Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism by Amelia Horgan

Author:Amelia Horgan [Horgan, Amelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Politics, Sociology, History, Work, Anti-Work
ISBN: 9780745340913
Google: bKXvzAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 51970461
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2021-06-19T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Jobification nation: When play is serious business

A popular image has been circulating online for the past few years. A simple black and white outline of a rose adorned with text proclaiming that ‘you are worth so much more than your productivity’. The image, made by Instagram user and designer @radicalemprints, went viral, or as viral as left-leaning memes can go, in 2015.1 If you’re in any radical online spaces, it’s likely that you’ll have seen it or seen a version of it. The intention of the image is to call into question the attachment of one’s self-worth to how much work one does or trappings of external success. That we measure ourselves against standards we can’t meet because there is always, theoretically, more we could be doing, is a real source of pain and frustration. The claim, ‘you are worth so much more than your productivity’ is an attempt to reimagine what value is or what a person’s worth could be. The limitation of this kind of thinking is that while reconfiguring our individual attitudes can act as a balm against a person’s feelings of inadequacy or failure, they do little, usually, to address the reality that your socially measured worth and your productivity, at work or for future work, are related. Without building durable and shared sites of worth outside of market relations, we are stuck with the valuation of worth as productivity.

Why is it that productivity has such a pull for so many of us? We find ourselves looking for that final hack that will set our day right, allow us to speed through our growing to-do-lists, plan for the future but not to sweat the small things, rise and grind, and so on. We might feel that we simply have too much to do and not enough time to do it in. This feeling is not in and of itself a new phenomenon: worries about the impossibility of doing everything someone should do, such as read all the right kinds of things, are ancient, dating back to at least the philosopher Seneca.

Complaints of nervous exhaustion and neurasthenia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively prefigure today’s ‘burnt-out’ society. In 1733, George Cheyne’s The English Malady linked city living and the pace of modern life to the problem of weak nerves. Weak nerves, he argued, meant the body was unable to properly circulate vital fluids, causing lowness of spirits, lethargic dullness and melancholy.2 While an excess of the pleasures of civilisation were behind Cheyne’s malady, the nervous ailments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were caused not by excess but delicate oversensitivity to external stimuli, a sensory overload caused by, among others, the periodical press, steam power, too much brain work, or, in the case of women, any brain work. Neurasthenia, like today’s burnout, was for high-flyers, with writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust known to have suffered from the illness.3 While contemporary corporate burnout is treated with luxury spa retreats and mindfulness sessions

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