the world of work is changing rapidly, and the divide between employees and companies seems greater than ever. in your magazine, you document the different ways people escape the daily work routine. why did you decide to discuss this topic? what is wrong with wage work today?

When I first started writing about this—we’re going back 15, 16 years now—the situation was different to how it is now.

So, we have things like Deliveroo drivers and other kinds of zero-hour contract work; we have a precariat; we have work from home disrupting the idea of going to a physical office. But the essential criticism of what is wrong with wage labor remains the same—the power imbalance between employees and corporations.

There’s this disingenuous idea that people want to work, that work is essential to your identity. Where, for most people, we work because we have to, we don’t work because we love it. Some people have convinced themselves that they work because they love it. Some people maybe do work because they love it. But the vast majority of us work because we have to, because we know that the alternative is homelessness, probably starvation, ostracization. You know you’re not going to be a functioning member of neo-liberal society, because if you’re not an economic unit of society, you don’t really count.

So, the central criticism of wage labor is this power imbalance between employers and employees. This whole business of your employer is your friend, your employer is your family, you don’t have to wear a collar and tie anymore because we’re all chill at this workplace— it’s all just lies because at the core of it is exploitation.

I am not a big Marxist, but Marx’s idea of alienation is absolutely perfect. Let’s say you own a small holding. You grow your own food and if there’s any surplus, you might take it to market. You are not alienated from that work since that work is literally and directly what you’re doing to stay alive. And that makes sense. But now everything is one or one-hundred steps removed from that. You don’t really understand the ultimate aims of your company. You hope that they’re benign. They’re probably neutral to malign. You have to work to stay alive, but also that’s not enough. You have to also like it and that’s the thing—it’s the power imbalance plus the insult that’s been added as you can’t just agree to have this economic relationship, you have to absolutely love it and be grateful for it.

in the last few years, we’ve seen a trend around the world of people not returning to work, whether it’s young graduates ‘lying flat’ in china or over-50s choosing early retirement in the uk. what do you make of this phenomenon? do you think it represents a broader trend of escape or simply a blip?

It’s two things—it’s partly practical and partly philosophical.

On the philosophical side, people had an existential dose during COVID where they were forced to reassess their priorities. For the first time ever, they’re in a situation where they’re stuck at home, they’re hopefully still being paid through furlough, but they’ve also perhaps realized that their work isn’t that essential, because the world is continuing without them.

Something I write about in the magazine a lot is about people who either get some sort of terminal illness diagnosis and they reassess their values, or they have a baby and they reassess their values. For a while I worked in a hospital library and there was a collection of diaries from cancer patients. The patients would always draw the same conclusions—I shouldn’t have worked so much, I should have been true to my values, I should have spent more time with my family and my friends and the things that I loved. It’s always, always the same. And what frustrates me about that is people have been dying of cancer for years and we’ve been hearing the same conclusions, but no one ever changes. It’s almost like these diaries represent a message from the future, and it just frustrates me. Why does it always take a crisis like a terminal illness diagnosis or a global pandemic to actually come to these conclusions?

So, there’s that. That’s the software issue, the philosophy, but there’s also a hardware issue about practicality, which is that work and neoliberalism just aren’t really working anymore. So, ‘lying flat’ and early retirement [are] almost born out of necessity. It’s when you realize that engaging with the system—getting an education, getting a job, saving, getting a mortgage, buying a house, retirement—doesn’t work anymore.

What are you supposed to do? Just carry on anyway with blind faith, hoping that there will be a pension for you when you retire, hoping that there will be a [health care system], hoping that you’ll be able to own a house one day? I’m not saying that all those things will fail, but there’s a strong sense in the culture that they will. That’s why I think you end up with people lying flat, dropping out, or taking matters into their own hands, because they don’t feel supported by the system anymore.

One of the practicalities I used to suggest to people is this idea of taking a mini retirement, taking a break and figuring things out. If you think they might hate your job but you’re not ready to throw it all in yet, I’d say well, can you get three months? Can you argue the case for a sabbatical? Or could you trust that you’ll get another job in a year?

there’s been a lot of talk recently about the ‘death of the career’, of young people rejecting promotion in favor of easier, less stressful, albeit lower-paid work. what do you make of this? do you think it represents a fundamental shift in the nature of work?

It’s unfortunately still frustratingly early days with that sort of thing. I think most people do still believe in a career and even when they do escape, it’s still a career model. They say, well, OK, I’m not going to be in the rat race anymore, but what I will do is monetize what I love. So, I’m going to have a career as a fine artist or as a content provider on YouTube or something. But there’s still the concept of a career. You’ve escaped the really horrible stuff, but you’re still enthralled by this idea of a career, you still believe in this narrative arc over a lifetime—I’m going to start small and get big, and eventually I’ll have enough money to retire.

So, I think there is still this religious belief in a career. Where the career myth is in some ways dying is the idea that slaving for forty years will get you somewhere.

I do see these stories, profiles of people who have decided to carry on icing the cakes in the bakery because they like the working environment, and not strive to own the bakery. I think that’s pretty good. But I do still think those people are a minority, that’s why they’re being profiled. A lot of people can’t afford to stay at the bottom if they have children. They can’t afford it if they’re the victim of rent profiteering.

