However, we seem to be enormously preoccupied with the notion of living for work only, and not so much for caring and sharing. It seems like we’ve collectively accepted that living well means working hard and working hard for money. By expanding our personal economy, we seem to believe that we naturally expand our personal happiness, safety, joy and sense of meaning. In some sense, this might carry some truth, but that belief has simultaneously created a snowball effect where there is no clear idea of how much capital one single person actually needs to be and feel safe and happy. This perception of having lost the concept of a reasonable and legitimate personal capital seems to be growing among us, while at the same time, we find ourselves fighting against our very own existence.
As Luca Fogale says in his song lyric, ‘Surviving - and nothing else’ seems to be an appropriate understanding of the way many of us spend our lives at the moment. The lyric then continues, ‘I’d give anything to be dreaming again’ which puts our lives in brutal contrast. Surviving versus dreaming.
But how do you dream when all around things are falling apart. The recent decades have crystallised the drastic changes we, us humans, have made on Earth over the last five hundred years of colonialism and capitalism. We have extracted, produced and used more than our planet can tolerate, and we now stand with a wound so large that we don’t know where to start. The era of dramatic climate change impacts every single part of Earth, every single cell within all living things and every single soul. Global heating is proceeding 1 at a rate not seen over many recent millennia and it is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that trap more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth’s system. The result is a warmer planet where rapid changes are affecting the oceans, cryosphere and biosphere. Crisis after crisis harm random and unprepared areas of the planet with horrifying effects that leave completely devastated societies and landscapes. These unpredictable and alarming events make us look like we’ve lost control. We are on our own. We have somehow disconnected from the intertwined life on Earth, and we have now set us against ourselves. Could our detachment from a unified world be the deeper issue and even the cause of the climate crisis? Was it our self-centred obsession with work and its possibility to create comfortable settings for humans only (and even for some humans only) that shaped the reality we live in?
Total work
The 19th century American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote; “At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage”. In his work ‘Nature’, Emerson expresses a belief that each individual must develop a personal understanding of the universe. That people in the past had an intimate and immediate relationship with God and nature, and arrived at their own understanding of the universe. Emerson further explores at length the difference between something he would call Understanding and Reason, two different ways of apprehending reality that both serve to instruct man. The tuitive understanding 2 is secondhand knowledge tied to matter that leads to common sense rather than to a broader vision. Whereas the intuitive reason is transformative and essential to transport man out of the material world into the spiritual. It becomes an integral part of the subject’s being.
Emerson was maybe trying to intellectually understand and explore the deeply rooted and entrenched global indigenous cultures where humans have naturally lived, worked and experienced time in relation to a considerate existence with nature. Now, more than 100 years after he wrote his books, Emerson might have been content to see that there are reawakened movements recognising this way of living with Earth. And with an Earth that is seen as an individual, something that can feel and needs to be recognised as such. Organisations like, for example, Client Earth, who by changing the system, by informing, implementing and enforcing the law with Earth as a customer, try to structurally change our ideas with concrete actions for a deeper connection with ourselves and our surroundings.
Still, we sit with our ordered lives and strong frameworks closely built around the concept of work. We need work for personal profit, for direct survival. In the way we have organised our society, we need work to buy and consume. Simultaneously we have established a way-of-life inflation—humans have an insatiable appetite for constantly having more. Many of us would not be content with our grandparents’ way of life. The philosopher Andrew Taggart calls this ‘the Centrality of Work thesis’, where work is that, around which everything else in life turns. Work seems here to be the most important thing in life. He builds his thinking on the concept of Total Work 3, a term coined by the German philosopher Josef Pieper just after the Second World War. Pieper suggested that the process of production itself is understood and proclaimed as the activity that gives meaning to human existence. We could see this as an antipode of ‘I think, therefore I am’. In this context it would rather be ‘I work, therefore I am’.
