Brigid Schulte

Good work, Lucassen argues, depends on three principles: cooperation, meaning, and fairness.

27 We are limited only by the horizon of our imaginations and the stories we tell ourselves about the way things ought to be. Our modern story of work is divorced from reality, and an astoundingly myopic failure of vision, one that has led to an exhausting daily grind. We are over work. Done. It is time for a better story. That’s where this book begins.

Because work has not been working for far too many people for far too long.

27 We are limited only by the horizon of our imaginations and the stories we tell ourselves about the way things ought to be. Our modern story of work is divorced from reality, and an astoundingly myopic failure of vision, one that has led to an exhausting daily grind. We are over work. Done. It is time for a better story. That’s where this book begins.

Because work has not been working for far too many people for far too long.

The way we work and fail to make room for care comes at a significant cost. Rising work stress is associated with the rising incidence of chronic illness—high rates of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety, obesity, and insomnia, to name a few conditions.

Overwork, impossible work-family conflict, and precarity are features of what I’ve come to think of as the “crappification” of paid work.

I became convinced that so much of the time scarcity, stress, busyness, and damaging overwhelm of modern life that I explored, which falls most heavily on women, originates in and is driven by our dysfunctional and gendered culture of overwork.