Either side of an analogy can have factors at different scales. But it can still be a valid analogy.
If you are saying that because slavery was much worse, then modern slaves should just suck it up and work harder. Then that isn't really helping is it?
This is kind of the argument "others have had it worse, so lets not try to make anything better for people today".
Are you seriously equating the modern office and work, where, you know, you can go home after, to life as a slave on a plantation? Sure, analogies can have factors at different scales but the scales come into the equation when the factor is the axis we are analyzing.
Is your issue that life requires action to maintain it? Do you believe no work is required at all in life? The idea that work is like slavery is deep when you're 14 and then not so much.
No one had said our modern lives couldn't be better but you don't have to liken our existence to slavery to get to "things could be better".
Okay if not American Slavery what's your benchmark? Having to do things you don't want? I'm being serious. You use extreme language and hyperbole so it's hard to take you seriously. Do you think your situation is akin to like, someone being held hostage in a call center and forced to scam people? Where is the line, in your mind?
Because it is a hard line to draw, doesn't mean I'm not being serious.
You are objecting to using the word 'slave' as a descriptor, except in extreme cases.
But the term slave is often used in culture for a lot of things.
Being a 'slave to your addictions', 'a slave to your desires', 'an office slave', 'wage slave'. etc.... I'll spare you a list of hundreds of examples.
I think since you are the one objecting, then you draw the line.
I tend to think it does hinge on 'agency'. If you are trapped. But, sure, being trapped in an office today, is not as painful as being trapped as a slave in the US south. Does that mean the office worker should just shut up and deal with it, it is comfortable enough?
I do think agency is the fulcrum and concede I was being too pedantic. I do think even from an agency perspective it is possible to "drop out" to some extent but not completely, but that's why I asked about the work aspect. Even if you are not working a 9-5, life does require work. That some choose to toil the fields for their food or sit in a cubicle, you must work all the same. So are we slaves to life?
Maybe the problem is if you are working for someone else.
If you are toiling on your farm to survive. Or even hunting/gathering for food. You do need to work to live. So a slave to life? All life is a burden? Even Buddhist have 'all life is suffering'.
But toiling in an office, is usually for someone else's benefit. You are only getting a fraction of your work back in pay. So if you are 'trapped', unable to change, and working for someone else's benefit, then a 'slave'? (wish I had some Marx quote to fit here).
It is bit of slippery slope, since i'm not trying to include every person that just complains about working because they would rather play video games.
And yet, in a market system, the 'rat race', we all do have a sense that we are 'slaves to the system'.
The tools of slavery have evolved but the overall end goal has not. The almost cliché slavery depiction of the chain and whip had evolved into the coolie system, the offshoring system and the kafeel system. The office is simply a part of that family of exploitation methods. There is a difference between serving the collective good and being a slave.
Many of us want to work on something greater than ourselves, to contribute to society not out of selfishness or lifestyle, but to genuinely help society function and make people happy. Many of us aspire to make a small dent in the universe with something great, something that can stand the test of time, building a thing in defiance of our own mortality in the hopes that our ancestors remember us, learn from us and run with the torch of civilization, to improve the human project to a level of greatness that we may ourselves never witness. In a way, to create is one of the highest forms of self expression as a human.
This is entirely different from reality, where retirements are wiped out by financial sorcerers, after decades of fulfilling your end of the social contract, trading in your productive years to a company that _does not care about you OR your community_, where run away inflation, debt and taxation are used to funnel capital to other competing nations or a unwitting fifth column whether that is transmigrasi in Indonesia, the influx of Indians in Texas or the mass refugee stream to Europe caused by US-Israeli inflicted wars, which has already surpassed in numbers the transatlantic slave trade, the endless wars that balance domestic unrest with a common enemy to rally around the flag, and the accompanied transfer of wealth across nations as these warmongers decide which country gets axed to serve the greater powers. There is no saving for retirement, there is no freedom, there is only bondage, death and taxes.
Meanwhile, the collective fruit of western society is plundered through the illegal pirating of the intellectual output of millions of creatives who poured everything they have in it, and it is plundered by the very same class of people that sued common folk for pirating software, music, movies and books. Aaron Swartz would roll over in his grave to see how the government supports companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic who rely on plagiarizing IP at scale.
The collective fruit of an entire civilization’s labor is plundered before your very eyes right before they launch it into a cataclysmic war that wipes away the very people who dedicated their lives to the sciences and humanities in order to further the human project. To deal such a low blow is an atrocity that is worse in its impact than the plantation system, it is reminiscent of the bronze age collapse that leveled ancient Egypt.
No good deed goes unpunished, as Ozymandius found out the hard way.
Perhaps it's worth going and reading about actual slavery and what it was like.