“We will have to seriously think about rest.” Daniel Susskind, an economist who predicts a world without jobs.

Awakened by pension reforms, the unsettling prospect of working longer for many is again raising questions. What would life be like without drudgery? Or, to put it another way, “what would people do if they didn’t have to work for a living?” asks economist Daniel Susskind, a professor at Oxford and King’s College, in a fascinating essay. A world without work (ed. Flammarion). “Will” and not “will” because, he points out, work will become scarce as a result of technological progress. Working people displaced by more jobs and professions will find themselves pushed to the exit.

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It remains to be seen what they will live on, while others will see their fortunes grow thanks to cars. This is really the crux of the problem. According to Daniel Susskind, future wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a privileged few. He advocates a strong state that can redistribute that wealth through a conditional basic income, and not a universal one, that would allow everyone to be paid for their obligations to serve society. “The technological threat is real, he writes. the link between work and income risks breaking. But work is not only an economic issue, work cannot be reduced to wages. It is about the meaning of life, the purpose and fulfillment of each one.

Fear of emptiness

Days to fill, course to set and meaning to build itself. Encountering what may seem like heaven, we suddenly feel dizzy, unable to project ourselves into the void. “We have been trained too long to exert ourselves and not enjoy ourselves,” wrote economist John Maynard Keynes, quoted by Daniel Susskind. The guilt of society’s evolutions becomes a paradoxical at best, an absurd world at worst. Modern management has both rationalized work through it process and: silly things and imposed a command of joy, even happiness. In addition to their skills, employees are now asked to mobilize their emotions, personality and intimacy. It is understandable to give a hundred times more to get less: less recognition, social or community ties, fewer boundaries protecting personal life… But for what?

In search of lost meaning

Answer the great minds of recent centuries, all the way back to Sigmund Freud, about our inner need to work. Work allows us to regulate our impulses, to flourish or surpass ourselves, they say. Better. it protects us from destruction, according to the Austrian social psychologist Marie Jahoda, author of a long study of peasants left unemployed by factory closures in the 1930s. Result? “Increasing apathy, loss of meaning in life and increasing malice toward each other,” says Daniel Susskind. Unemployed, residents wander, walk slowly, stop, disorientated. It’s like reading a synopsis for an apocalyptic movie. “For Marie Jahoda, work was a structure, a direction in life.”

Except that the compass no longer points North, much less since the pandemic, an opportunity for an unprecedented but unfinished step back. Questions arise about the meaning of work, the quality of life, the search for meaning, without finding deep, lasting answers. It seems that we still had to clear the fog. “What if work was our new opiate,” even Daniel Susskind wonders. Like drugs, it gives some people a sense of satiety and pleasure. At the same time, it intoxicates and disorients and entertains us, preventing us from looking elsewhere for meaning.

New values

But where? The advocate of this famous conditional basic income, and not universal, Daniel Susskind advocates a new collective order, which is no longer fueled only by work, but also by other activities useful to all, which the state would encourage and for which it would reward us. It remains to decide which ones. “Different societies will come to different conclusions. But everyone will be obliged to explain what is valuable or worthless,” he emphasizes. Some may encourage the practice of the arts, like the ancient Greeks, political involvement, volunteering, or forming associations. Others, Susskind hopes, will revalue the activities and professions of care and education: stay-at-home parents, caregivers, nurses, teachers…so precious and yet little or no pay. It seems that the all-powerful logic of the market is too narrow to recognize their value. A world without work, if it does not promise Eden, would at least be worthy, according to Susskind, of stopping this system from breathing. Perhaps you can imagine another, more virtuous one.

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