In other words, work has become ritualised and detached from the practical things it was invented to accomplish.
Why do we work? The obvious answer is "to live". But it's not our actual job - giving a lecture, selling a car, nursing a patient or flying a passenger jet - that directly secures our life conditions.
For sure, most occupations in the West have drifted far away from the baseline of biological self-preservation. A job simply grants us access to man-made vouchers we call money. We then redeem these so we can then purchase life.
How many vouchers we obtain and what we have to do to get them is the political question par excellence under neoliberal capitalism. But it's this growing disconnect between labour as a biological/social requirement versus work as a cultural artefact that has seen it take on a life of its own, spiralling out of control, taking over everything else.
Herein lies the work paradox. At the very moment it is glorified as the highest civic virtue (on both the political left and right) it is drying up at an unprecedented rate.
Slow GDP growth is nodding its head. One possible end game of this process is policy which partially decouples work from income -- a basic income guarantee. Of course, there are other end games as well.
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