What’s in it for me? A critical look at the theory and practice of changing the way we work.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Actually, don’t answer that. Instead, think about what the question is implying. In asking kids that question, we’re effectively telling them that the job they do will become who they are. Society expects that we center our lives around work to access basic human necessities, like income, social status, a sense of belonging, and community.
But the way we work doesn’t actually, well, work for a lot of us. Those of us in high-status jobs endure grueling hours, and spend the rest of our time worrying about the next day. We compulsively scroll through notifications when we should be sleeping or attending to our families. Those of us with lower-paying jobs are often further plagued by financial insecurity, never knowing if there will be enough to pay for the basics.
In these blinks, you’ll hear from critical thinkers about the history of work and how our current work-centered society developed. You’ll also meet people who actively resist centering their lives around work. And finally, you’ll learn how we might reorganize work to be more equitable, meaningful, and rewarding for everyone.
In these blinks, you’ll learn
why Keynes predicted that by 2030 people would only work 15 hours per week;
why one employee at a Fortune 500 company carries around an empty briefcase; and
why Samantha, a patent attorney with a PhD, gave it all up to become a part-time waitress.
Modern society has centered itself around work – to the benefit of no one.
When work is good, it can be really good. When you’re interested in something, and good at it, a task can completely absorb you and deliver hours of productive bliss and a satisfied fatigue.
But when work is bad, it can be soul-crushing – and that’s a best-case scenario. Even if your job doesn’t require heavy physical labor, it’s likely to be mentally exhausting. Your job might leave you so drained at the end of the day that all you can do is zone out in front of a screen until you fall asleep.
In modern capitalist societies, access to satisfying work is profoundly unequal. The vast majority of us struggle with boring, repetitive, and meaningless jobs. That begs the question: What’s so great about work that society wants to create more of it?
The key message here is: Modern society has centered itself around work – to the benefit of no one.
The answer might seem obvious. Work is society’s way of distributing wealth. Through work, people have access to the things we need, like food and shelter.
But it’s far more insidious than that. Our identities, status, and access to community are all tied to our jobs. The gradual rollback of social services in the late twentieth century means that even critical needs like health care or retirement are tied to employment. We may resign ourselves to the fact that work has always been this way, but history proves otherwise.
In what sociologist Max Weber calls “traditional,” or pre-industrial, societies, the priority was free time, not financial accumulation. When a worker was offered a pay raise, he was excited by the opportunity to do less work for the same amount of money, calculated specifically to meet his cost of living.
Today, people are excited about raises because it means they can do the same amount of work for more money. Nowadays, we work in order to enjoy our money, not our time. And, the more we enjoy, in the form of consumption and consumerism, the more we need to work.
This is not how thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries envisioned the future, either. Karl Marx believed that technology would lead to massive leaps in productivity, freeing the worker from the drudgery of labor. John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1932 that by 2030 the average person would work only 15 hours per week.
Instead, today’s high-ranking workers clock in even more hours at their desks, while many lower-ranking workers struggle to get by with low-pay, insecure jobs, or no jobs at all.
For many, work is no longer a reliable source of income, rights, or belonging. It’s time, then, for a reevaluation.
After centuries of alienation from the pleasure of work, today’s employees must behave as if work is enjoyable.
Given how forcefully Marx argued for less work, it would be easy to assume he didn’t care much for work in general. But that’s far from true. Consider the length of the books he wrote – Das Kapital alone is over a thousand pages. Writing foundational texts on society, economics, and politics, Marx clearly loved to work. Even more, he saw value in it beyond a simple paycheck.
Marx argued that people self-actualize through work. He defined work as humans purposefully reshaping the natural world and extending the possibilities of human life.
Sadly, industrial forms of work destroy even the possibility of fulfillment through work. Capitalism transforms labor from the joyful reshaping of the world into a necessity for mere survival. This is what Marx called alienation.
The key message here is: After centuries of alienation from the pleasure of work, today’s employees must behave as if work is enjoyable.
In Marx's era, the chief instrument of worker alienation was the factory. There, in the name of efficiency, jobs were reduced to single, repetitive tasks performed thousands of times. This quest for efficiency reached a pinnacle in Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, but came at great cost to the individual worker. Assembly lines reduced the worker’s responsibility, drained away all creativity, and eliminated the relationship to a final product. Workers were essentially reduced to machines themselves.
Today, the majority of workers no longer stand at machines, but slump over their screens. The work may be less physically dangerous, but for most, it’s as monotonous as ever.
Another major difference in today’s work culture is that it’s performative. In the digital economy, a worker’s success is no longer measured in units from the factory floor. Rather, it depends on workplace behavior, or how cheerfully they conform to institutional values and goals. One sociologist writes about a worker at a Fortune 500 company carrying around an empty briefcase, simply because it looked professional.
