Work dominates pretty much everything. Whether or not you have it, it’s probably taking up most of your time. Employment is the most-common indicator of economic health and nearly all of the public debate about economics has to do with creating jobs. If you don’t work, it can have a detrimental impact on your health and your cognitive capacities. And with the automation of cognitive as well as physical labour many people think their jobs are useless, and it looks likely that many kinds of jobs are going to be become increasingly scarce. So maybe we need to rethink what it means to work and the role of work in our society.
Having a job either plays an outsize role in framing our identity or not having one is a major source of anxiety and insecurity as well as a cognitive drag on our capacities. Poverty, which usually results from none, not enough, or poorly paid work, places a cognitive strain on the brain that saps concentration and processing power. If you are poor or precarious, finite cognitive energy is being devoted to making micro-financial calculations and the anxiety coming from constant worry about housing, feeding, clothing oneself and one’s family. The supposed poor macro-financial decision making often attributed to those in poverty doesn’t come from thinking too little, but rather from thinking too much about every transaction.
Moreover, the work that fills our lives with meaning is not always work in the sense of wage-labour. That’s probably a very good thing considering that, according to the anthropologist David Graeber, a great many people think that their jobs are "bullshit".
