The Weariness of Work

Why I've been away; why I'm anti-work as well as pro-labor

This will be an intro to an anti-work post that I’ve been chipping away at for a while. The main point: I’m convinced we can aim for a world without work, not just a world better designed for workers. We can be anti-work as well as pro-labor.

For the past several weeks, I’ve hit a wall that looks like writer’s block but feels like burnout. I’m chalking it up to work.

In my new job I’m struggling to keep up with administrative tasks (never a fun time for those of us with ADHD), I’m not liking the person I become when I’m on the clock, and I’m coming home exhausted and discouraged at the prospect of doing anything else. But I also feel responsible for optimizing my time, for doing everything well all by myself — keenly aware that logistical and domestic tasks fall to me as long as my partner and I are long-distance.

Compared to others in worse conditions though, I feel I don’t deserve to complain about anything. At least I have a home with all my basic needs met; I can go outside and buy food at any time of day or night; I have water and electricity and internet; I’m writing this essay on a media platform that enables me to reach an audience directly and get paid to share my thoughts.

So why do I still feel like I’m failing at life?

Because if I ever stop, or make a big enough mistake, or miss a rent payment or two (or a post or two on Substack, my brain tells me), then the consequences could be very serious.

This is the looming, ever-present psychological atmosphere of the work system in which we live.

It’s the stick of homelessness and hunger juxtaposed with the carrot of wealth and leisure. But even leisure loses its luster under the work system. Hobbies and pastimes and creative work and fun with friends all take a backseat, or else are themselves permeated by the angst of work.

The system is geared to make us mad at ourselves (or each other) instead of at the way our society is structured. There is an intention to the isolation so many of us experience, especially in the U.S. Our living situations are not designed for communal wellbeing, our cities are designed for cars not people, our interactions are increasingly mediated by the market (and now by screens), and all the while we’re expected to perform at our best, to stay positive, to make every moment count.

This way of being is supremely unhealthy, which I think most of us know already. But when we talk about work, it’s often about everything else besides the work system itself. I’m against work not just because the wealth work produces is unequally shared. I’m against work because of the way it wears people down, mentally and emotionally. Even if the products of our labor were perfectly distributed, I would still object to spending most of my waking hours at a job. The lack of control over my time, the exhaustion, and the subordination are reason enough not to work.

Life under the work system can be characterized by material wealth and social poverty — exactly upside-down from what life has been like for most of human history. There’s a reason many stateless societies actively choose not to adopt our way of living.

The problem is that our material wealth is a house built on sand. We enjoy the illusion of cheap energy from fossil fuels, but we’re finally reaping the sour fruit of that labor, which will certainly not last much longer. We survived this long because of our social capacity: because we shared, cooperated, and refused to leave each other behind.

That’s why I’m against work as a system. It is a tool designed to create material wealth by means of social poverty. I’m not against doing things; I’m against doing things in such a way that resources flow to a powerful few while the rest of us grind away like machines.

It is not necessary to work like machines in order to live. That’s a capitalist lie to keep us in our place. Our planet, for the time being, already provides everything we need in abundance. The more we fairly and generously share the material wealth we distill from the natural abundance around us, the healthier our social fabric becomes, and the more resilient we are as people and a species.

If I were only concerned with economic exploitation, I’d stop at being a pro-labor activist. But I think if we want to live freely and well we have to stop working.

While we’re in this work system, of course we should be doing everything we can to make it fairer, easier, and better for workers. We need labor organizers the same way we need public defenders in the courts. We’ve got to engage the terrain we’re on. But I think we can also, at the same time, broaden our horizons and take hold of a bolder vision.

We don’t need to keep living this way — another world is possible.

In future posts I’ll attempt to illustrate just how we might go about abolishing the work system, and imagine what we might do instead.

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