I’ve tried therapy, meditation, exercise, and getting better sleep. These questions have buzzed around my brain for the last several years, as work has increasingly come to dominate my life, while also exhausting me, damaging my mental health and creating a growing list of chronic aches and pains from sitting at a computer all day. Why do we work? Why is our work primarily arranged in the form of full-time jobs or careers, or precarious, alienating gig work? Why do we need to perform a job for someone in order to get the things we need to survive? Why must we devote so much of our lives to work? Why are unemployed people treated with such contempt? Why is the first thing we ask someone after meeting them “So, what do you do?” I’ve been reading a lot of books about work lately, and they all focus on one or more of these elements.īut there is simply no mainstream critique of the value of work itself. Some occasionally focus on reducing working hours for workers. Many progressive and leftist critiques of labor focus on getting higher wages, better benefits, and better working conditions. In addition to being a well-argued, interesting read, it helped me feel less alone in my ideas about the world. It sounds a bit cheesy, but this book was tremendously psychologically validating for me.
This book came to me at the perfect moment, giving voice to thoughts that have been bouncing around my head for the last two years or so.
I am so glad that this book and I found each other.
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