Writing Prompt: What should the future of work and leisure look like?
Writing Prompt: What should the future of work and leisure look like?
Supplemental reading and writing prompts on the subject of work and leisure.
As we read Thomas More’s Utopia together, I’ve been thinking a lot about work and leisure.
More’s Utopia has every citizen work in agriculture, as well as specialize in a trade “such as the manufacture of wool or flax, masonry, smith’s work, or carpenter’s work.” They work in these trades as the community has need of them six hours a day. They also make their own clothes and build each other’s houses.
If an agrarian workforce was de rigueur for More’s day, they make up only a quarter of the world’s workforce today. That’s why I want to introduce some supplemental reading that will help us imagine where work and leisure could go from here. To this end, I’m recommending the following supplementary reading material. Feel free to read along, contribute your thoughts on work and leisure in the comments, or better yet write your own essay on the topic of work and leisure and include the link in the comments.
For those of you who choose to write an essay, I will share your contributions with the Utopian Collective and my favorites will make it into the print edition of Oblivion: The Essays. I’m no longer imposing a time limit on when essays need to be written, just share the link to your essay in the comments section anytime this year and I will share it. You can keep track of all the essays thus far in the Oblivion project via The Index.
A reading list on work and leisure
I told you I had a much more extensive reading list than just the list of Utopian novels I’m reading in 2023, and I finally found a less intense (see: more organized) way to share it. I’m now tracking my entire Utopian Collective reading list via notion. Here’s my complete reading list for 2023, along with notes and time stamps on each piece of reading material. It’s now a section head at the top of The Novelleist homepage if you ever want to refer back to it (it’s ever evolving as I read). You can also copy it to make your own Notion template.
I’ll send out smaller portions of my reading list as we delve into other utopian topics—like government, capitalism, education, property, energy, etc.—but as far as this topic is concerned, here’s my reading list on the subject of work and leisure:
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ book Inventing The Future, plus the below seven-part conversation about the future of work and leisure in response to the book. I was able to add all seven parts of the blog discussion about to my Utopian Collective reading circle in Threadable, it’s called “Reinventing the Future” there.
Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work (anti-automation and thus anti Inventing The Future, Mueller argues for a return to the analog)
Related reading: David Sax’s The Future is Analog
Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists (advocates for a 15-hour work week, universal basic income, and open borders)
Why didn’t we get the four-hour workday by Jason Crawford
Is hard work virtuous? by Étienne Fortier-Dubois
Watch Star Trek: The Next Generation (there is no money or work in Star Trek, the people aboard the Starship Enterprise are there for the benefit of humanity)
Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek
Watch The Jetsons (George Jetson averages a nine-hour work week and complains when he has to work two hours in a day, most work has been automated—many consider the show a utopia).
A writing prompt: What should the future of work and leisure look like?
Feel free to read whatever reading materials you want to study on this topic, including those of your own choosing, then join our discussion on work and leisure in the comments section, or write your own essay on the subject and share it in the comments:
Thanks for posting the reading list on notion! I’ve structured my 2023 ‘syllabus’ largely around your reading list. There’s just something in my brain that loves seeing books and articles organized and curated...
This is a tangential point, but I think one of the biggest challenges to the idea of leisure time in a rampantly capitalist system is that time NOT spent working is equated with NOT making money. In France, overtime is not paid monetarily, but rather with TIME OFF. If you work 8 hours of overtime, you accumulate 8 hours of "vacation time." And if you don't take that time off, you lose it. The incentive, then, is not to work TOO much, because of course France is also becoming more and more capitalistic each year, which means most people can't afford to use their "time off," effectively losing it and feeling like doofuses. But I'd rather feel like a doofus than be stressed about NOT MAKING MORE. Alas, the tangent is creating other tangents. For now, I desist.