Of course, what is necessary and what is not? Who is to say that something is necessary and something is not? Ultimately, does this question imply that anything can in fact qualify as necessary if we convince ourselves so? There is a type of necessity that is indispensable, like food and shelter—things that connect us to life. There is another type of necessity, however, that emerges on the basis of choice. I choose to have a smartphone, and thus bind myself to the necessity of having a charger, headphones, a host of “indispensable” software, the Internet, a carrier and so on. So these other “accessories” are not strictly necessary, but they become necessary once I make a certain choice and continue to maintain this choice; once society makes a choice and continues to maintain it. One can argue that in fact necessity is an extinct concept. Nothing has to be necessary, but rather based on choice, because arguably humanity has already mastered the strict necessities. However, the psychological notion of necessity is still predominant. One does really have to stop to think that it is not actually strictly “necessary” to check e-mail today, but rather that notion of necessity is a constructed prerogative that emerges out of a series of choices that we have been making for hundreds of years, that precede the moment of the urge to check e-mail, a series of engagements that we almost forget we have “chosen” that make it inevitably “necessary” that we check e-mail today. Therefore the question of what is necessary and what is not is in essence a question about what is desired and what is not. The overwhelming social structure to which we are borne is the starting point of this so-called desire. After all, not all the choices the human race has been making over the millennia are ours as individuals borne into the path that is dictated by those choices. Upon the moment of the first breath, there begins an imposition of structures and conventions that become so immersed in the psyche that they become foregone unconsciously as “choice” dictating desire rather than the external impositions they are. In fact, one has to make a distinction between individual choice and a set of individual choices that comprise a notion of collective choice. While in an ideal world, the system should produce a seamless match where individual choice meets the larger choice so that what we choose to do individually is also demanded by “collective” choice, this is not the case for at least two reasons. First, there are jobs in construction or waiting tables that reflect the collective choice of society, but are not necessarily “chosen” or “desired” by individuals who may do them nonetheless for monetary gain. Arguably technology is increasingly rendering these jobs extinct, not only in the realm of manual production, but in nontangible services as well. However, even taking into account more widespread automation and technological efficiency, there is a stage at which choice is increasingly buried within a self-feeding complexity that hides the absurdity of jobs that may be neither demanded by individual choice nor the choice at large. There could be a whole array of reasons from economic efficiency to cultural bias about work that may perpetuate this state only to be exposed by a crisis. Ultimately, does the “choice” of the individual belong to the individual or is it the continuation of a choice of an alien structure elsewhere, detached from individual choice?

This throws to relief the question: Is there something in fact so undesired in what we convince ourselves to be the desired, cloaked in terms of necessity and imposed by an outdated social structure? And this question in turn brings me to a fundamental reason why I decided to write this book. Besides complaining about the amount of work, there is another pervasive complaint one hears from people “fortunate” enough to have work: they are not happy. There is an acute and deep sense of dissatisfaction permeating the essence of modern work. According a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans are not engaged at work.² This is especially true among young workers who feel that their skills and creativity are often underutilized or not utilized at all in work environments that overwhelm them with menial tasks that dull their minds. There is a wide-reaching frustration that the modern work structure does not accommodate the creative, the meaning-seeking element that is at the very root of our humanness. This creates a deep sense of disconnect between the work one does and the desire to have a meaningful and a useful contribution to the world at large, beyond the esoteric corridors of the universe that has sucked people into its self-convinced, all-too-important mold. This is indeed a paradoxical state. On the one hand, while strict necessities are extinct, and when ideally choice should be the basis of work, why should people be stuck doing jobs to which they do not feel any connection? Thus if our so-called needs have evolved beyond pure necessities, how much of the current state of the work culture emanates from choice, and how much of it is mired in a deep web of psychological repression that possibly survives based on a number of economic inefficiencies?

On the other hand, there are certain emerging, legitimate needs one cannot deny. Just the constantly growing vastness of the human population brings into focus the very immediate task of dealing with each other, that is, human management. This is a “need” that becomes more complex and convoluted as society evolves and interacts with technology in ever uncertain terms. And, inevitably, as needs evolve from other needs, which have in turn evolved from changes we have long accepted, the complexity grows larger. Therefore, there is indeed an inevitable sense of needs arising and branching out, multiplying further and further, and therefore, one might think, there is a valid basis for the expansion of work, not necessarily its elimination. However, what I argue in this book is that the work paradigm in the West has transcended beyond this natural evolution and deviated into a realm that displays many of the symptoms of self-justification and collective autoconviction of a necessity of work that is not consequential at all except in our minds—a subtle, but powerful rendition of dogma that is pervasive.

