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On Tuesday, I wrote about the false promise of the future of work. I highlighted, amongst other things, that education helps school us towards direct paid employment or waged slavery, according to some, and not towards the freedom of self-employment, for example. Self-employment is too risky, it seems. If we take the chance and fail, we’ll lose everything we’ve earned. In this, we accept the prison of our employment over the freedom of the unknown.

The structure of the workplace provides us with a degree of certainty. But what if this apparent ground of our belief was not factual but something the system taught us? Maybe it is the pursuit of hedonic pleasure and the avoidance of pain that keeps us there. wrote this week that the philosopher Karl Marx believed work was a natural thing human beings seek to do, and in this need to express ourselves, we are manipulated by capital. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle believed manual work was of the lower order and not for sophisticated men. They also believed that slavery was right and proper, so perhaps not the best judges on these matters.

The question remains: Do we work to attain the means to live or merely survive, or do we seek fulfilment of a deeper, more innate human need? What would we do if we didn’t need to work to meet those basic needs? What would we do with our time? Is contemporary work designed to line the pockets of the capitalists, and do we comply through blind habit? That’s several questions, yes, but you get the picture.

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