Rethink Work

Changing how we think about work

Good life

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  • 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 And the physical hardships of working in the old mills have been replaced by new psychological hardships [2004]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: Productivism, 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    

  • faviconLos Angeles gave families $1,000 a month in the biggest basic income pilot in the country, reporting positive results for the recipients. Participants reported fewer housing burdens, better food security, safer home situations, and were more likely to secure full-time work than remain unemployed [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: UBI   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Business Insider    

  • faviconSleeping in the office is making a comeback? Elon Musk would approve – but what about having a life? There is a wider belief there that asserting your right to leave, leisure and a life outside work is a duty, not a self-indulgence, since these were hard-won, historic social gains [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Worker Rights   
    Comments   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconWhat Will Leisure Mean to Us in the Future? It may require significantly transforming our deeply ingrained biases holding a life of work above all things else, and setting ourselves free to enjoy a more active, stimulating form of leisure, comprising the work we as individuals are driven to do [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Leisure   
    Comments   
    Source: Farsight    

  • faviconWhy Americans Care About Work So Much – Workism is rooted in the belief that employment can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: The Atlantic    

  • faviconOur Only Imperative is to Achieve – Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in ‘Burnout Society’ that a cult of individual achievement has led to mass burnout and depression across society. Resisting burnout is simple, but easier said than done: we must slow down, and rediscover how to think [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Philosophy Break    

  • faviconWe think of it as an individual problem, but burnout is the result of conditions in workplaces, workplace culture. And it’s a result of society and the view that we have of how work plays a role in being a good citizen, being a good person and so on [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: NPR    

  • faviconAlmost half of Dell’s full-time US workforce has rejected the company’s return-to-office push. Close to 50% of Dell’s full-time workers in the US have opted to stay remote, even when that meant giving up the chance of promotion, a punitive policy Dell implemented to get employees back in the office [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Business Insider    

  • faviconThe workers have spoken: They’re staying home. Companies might want people’s rumps back in office chairs, but according to a recent Gartner report, 48% of employees say their company’s mandates prioritize what leaders want rather than what employees need to do good work [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Productivism, Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Source: Computerworld    

  • faviconBurnout is a structural issue, built into the dysfunctions of the industry. Burnout is made out of individualism, and meritocracy, and doing too much with too little. It is built on the idea that if we skip a meal and work more hours, we might finally get ahead [2015]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Independent Blogs    

  • faviconWords indicating labour in most European languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution. It seems that despite the progress, work doesn’t bring relief from poverty, but it’s rather a confirmation that humanity is destined to suffer needlessly and endlessly [2013]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Protestant Work Ethic   
    Comments   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconUBI, at its heart and in its philosophy, upholds the idea of social justice by acknowledging that everyone deserves a decent quality of living, regardless of socioeconomic status. By ensuring that every person receives an unconditional basic income, UBI supports people’s inherent worth and equality and ensures that no one is left behind in the quest for a fulfilling life [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: UBI   
    Comments   
    Source: Independent Blogs    

  • faviconIn a world of Covid, rampant social media mobs, rising ideologies, increasing risk of nuclear war, AI threatening some sort of hockey-stick growth curve, the rise of working from home is a rare bright spot mainly because it allows people to spend significantly more time with their families [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Source: The Intrinsic Perspective    

  • faviconClassical Music’s Burnout Addiction: The unhealthy practices in music education that prime young musicians for failure from the beginning – particularly the belief that burnout-inducing schedules offer an accurate representation of the professional world, to see if they’ll crack under the pressure [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconThis world is built on the idea of work being an individual status point and symbol of success, which is meant to give unique meaning to our lives. Burnout is what happens when work no longer provides us with these things [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human   
    Comments   
    Source: Farsight    

  • faviconBurnout is not a thing inside us that has gone wrong. It’s the relationship between our ideals for work and the reality of our jobs. To counter it, we need to make work less central to how we understand our lives and spend more time with our families, communities and enjoy more leisure time [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Mental Health, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: Welcome to the Jungle    

  • faviconThe Surprising Effects of Remote Work: Working from home could be making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Source: The Atlantic    

  • favicon“We’ve created a society where we fear boredom and we’re afraid of doing nothing,” says psychology lecturer Dr Sandi Mann. But in trying to avoid boredom, we miss out on its benefits. When we’re bored, we daydream, and that has been linked to creativity [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: BBC    

  • faviconIt may not be that the 4-day work week revolutionises our minds as much as it might revolutionise our schedules. It will take more to truly disconnect ourselves from the impetus to work ever more or from the view that leisure’s purpose is to recuperate or distract from work [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: 4 Day Week   
    Comments   
    Source: The Guardian