One immediate and obvious argument for why there should ideally be less work today than what we observe is simply technology. More robots can do more routine tasks, which should leave humans with more time. However, a more subtle reason that emerges from the technological evolution is that technology enables humans to focus more on the production of ideas rather than the production of material goods, which can be done by robots. In an economy of ideas where more and more people produce ideas instead of tangible goods, labor and the length of labor become more complex. One hour of labor does not correspond to the same “quantity” of output that it would, for example, in an economy whose predominant paradigm is industrial, material production. There is a decreasing marginal productivity of labor in any given setting with certain natural constraints where working more does not necessarily produce a higher output in quality or in quantity. However, in an economy of ideas, this is even more so. More hours of work, by virtue of the complexity of the ultimate output, could even conceivably produce more inferior and mediocre ideas that simply reinforce inefficient structures and outmoded groupthink. A useful idea that solves problems or brings creative solutions does not necessarily emerge from simply more hours of work sitting behind a desk in a cubicle. Therefore, in an economy of ideas, we reach this concavity of the productivity of each additional hour of work even faster. Hence, there is fundamentally a different relationship between labor and output and simply a lesser “need” for the same hours or the same types of work. However, have our culture and psychological construct of work reached a parallel understanding of this change? Has the economic system adapted to this change or is it simply trying to adapt in the guise of a crisis?

Despite this evolution, the construct still insists on working the same hours. There are a number of arguments the book proposes for this insistence: from cultural biases to economic inefficiencies that can be self-reinforcing. Ultimately the discussion converges to basic questions that need rethinking. Of course, the question of more or less work is separate from the question of more or fewer workers. While an economy can decrease its number of work hours, it can actually simultaneously increase the number of employed. This is an important distinction that further adds to the complexity of the topic.

As the title suggests however, the book is as much about the future as it is about the present. Once past the messy terrain of the debate, and the toxicity of the crisis mentality, there is a foray into a field that is simply about “why not.” How would a future without work or with significantly less work look? How would this state come about? How would such an economy function? As automation and robots enter ever more deeply into different domains of production, what will more and more people do? All of these questions are considered with as wide a reach as possible. And that is the reason why the book does not shy away from issues that may not strike the reader as readily relevant to the topic at hand. From current events to economics, philosophy, art, education, and environment, there is a speculation about everything under the sun. This path contains more questions than answers and more opinions than facts; it is an unruly journey of rough corners and ephemeral musings into unexpected plains. But this is only natural. Take, for example, one of the most concrete elements that labor entails—the competitiveness of an economy; how that can quickly degenerate into completely unexpected depths! Labor cost is one of the components of an economy’s competitiveness. Lower labor cost makes the production process more competitive. But imagine a situation where labor is not only too costly, but it is not even useful at the most fundamental level, and continues to exist on the basis of various reasons from social and psychological biases to microeconomic inefficiencies. Then the discussion of competitiveness quickly runs into a limit; it fails to capture a deeper underlying issue. One immediate reason is that wages can always be susceptible to upward pressure; there is a fairly unanimous consensus that in fact wages face asymmetrical upward pressure, and therefore simply adjusting wages downward at one time does not effectively restore competitiveness to fundamentally useless labor. Where there is lack of relevance altogether, lower wages will not necessarily address the root cause of the issue, the very relevance of human labor itself. And, ultimately, the question of the usefulness of human labor naturally leads to the issue of lack of happiness in society. As people feel that their skills and work outputs are not needed or as young people “fortunate” enough to have a job become increasingly frustrated that their potential for imagination and meaningful ideas cannot be fit into the work structure, there emerges a profound sense of malaise and cynicism in society. Therefore the current crisis, while manifesting the usual suspects as ostensible symptoms of its evolution, belies a deeper crisis—a crisis within a crisis, that is harder to define and articulate, a crisis of identity and purpose, one of definition, a conceptual crisis.

Labor is ultimately human, and that is where one naturally encounters nontraditional elements outside the boundaries of the orthodox policy discussion, hence its perceived inadequacy and the sense that something profound is missing from the discourse. The current core of the debate, while it obsessively asks to how to “create” more jobs, ignores this very human element. This book makes an attempt to catch a glimpse of that unattained depth.

The discussion of this “general” shift precedes work precisely because one has to recognize and deconstruct the factual context in which work is evolving in the first place.

First, a shift has to be system-changing by virtue of its challenge to the thinking that supports that system. One can make the argument society functions not by an exogenous force such as the rule of law or an administrative, organizing principle, but by a way of thinking that leads people to certain types of behavior (even the ones we may deem inconsequential and nonpolitical in nature), which are limited to a specific range. The discussion of the origins of this range of thinking, and how it has been shaped and limited—perhaps in cultural and historical experience or political philosophy—is beyond the scope of this book. However, arguably, the emerging system, its aesthetic outlook, legal framework, economic structure, administrative branches, and organizational approach are just reflections of the consensus emerging from the prevalence of this thinking. If there is a change that happens within the range of this prevalent consensus, one cannot call it fundamental because it does not alter the underlying thinking nor does it necessarily reflect a shift in the underlying thinking, no matter how ostensibly it may point to a change. I will argue below that what we are witnessing today in the Western discourse, the revolutions spanning the M...