Portrait of the Artist as a Man
April 2, 2021

What work should be

But all of these arguments are built on the supposition of work as the primary, enduring locus of meaning in your life. Think of it this way: Maybe office workers feel the need to make friends at work is because they spend so much time working that there’s little time to cultivate or sustain friendship elsewhere. Maybe it’s so hard to make friends in your 30s because you’re working all the time.

What remote and hybrid works supposes — and what this book I’ve been working on these last six months with my partner, Charlie, argues — is the potential for a different posture towards work, in which, again, the work itself becomes malleable, even an accessory, to the rest of our lives.

Source: The Future of Remote Work is the Opposite of Lonely by Anne Helen Petersen, https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-future-of-remote-work-is-the


We seem to have lost the thread in this late stage capitalistic society. Work is to support a life worth living, not the other way around. And while I, specifically, call what I do a vocation, I still don’t want to do it constantly.

But the idea that I could blend it into my life in a way where I can, say, work from a coffee shop some days, have a quiet office some days, or even finish up a task in the evening without feeling guilty? That would be nice.

If at the end of the day, everyone is satisfied with the things I’m accomplishing and I’m making deadlines, why does it matter when or how long I work on a given day?

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/what-work-should-be


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Ideal worker My workplace is aggressively “ideal worker” concept. There is even a particular person that gets rolled out into stage whoever there’s a new “work is hard, suck it up” message - usually around a benefit changing, or some cockamamie scheme to “better balance work and life.” They have kids but manage to work really long hours and it gets glorified on stage.
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A little sluggish Clever turn of phrase I rather like. The previous passage on coffee tea/tobacco and stimulants was interesting insofar as smoking was thought to be harmless. Back when this was written, maybe they were less harmless?