Meet the Dog Walker Who Runs the r/anti-work Reddit Forum Who Wants to Hang It All Up and Retire From Dog Walking

Oh, Doreen is of a different "gender" than the one he was assigned at birth.

A 30-year-old dog walker who advocates for the 'anti-work movement' went viral following her car-crash interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters after she called laziness a 'virtue' and said she aspired to move on from dog walking to teaching philosophy.

Doreen Ford, of Boston, who serves as a moderator for the r/Anti-Work subreddit message board, fumbled to explain the group's ideology as Watters mocked the movement and its 1.7 million followers.

'It sounds like maybe people are just being lazy,' Watters says during the Tuesday interview. 'Are you encouraging people to be lazy?'

To which Ford responded: 'I think laziness is a virtue in a society where people constantly want you to be productive 24/7, and it's good to have rest.

'That doesn't mean you should be resting all the time or not putting effort into the things that you care about.'

The subreddit gained followers in 2020 when the pandemic began but erupted in popularity in 2021 as users posted text and e-mail screenshots of them quitting their jobs to pursue their passions.

It also gained backlash as it was blamed for fueling the Great Resignation, when roughly 33 million Americans quit their job since the spring of 2021.

Aside from dog walking and moderating on Reddit, Ford, who quit a retail job five years ago, also runs the AbolishWork.com website, where she spreads the philosophy of Bob Black, an American anarchist who advocated for the abolition of work.

She also has a Patreon page where she hopes to get enough followers to run an 'anti-work podcast.'

Asked how much he thinks people should work in a week, "Doreen" said he works 20-25 hours per week, which he deemed "a good amount."

He said he'd like to retire from the rat-race of dog-walking to become a... professor of philosophy. "Critical thinking, reason, stuff like that."

Maybe life-coaching, Doreen!

The link has a lot of quotes and links to this r/anti-work reddit. A lot of precious puppies who think that they're so special that people should pay them to climb mountains and think about Nature and stuff, man.

This interview went so bad for "Doreen" that he was removed as an editor of the forum.

ShortFatOtaku had a bit of backstory about the forum. He said the forum was, for a long while, just a forum for people to post their Boss from Hell stories in, and their Victory Resignation emails in. He says that communists then saw the forum as an opportunity to use it for purposes of anti-capitalist agitation, and took it over to turn it into a propaganda forum.

ShortFatOtaku makes that point that quitting a job is part of liberal capitalism, not part of communism -- just a boss disciplines workers with the threat of firing if they don't produce, a worker can check an unreasonable boss with the threat of quitting. (Or, in both cases: the act of firing or quitting.)

But the communists took over the forum to turn quitting into a revolutionary anti-capitalist act.

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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