If you’ve ever walked a city street so late at night that it’s very early in the morning, you may have been greeted by a strange and unbidden thought. In the eerie stillness, it can feel for a moment as though you’re the last person alive.
When it comes to our membership of different social groups, most of us switch between different versions of ourselves multiple times each day.
I spent the daytime during the summer of 2009 at an unpaid internship at a literary magazine, and I spent the nighttime, paid, behind the counter of the gelato stand at the Times Square location of Madame Tussauds wax museum.
I am standing on the sand at Scheveningen, The Hague’s most famous beach resort, in the act of niksen, the Dutch term for doing absolutely nothing. I try not to think about whether I am really doing nothing if I am standing on a beach. Maybe I should be sitting down? But then I would be sitting down.
In 1966, an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot. He cast it in the role of a psychotherapist. A user would type a message on an electric typewriter connected to a mainframe. After a moment, the “psychotherapist” would reply.
If the 2010s was the decade of the girlboss, the 2020s is shaping up to be the decade of anti-work. Since the advent of the pandemic in 2020, we’ve witnessed the rapid growth of r/antiwork, “a subreddit for those who want to end work,” to the Great Resignation of 2021 where millions of people across the world quit their jobs in the space of just a few months.
The New York Times recently played host to a trilogy of articles, delving into the shifting landscape of work in the digital age. These thought-provoking pieces shed light on myriad challenges that arise as we navigate the evolving nature of work in the modern world, and underscore the pressing need to prioritise the well-being of workers as we forge ahead into the future.