Devoting long hours to goals with no personal relevance is mentally taxing. To combat this, companies have tried making the workplace more fun. Silicon Valley is known for offices flush with all the trappings of fun, like bean-bag rooms or kombucha on tap. These cozy, familiar touches are intended to distract from the otherwise alienating nature of the work itself.
In today’s workplace, you can have purple hair or bring your surfboard to the office. You are encouraged to “be yourself,” as long as your true self is eternally positive and productive, and expects no control in the workplace.
Work has effectively colonized the most meaningful aspects of our lives.
When does a day’s work truly end? Is it when you stand up from your desk? Maybe it’s when you arrive home after a long commute and pour yourself a glass of wine. But what if you’re still mulling over that expense report you sent to Brenda in accounting? Or the phone pings while you’re putting your kid to bed, and you feel a wave of anxiety that it might be your boss? It can feel like your work never stops.
For many of us, most non-work time is spent winding down from work. We consume escapist forms of entertainment and enjoy treats to compensate for the day’s indignities. But as long as our free time is determined by a force we can’t control, it’s not free at all.
The key message here is: Work has effectively colonized the most meaningful aspects of our lives.
Nearly all aspects of modern society have been reoriented to optimize employability. This is most evident in our public schools.
Learning can be joyful – a journey of discovery and wonder that lasts a lifetime. But the modern educational system is narrow and geared toward specific jobs. Education’s primary goal today is to stratify the population into levels of employability, optimizing young people for their next job.
Capitalism has also reshaped our communities to privilege money over leisure time.
Our addiction to consumer goods is obvious. From mega-malls and big-box stores to late-night shopping binges on Amazon, our need for more stuff feeds the economic growth necessary for capitalism. And how do we pay for this stuff we think we need? We work.
And how has capitalism convinced us to sacrifice our leisure time for more stuff? One answer is advertising. Beginning in the 1950s, advertisers incorporated psychological manipulation techniques into marketing. Advertising convinces us that true human needs, like social acceptance or cultural identity, can be bought. This message is hard to avoid: one study showed that by the age of 18, the average American will see around 350,000 advertisements.
It’s circular logic: working our mind-numbing jobs makes us feel we deserve a treat, like a new toaster or designer coffee. In order to afford the stuff we think might satisfy us, we need to keep our mind-numbing jobs. It’s a system designed for capitalism to sustain itself – at the expense of happiness.
Today, a job is considered the only moral option. But there’s a strong history of resisting work.
In times past, it was convenient for privileged classes to limit their workers’ leisure time. More hours spent by workers at their stations meant more profit for management. But far worse, the working classes couldn’t be trusted to spend their free time wisely, and might indulge in alcohol, entertainment, or other immoral pursuits if given the chance.
Members of the bourgeois classes also feared workers with leisure time might spend it taking part in collective action to improve their lot. If days off threatened profits, a politically awakened underclass would be disastrous.
So in the 1920s, when shortening the workweek to 40 hours became a real possibility, business leaders began promoting the morality of work, claiming paid employment was the ethical backbone of society. Philadelphia Gear Works chairman George Markland proclaimed “any man demanding the 40-hour week should be ashamed to claim citizenship in this great country.”
The key message here is: Today, a job is considered the only moral option. But there’s a strong history of resisting work.
Today, the consensus is that the unemployed are lazy and immoral. Throughout his tenure, former Prime Minister David Cameron endlessly praised the “hard-working people” of the United Kingdom, while anyone receiving benefits was “sitting on their sofas” waiting for the checks to arrive.
This kind of political posturing has created a false dichotomy between people who are workers, and thus productive members of society, and non-workers, who are threats to society. Poor people are seen as individuals who haven’t made the right choices. This allows governments to blatantly ignore the structural causes of poverty.
But the reality is much more nuanced. It’s hard to imagine an alternative to a nine-to-five job in the context of a society that rewards working and spending. But there’s a robust historical precedent of people successfully questioning, and rebelling against, this particular work ethic.
In the 1860s, workers and capitalists in France and the UK struggled violently over the length of the working day. In the 1950s, the Beat movement joyfully embraced the jobless life of the enlightened drifter, producing such luminaries as Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bob Dylan. In the 1970s, women joining the workforce were touted as a sign of increased equality, but second-wave feminists questioned whether women’s liberation could be achieved simply by working more.
This struggle goes on, even today. Next, we’ll learn how people continue to challenge the idea of paid labor as a moral necessity.
People who resist work want to do more, not less – but they all face harsh judgment.
We discuss unemployed people as though they are a singular type, with predictable backgrounds and similar psychological tendencies. Most often, we speak of their deficiencies. But people’s job status is based on a variety of factors.
