If you spend your day in front of a computer, you may ask yourself, at times, why you do it. What’s it all for? Who benefits? For Noēma, Aaron Horwath suggests that the crisis confronting knowledge workers these days isn’t strictly economic, it’s also existential. He explores the pitfalls of work-as-performance and wonders whether the “messy middle,” which embraces human interaction and collaboration over an army of agents, might offer more for workers and employers alike.
But perhaps the most powerful action of all is simply to maintain an awareness (and remind others) that Workism is a spectacle. For most employees, we owe it to each other to remind one another that this work is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that important. It is illusory. No one has ever died over a spreadsheet. The world does not wait with bated breath for product launches. A marketing campaign will not change the world. Almost no one will remember all the work we do. But they might remember the types of people we were, the relationships we had and how we treated the people we worked with.
More picks from Noēma
Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures
“Gene editing may enable us to prevent a species from ever becoming extinct in the first place. But should we?”
The Languages Lost To Climate Change
“Climate catastrophes and biodiversity loss are endangering languages across the globe.”
Living In A Lucid Dream
“Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.”