A reply to this reasoning is the Asian movement Tang Ping 4 (“lying flat” in Chinese), a lifestyle and social protest that began in April 2021. It is a rejection of societal pressures to inhumane overwork, such as the 996 working hour system where employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week. The young Chinese generation who take part in the "lying flat" protest is not necessarily socially isolated, but merely choose to lower their professional and economic ambitions and simplify their goals while still being economically productive for their own essential needs. The underlying massive critique is aimed at the compulsory life milestones dictated by society.
Human curiosity
Has work replaced the idiosyncratic space of subjective freedom, a space we could call our ‘human curiosity’? The collaborative research ‘Beloved Economics’5 asks the question: Why are we trapped in exhausting, harmful modes of working, and what is possible when we innovate out of them? The research developed a better understanding of how we need to change our mindsets and way of working.
We have a beautiful and indefinite need for imagining, for playing, for exploring and experimenting, for revealing new possibilities and stimulating ideas. Work beyond survival is a space where all of these heartening practices can be fully treasured. Can this focal point be the future of work, where all of us work for the goal of cherishing life? Aristotle argued that leisure, not work, was the sphere of life in which our true selves can be realised, where humans strive for perfection.
Unfortunately, before we get there, we need to better understand the powerful impact monetary recognition has on our making of ourselves and our personalities. We live within the borders of the economy as we see it right now. It is heavily built on ideas of capitalism where inequalities are the norm and a sense of extreme subjective individualism is key to monetary success. By working and gaining a material richness, we seem to fill the voids of the common and shared philosophical questions of who we are, why we live and what comes after life. In line with the moral theory ‘act consequentialism’ 6 that tells us that the morally right action is always the one that will produce the best overall outcome in the world, we seem to have approved one nasty behaviour for another. By reason of the theory of act consequentialism, a human being might choose to kill only one person instead of three. Modern work might be a massive, systemic delusion that forecloses the very possibility of understanding what we, as human beings, are doing here. If work would be cherished in life, then work can no longer be what brings life to an end.
That two-part idea of work both providing and destroying, opens up for moral dialogue. Metaethics7 try to delve into an understanding of how moral facts might be related to other facts (such as psychology, happiness, human conventions etc). Metaethics explores the connection between values, reasons for action, and human motivation, asking how it is that moral standards might provide us with reasons to do or refrain from doing. It addresses many of the issues commonly bound up with the nature of freedom and its significance (or not) for moral responsibility. We might have to bend some rules if we are to try to get a glimpse of what future work might look like.
To deviate in that sense often requires an initial springboard. The First World War (1914-18) left 10 million dead and some 20 million wounded. For many intellectuals, the brutal war produced a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric, maybe even with the core principles, of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. Freud wrote at the time that no event “confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.” It quickly provided a breeding ground and powerful space for the birth of the art movement ‘Dada’ that embraced and parodied that confusion. Dada wished to replace the logical nonsense of human actions with an illogical nonsense 8. What is the Dada of the 21st century? Are we again witnessing a collapse of principles and rationality that can only be looked upon with a nonsense type of mindset?
But what about the economy?
If we talk about work we need to talk about the economy. Many would say work, and workers are what make the economy prosperous. Private companies forcefully extract finite materials from our shared planet, producers activate workers to make products, consumers buy these products, and end users keep them as their personal items, privileges and methods for being effective, meaningful or happy. All this system does is keep a monetary structure constantly growing for the very few and very rich who control it. Workers in that world are enormously important and the key to the anticipated profit the controlling companies need for their internal monetary recognition. The growing market of technological innovation and AI is therefore an intelligent move forward since it can create a more reliant, and possibly cheaper, workforce.
Would that mean that traditional workers are put at risk for their own survival? Technological advocates would decisively contradict that fear and instead, say human work will shift and transform through directed education and cutting-edge competence. However, there are more radical thoughts out there suggesting that technological evolution is the only way forward if we aim at creating a world where suffering is long gone. The British transhumanist philosopher, David Pearce, simply suggested we start rewiring our brains by directly stimulating the pleasure centres via implanted electrodes, that we actively use utopian designer drugs for mood enhancement, and that we genetically engineer babies to create a civilisation we were to opt to become genetically hyperthymic 9 and adopt a motivational system driven entirely by adaptive gradients of well-being. Pearce himself calls the above theory the ‘Abolitionist project’ and proposes paradise engineering with an abolition of human suffering. In the world he sees, mental torment will be a relic of the past through technological innovation and humans will feel jovial no matter what type of work we have, where we live or what conditions we might be born into. Pearce’s future vision of the world feels dark, even though his suggestion means a design of human societies that themselves would not feel dystopian at all.
