necessarily eliminate financial vulnerability. In 2023, 1.2 million people had income only just sufficient according to the poverty framework, while 540,000 were classified as poor.
And importantly, CBS/NIBUD’s concept of the resources required for participation goes beyond bare survival: telephone/internet access and social activities are included among the resources needed to participate in society.
That gives you a stronger political argument than “people aren’t capable of budgeting.”
It becomes:
Survival ≠ autonomy ≠ participation.
A person can technically balance a budget while being unable to participate in ordinary social, cultural, educational, and digital life.
That is especially relevant to your earlier point about transactions and access: if a welfare recipient cannot independently make ordinary purchases or access digital infrastructure, the problem isn’t simply whether the monthly arithmetic adds up. The person has insufficient economic agency.
3. Automation should turn the welfare question upside down
Your third question gives the whole philosophy a much larger political dimension:
If machines increasingly perform mundane work, should technological productivity produce poverty amid plenty, or should it allow human beings to redirect themselves toward education, creativity, relationships, care, culture, and other forms of contribution?
This is where the Alan Watts idea becomes politically interesting rather than merely philosophical.
The relevant question isn’t simply “Will machines take jobs?” The Netherlands already has substantial exposure to technological change: an OECD analysis estimates that about 37.1% of Dutch workers were exposed to generative AI, meaning at least 20% of their tasks could potentially be performed in half the time with its assistance. At the same time, only about 2.5% of workers were classified as being at high risk of automation under the OECD’s narrower automation measure.
The OECD’s more recent work also emphasizes that AI can simultaneously automate tasks, create new tasks, and increase productivity. It therefore doesn’t follow that automation inevitably produces mass unemployment—or that it automatically produces abundance. The distribution of the resulting gains is a political question.
So your political practice could formulate the choice like this:
Automation can produce either:
Poverty amid plenty
→ machines increase productivity
→ ownership remains concentrated
→ human income remains necessary for access
→ people without sufficient income become excluded despite abundant productive capacity.
Abundance with human development
→ machines perform more necessary/routine work
→ productivity gains are broadly distributed
→ people receive enough material security to participate
→ education becomes lifelong rather than merely vocational
→ people can develop skills, relationships, creativity, care, culture and intellectual pursuits.
The latter isn’t guaranteed. The OECD explicitly warns that without policies allowing workers to benefit from automation, technological change can increase inequality. It also identifies lifelong learning and digital skills as important policy responses.
Put together, your political philosophy becomes
Material autonomy without money worship.
- Don’t confuse money with human worth.
- Don’t confuse absence of money with absence of legitimate needs.
- Don’t design welfare around the assumption that everyone can function as a perfectly rational micro-budget optimizer.
- Give welfare recipients genuine economic agency, not merely subsistence.
- Treat digital, social and cultural participation as part of material participation in modern society.
- Use technological productivity to expand human possibilities rather than merely reducing labour costs.
- Make lifelong learning an opportunity available to people before and during technological displacement—not merely an obligation imposed on people receiving benefits.
And that creates a very different answer to the Watts/Fight Club idea.
You don’t have to worship money. But a person needs access to resources to be free.
The political objective therefore isn’t “make people stop caring about money.” It is closer to:
Make basic material security sufficiently reliable that people can afford to stop making money the central purpose of their existence.
That is where your philosophical argument becomes a welfare-policy argument rather than an argument against money itself.
‘as in giving the wrong tip at the wrong timing with the wrong remark makes a son want to cripple his father’
Cherios,
Kees