To understand what it looks like when someone attempts to decolonize their lives of work, the author David Frayne interviewed dozens of people who have made the choice to work less. Each person had thoughtfully considered their reasons for resisting work, and all were coping with their new lifestyles with varying degrees of success.
But everyone interviewed had one important thing in common. Their decision to resist work was born from an alternative moral principle, not laziness or an aversion to productivity.
The key message here is: People who resist work want to do more, not less – but they all face harsh judgment.
Participants in Frayne’s study experienced what he calls breakpoints. These are moments at which the individual was forced to critically question their habits and beliefs. For some, this resulted in a reawakening to their ability to shape the world around them with awareness and purpose.
For one interviewee named Larry, the breakpoint came as his social worker job eroded. Early in his career, he had engaged with a client or case from start to finish; toward the end, he performed the same administrative tasks for many different cases at once. A job that was supposed to draw on his wisdom and empathy was reduced to a bureaucratic procedure. So he decided to cut back each workday by an hour.
Samantha, a patent attorney with a PhD in genetics, was disappointed with her lack of engagement with the “real world” at her job. She was deeply bored by the actual work, which she likened to high-stakes Sudoku puzzles with profit the only goal. She now works as a part-time waitress and tutor, and loves interacting with people all day.
Contrary to what we might expect, all Frayne’s interviewees describe their “less work, less money” lifestyle using language of enjoyment. By spending more time purposefully crafting their lives, they are rewarded with social and environmental connections more valuable than money or consumer goods.
Despite this increased sense of contentment, each struggles with justifying their choices to others. Expectations of parents and friends represent a challenge. Meeting new people can also be tricky. The question “What do you do?” has become a continuous source of anxiety for many of them.
We are all our own harshest critics, whether you have a job or not. Raised in a society that judges the jobless, those who resist work often internalize this cultural stigma as shame. The people who most successfully resist work are those who cultivate other sources of motivation and validation, before changing their work life.
To make meaningful change, we must focus on collective redistribution, not individual work-life balance.
It is safe to say most people in the world don’t love their jobs. To get through the day, we fantasize about telling Frank in HR what we really think of his latest memo, then go home and binge-watch The Office while self-medicating with our favorite mood-altering substance or activity.
Cynicism about work is itself a form of rebellion, like the McDonald’s worker who secretly wears a “McShit” logo T-shirt under her uniform. This personal subversion lets her appear outwardly to conform to institutional values while keeping some of her autonomy intact.
As long as work remains a chief source of income, rights, access, and belonging, resisting work will remain an option only for the very brave, or very desperate. But we can begin working toward a more equitable system.
The key message here is: To make meaningful change, we must focus on collective redistribution, not individual work-life balance.
The recent focus on work-life balance reveals widespread dissatisfaction with the oversized role that work plays in our lives. But time management workshops and training courses in dealing with stress place the responsibility for an unreasonable workload back on the individual. Yet it’s not possible for the individual to solve the problem alone, via self-optimization or otherwise.
Rather, it’s up to the collective to work toward a reorganization and redistribution of work that gives everyone more free time to pursue dreams and interests.
One solution could be a society-wide reduction in working hours. This would reduce unemployment and reverse the widening class division challenging civil society. Each of us would work less, so more of us could work.
Some countries are already testing this solution. In 2000, France legislated a 35-hour workweek. As of 2014, city employees of Gothenburg, Sweden work six-hour workdays with no reduction in pay.
Another option is decoupling work and income. The idea of Basic Income, where every adult receives a monthly amount designed to cover basic necessities, is gaining widespread traction. Liberated from the threat of hunger or homelessness, people would be free to develop their talents and ideas, or learn new skills.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t work itself. It’s the idea that only through paid labor can we access social acceptance, status, and the income we need to live.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
Our society is centered around paid labor, through which people access not only income, but social interaction, status, and the opportunity to participate in public life. But the vast majority of us are unsatisfied with the dominant role work plays in our lives – that is, if we can even get work at all. It’s time to imagine another way of distributing work in our society, in a way that is more equitable, and enjoyable, for everyone.
Got feedback?
We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with the title of this book as the subject line and share your thoughts!
What to read next: The Economic Singularity, by Calum Chace
In these blinks, you’ve learned that the centrality of work in our current society may feel like it’s always been that way – but it hasn’t. Thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries predicted that technology would free the worker from the drudgery of labor. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Today, through propaganda and advertising, capitalism compels us to work as much as possible to buy things we’re convinced will give us access to community inclusion and social acceptance.
But artificial intelligence is giving us another chance to get it right, argues Calum Chace in The Economic Singularity. He predicts that within a few decades, most humans won’t be able to work for money, because their jobs will be performed by intelligent machines. Universal Basic Income will be a necessary part of the entirely new economic system that will need to be created to accommodate this new reality.