Concurrently, sincere biological freedom comes with a sense of pain that most people might not want to give away. Would we be better off looking at the future of work through a lens of new or upgraded economic systems, than through a common tech lens? German feminist Heide Goettner-Abendroth believes it is exactly that we need to do. She believes seeing the world through the eyes of the matriarchy will require adjusting the mind's lenses and discarding past prejudices. When doing that we might be able to see a kinder future and different system that could work for all living things. “Matriarchal societies, primarily shaped by women, have a nonviolent social order in which all living creatures are respected without the exploitation of humans, animals or nature. They are well-balanced and peaceful societies in which domination is unknown and all beings are treated equall y 10.” This world could hold a slower approach to our existence where care is seen as an economy of its own, where value is found in non-traditional perceptions and where an introspective way of living is what we would all strive for. Yet, this possibility of another future still sits in the current political mindset and decision making system where proof needed for policy making and change are built on concrete measurements. How do we measure spillover values of care and kindness?
I’d give anything to be dreaming again
In Sartre's study of the consciousness of being, ‘Being and nothingness’, he suggests that people are not like things 11. He argues for a distinction between unconscious being (en-soi, being-in-itself) and conscious being (pour-soi, being-for-itself). Being-in-itself is concrete, lacks the ability to change, and is unaware of itself. On the contrary, being-for-itself, is conscious of its own consciousness, yet while also being incomplete. A tree is a tree and lacks the ability to change or create its being. A human, on the other hand, composes herself by acting in the world. Unlike things, we do not have an intrinsic essence and need to invent our existence and meaning. Work in the modern world might be the cornerstone of how we define and invent our meaning. How we define ourselves could therefore shift dramatically in a future world where work is purposeful on a deeper level for all humans.
The art work ‘Eternal Employment’ proposed by the Swedish collaborative collective Goldin+Senneby, shows a vision where a person is employed at the platform of the subway station Korsvägen in Gothenburg. Whatever the employee chooses to do, constitutes the work. The employment contract is full time and of indefinite duration; should the employee resign or retire, a new employee is recruited. In the job advertisement Golding+Senneby writes:
“Apply for this job. Unusual. We know But it's a job, a completely ordinary job. Maybe not completely boring. It's free. A free mission. We believe you are free. We think it sounds like that. You sound free. Look free. Alert. Friendly. Open. We can't take it anymore. Apply. Take over. Thanks.”12
The ‘Eternal Employment’ profoundly challenges our ideas of work and of what a ‘good job’ might look like. Are we free to choose what we want to do, for how long and what we will get out of it?
As human beings we seem to be captivated by time and how to spend it in both meaningful but necessary ways. We ponder and dream of possibilities. We energetically look into futures that could bring a better way of living. In 1930, a year into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes predicted that in 100 years’ time, i.e. 2030, society would have advanced so far that we would barely need to work. He thought that when the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose13. Keynes believed humans were suffering from over-rapid changes, and with the knowledge we sit with today, the speed he was referring to is nothing at all compared to what later happened. He saw a world full of “wants” that blinded us to what was going on under the surface.
“The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.”
The future Keynes dreamed about was a time where work was not the core of human existence and where higher morals defined our actions. By understanding the underlying structures of “distasteful human qualities” we could instead focus on a joyful existence full of excitement, care and meaningful moments. He wanted to see a drastic change in the economy where the nature of a person’s duty was towards others, where it was reasonable to be economically purposive for others instead of reasonable for oneself. It somehow leads us back to Luca Fogale’s comment, ‘I’d give anything to be dreaming again’. A future might be one where we are free to exchange long working hours in a monetary wealth system, for generous connections and lighthearted imaginations. A system of economic bliss.
