The pandemic brought about an unexpected side-effect: The Great Resignation. People have been quitting their jobs like never before. In the US, 4 million people quit their jobs in April and another 4.4 million in September. In the UK, nearly a quarter of employees are planning to leave their jobs in the next six months. People are realising that many jobs simply aren’t worth the effort. This isn’t new – it’s been a long time coming. There has been a gradual recognition that making work the centrepiece of our lives isn’t the path to wellbeing.  But there are no easy solutions short of questioning whether human progress and prosperity should rely on human labour, writes John Danaher.

Do you like your job? Maybe you do, but I think you should reevaluate. At the very least, I think you should be uncomfortable with the fact that you live in a system that compels you to have a job, particularly if that job is neither necessary for your own well-being nor the well-being of others. Thanks to advances in robotics and AI, we may be close to building a society in which work, as we currently know it, is no longer necessary for either of these things. Far from being a cause for concern, this is something we should welcome. The work ethic is a cultural virus, something that has infected our minds and our institutions. We need to be inoculated.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there is no place for determined effort, self-improvement and ambition in the well-lived life. Mastering skills, making a contribution to one’s society, and achieving goals are all key elements of the good life. They are also, as the philosophers Anca Gheaus and Lisa Herzog point out, things that are made possible through paid employment. But is the workplace really the best place to pursue such ends? I don’t think so. As currently constituted, it offers us a second-rate forum for their pursuit, one that requires us to bend to the will of the market and follow prescribed norms. Although there are many problems with the world of work, there are three aspects of it that I want to draw attention to here. Each of them supports the view that we should resist the ideology (i.e. the work ethic) that underlies the current system.

___

"Enough of this. We are being sold a myth. Internalising the work ethic is not the gateway to a better life; it is a trap."

___

The first is that the work ethic fosters a culture of perpetual disappointment. This is toxic and ultimately self-defeating. From an early age, we are told that the key markers of success in life are grit and the capacity to delay gratification. To get ahead in life we need to knuckle down, put in our 10,000 hours, and plan our future careers. We need to work hard at school, fill our spare time with extra-curricular good deeds, build this into an impressive college application, study hard for another 4 years or more, build up lots of debt in the process, get a low-paying temporary gig at a start-up, show-up and suck-up, work all the hours that we can, and then maybe, just maybe, it will all payoff. By our early thirties, we might win the job lottery and be able consider buying an overpriced house in a distant suburb. We might be able to consider settling down, and starting a family (though don’t get too complacent; you’ll have to work even harder to cover the childcare costs).