For me, the alternative to a career is having a good time as much as possible. I once heard that Woody Allen makes a film every year. So, I have this goal to write a book every year, that’s the project. And I really like that. You want to make enough money to live on—that’s still important unfortunately, because we live under the demands of capitalism and nothing on that front seems to be budging in any meaningful way. But as long as you enjoy making the film, or writing the book, or growing the mushrooms—whatever it is. As long as it’s not a grind, as long as it’s not “I have to do this”, then I think it’s good.

in the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in remote work, with images of people working from the beach etc. do you think remote work represents an ‘escape’ from the typical 9-5?

I think what work from home does offer is a semi escape. In my book, I offer these escape routes from work, and they go from conservative to radical. They start really easy—make sure you always take your lunch break, always leave the building for an hour, all the way up to being a hermit in the woods.

At some point, three or four steps in, is work from home. But I was saying this before it was called work from home. If you have a white-collar job where you have to cross town to work on the Internet, which you can do from anywhere, that’s ludicrous. So, when you remove the commute, which, on average, is one hour in each direction, it adds up to two hours a day. You’re clawing back 10 hours a week, which is more than a working day. That’s a step in the right direction. And not having to go to an office for seven hours when you might not even have anything to do— it might be a quiet day where you’re just going to look at Facebook or stare out the window, when you could be at home reading Shakespeare, catching up on the DIY or housework, or doing something you enjoy instead of just wasting your time.

So, I think [work from home] is a semi-escape and it’s definitely a step in the right direction. I mean, ultimately, you’d want to live independently of employment—that’s my vision. Something like Universal Basic Income (UBI) would allow us all to live independently of useless, immoral, or dispiriting work if we wanted to. UBI trials show that people carry on working regardless, but at least they have the option to leave and to do something more rewarding with their time. If we want wage labor to be truly consensual, we need to have the option not to do it. UBI would give people the option not to do it.

at the same time, companies such as google have enforced a return to the office. why do you think some companies are reluctant to embrace remote or hybrid work?

The problem really is work culture. The Protestant work ethic prevailed for a very long time. Also there’s a kind of… you could almost describe it as kinky if it was fun, this idea of “Sit on your seat!”, you know, some people like to be the one who tell you what to do and other people like to take the orders, right? That’s what these companies like to do—telling people what to do and pushing people around, backing people into corners and coercing people to do things.

So, it’s partly spiritual, because it’s this idea from Protestant Christianity that hard work is good, and it’s partly just personal because they’re getting something out of this submissive, masochistic relationship—that’s not consensual remember, because people have to work in order to live.

some of the arguments against remote work include the blurring of work and home life and issues of privacy, with employers having access to employees’ personal space. what do you think about these criticisms?

Well, I think that the privacy thing is just a vestige of this submissive thing that I’m talking about, people have not yet been willing to relinquish that power. So, they’ll go, “Well, OK, you can work from home, but we will be installing spyware on your computer”. It’s amazing that they think that’s acceptable. I think it’s a vestige of that mentality.

The privacy thing is not an essential requirement of work from home. It should be results led. If you’re doing the job successfully, if you’re delivering a good product or service or whatever, it is arguably probably better than if you were in an office sleepy because you had to get up at 6:00 AM.

The blurring thing—it’s not my intention to trash the question—but I think that the blurring of work and life is a bit of a media buzz concept, a bit like work-life balance. Once you really start to think about it, it doesn’t really mean very much, because work and life are always blurred, and actually, a really bad way of blurring it is commuting to work. You’re on your own time there, you’re not being paid.

If you really love your job, you would want to blur it. If you were a serf, if you were a subsistence farmer, that work is your life. And actually, if you’re an artist, that work is your life. If you’re a politician, that work is your life. If you look to the people who we might consider privileged because they have the ability to make art for a living, or run the country and look powerful, blurring work and life is a good thing.

So really you should be asking the question, why don’t I want to blend work and life?

RECORD KEEPING

that brings me to the last question. you have written articles and interviewed people about escaping the 9-5 for more than a decade now. how do you think work has changed in that time? and have the ways in which people escape changed?

Yeah, it’s not quite a regret, but in the early days I almost wonder if I was an advocate for piecemeal work that has led to a precariat. When I was a full-time librarian for a university, I didn’t really like it. That was nothing to do with the nature of libraries or anything, I just didn’t like being a full timer and turning up early and things like that, and the idea that it was not going to end wasn’t appealing. So, somebody recommended this temping agency for librarians looking for contract work. I was like, oh, this is it. This solves the problem.

Now that that’s a bit more of a mainstream idea, it does threaten livelihoods. You end up at the extreme, with Deliveroo, PeoplePerHour, and things like that. So, I do wonder whether something I saw as an escape route in the early days is now part of the problem.

The precariat is growing and it’s becoming more and more accepted. I really hate volunteer culture, especially in the arts, because it privileges people who can afford to do it. I see jobs—literally jobs—and drudge work, often advertised in publishing and art galleries, for example, and you think, well, why? You’re millionaires. You really can’t just employ staff? What do you want volunteers for?

So yeah, work has changed—zero-hours contracts, precarious volunteer culture, work from home culture.

Has escape changed?

If we’re talking about work from home being an escape, or at least a halfway house to an escape, it’s easier. You know, you can do that. And in a in a way, escape is easier also because jobs aren’t paying as much. It’s easier just to say no. In the 90s, doing something like that would be seen as a personal failure—why aren’t you thriving in this culture that’s been made for you? Now there isn’t really that culture.