Amelia Horgan: Lost in Work

“Work hard, get paid.” It’s simple. Self-evident. But it’s also a lie—at least for most of us. For people today, the old assumptions are crumbling; hard work in school no longer guarantees a secure, well-paying job in the future. Far from a gateway to riches and fulfilment, ‘work’ means precarity, anxiety and alienation.

Amelia Horgan poses three big questions: what is work? How does it harm us? And what can we do about it? While abolishing work altogether is not the answer, ‘Lost in Work’ shows that when we are able to take control of our workplaces, we become less miserable, and can work towards the transformative goal of experimenting with ‘work’ as we know it.