Can anyone live without work? Work is a common good, isn’t it?
It has been years since a famous volume by Rifkin titled “The End of Work” and Aronowitz's “Post-Work Manifesto” which envisioned a new society in which we work to live and do not live to work. While on the one hand, this increases complex phenomena such as unemployment and the substitution of machine for man, paradoxically, on the other, open up possibilities for rethinking the relationship between life and work, even to the point of considering the possibility of working less to live better.
This possibility, which, in the twenty-first century, especially in the post-pandemic era, has found its most extreme manifestation in the phenomena of great resignation and quiet quitting that tell of men and women willing to give up a secure job, to “work less” for quality work or to “distance themselves” and give new meaning to professional activity in order to recover and not lose the dignity of the subject-person and the quality of life.
But can one really live ”without” working?