Rethink Work

Changing how we think about work

Good life

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  • faviconWhy Work? The meaning and significance of work have already changed fundamentally. The possibilities of increasing and using leisure time have meanwhile increased exponentially. To ignore these facts is to remain trapped in the gravitational field of classical social theory—from Hegel to Freud via Marx—and to make work a fetish [2017]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Protestant Work Ethic   
    Comments   
    Source: The Baffler    

  • faviconYou aren’t lazy. You just need to slow down — The idea of laziness has been effectively and expertly wielded to make people feel unproductive and unworthy. It’s a lie, and a trap that makes us believe there’s always more we could be doing — at work, in our relationships, at home — and that worth is productivity [2021]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Productivity   
    Comments   
    Source: NPR    

  • faviconYour Worth Is Not Your Productivity — From the draconian Poor Laws of the nineteenth century to today’s workfare conditions, governments have consistently used benefits as a tool to discipline those deemed to be ‘idle’ [2025]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Productivity, Protestant Work Ethic   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: Tribune    

  • faviconIceland Embraced a 4-Day Workweek in 2019 – Now, Nearly Six Years On, All Gen Z Forecasts Have Materialized — With more time for leisure, family, and friends, the stress associated with rigid work schedules has decreased, and overall happiness has increased [2025]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: 4 Day Week   
    Comments   
    Country: IS   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconThe benefits of doing nothing — An overactive ‘life drive’ endlessly seeks expansion, inevitably leads to burnout, and drains us of the energy needed to truly progress. Finding the time to do nothing is essential to reassessing who we are and who we want to be [2020]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Leisure   
    Comments   
    Source: iAi    

  • faviconThe Age of the Crisis of Work — No less than the state, work makes promises to its subjects. Our culture has scripts about what makes work worthwhile, not just necessary; not a burden to be endured but an important component of a flourishing life. And increasingly these scripts do not play out as written [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human   
    Comments   
    Source: Harper's Magazine    

  • faviconThis Job Is (Literally) Killing Me: A Moderated-Mediated Model Linking Work Characteristics to Mortality — When job demands are greater than the control afforded by the job or the individual’s ability to deal with those demands, there is a deterioration of the individual’s mental health and, accordingly, an increased likelihood of death (PDF) [2020]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconWhy are we all working so hard? The intensification of work doesn’t seem to be making us richer, but it does appear to be making us sicker — In spite of — or perhaps because of — new technology, people now say they are working harder to tighter deadlines under greater levels of tension [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Workism   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: Financial Times    

  • faviconExpert who coined presenteeism term says employers who force staff back are dinosaurs – Cary Cooper says ‘micromanagers’ risk driving away talent and damaging wellbeing [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Remote Working, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconAristotle On Why Leisure Defines Us More than Work — Transposing his thought — that we often do not know how to spend our leisure time constructively — to the modern day, at one extreme we can find workaholism, at the other we find those who want to completely forget work [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: Philosophy Break    

  • faviconWhat if work is making us sick? — While employment has become less physically dangerous, it seems to have become more psychologically harmful, as high demands and low control at work — known in the academic literature as “job strain” — is bad for mental and physical health [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: Financial Times    

  • faviconHannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning — Arendt thinks we must somehow cease glorifying labor and return it to its true place at the bottom of the vita activa hierarchy. We must unblur the lines between labor and work, and between work and action [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Protestant Work Ethic   
    Comments   
    Source: Philosophy Break    

  • faviconPaul Lafargue’s ‘Right to be Lazy’ — While he exclusively focused on laziness as a form of rebellion by workers against the social pressure to constantly work, his treatise echoes modern research on the positive health benefits of boredom and daydreaming [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Leisure   
    Comments   

  • faviconBertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness — In his brilliant and timely 1935 essay, the philosopher suggests that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work…” [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Leisure   
    Comments   
    Source: Philosophy Break    

  • faviconBasic income: why we need to start talking about money. Many aren’t getting their basic needs met in the UK. UBI could change this – if we can believe we deserve it [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: UBI   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: openDemocracy    

  • faviconThe Shame of Work — Review of “The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work”, by David Frayne; If ever a book was designed to help you question the value of the work ethic and look anew at our modern obsession with productivity and promotion, this is it [2016]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Books, Protestant Work Ethic, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: The New Rambler Review    

  • faviconA meta-analysis on the crossover of workplace traumatic stress symptoms between partners — Workers’ PTSD/distress from violence, harassment and abuse on the job is as harmful for their intimate partners as the traumatic stressors are for workers encountering them firsthand, shows research [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: Scientific Journals    

  • faviconWhy You Hate Your Job: it’s a bullshit job — The creation of UBI would liberate many from degrading working conditions and meaningless work, while allowing them to take on dignified work that truly serves the society. Whether this dignity is derived from external or internal sources, it is a prerequisite to our pursuit of the good life [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, UBI   
    Comments   
    Source: Current Affairs    

  • faviconWhat if work is making us sick? While employment has become less physically dangerous, it seems to have become more psychologically harmful, as high demands and low control at work — known in the academic literature as “job strain” — is bad for mental and physical health [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: Financial Times    

  • faviconThe shift to remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic gave Americans 60 million hours of their time back. And recent research indicates that those workers who no longer spend hours commuting to and from the office are using that reclaimed time to focus on their well-being [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: CNBC    

  • faviconDoes less working time improve life satisfaction? Working fewer hours contributes to higher life satisfaction in Europe, and health plays an essential mediating role in this relationship, shows research [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: 4 Day Week, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: Scientific Journals    

  • faviconWe are still enslaved: we may not die from hunger, but we are certainly overworked and stressed out. Work has overtaken us and invaded our consciousness. And the physical hardships of working in the old mills have been replaced by new psychological hardships [2004]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Workism, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconProductivity culture and technology has been very successful at making us working more, not less. And with millions either quitting their jobs or having to work from home, this is the time we should capitalize on this moment for the good of workers, not the bosses [2021]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Productivity, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconModern welfare in the United Kingdom is a universal (dis)credit to Beveridge. Adequate social security is vital to the functioning of society, as well as to the health and well-being of the population and Universal Basic Income can help by offering stable, individual, non-means tested, and unconditional money transfers, to all citizens [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Research, UBI   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: Scientific Journals    

  • faviconHappiness Consultants Won’t Stop a Depression — Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness, is a quack science; it condemns all social critics, iconoclasts, dissidents and individualists for failing to seek fulfillment in the collective chant of the corporate herd. In the land of happy thoughts, we are to blame if things go wrong [2009]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Truthdig