This threat of dereliction in the service of a foreign desire, the threat of the expenditure of the power of acting as pure loss – though obviously the ‘loss’ is never pure, if only because at the very least the expenditure brings in a salary – can be countered in the end in a very limited number of ways, in fact in only two. One can admit it to oneself, with the consequence of having to choose between resignation (real life is elsewhere, in the other eight waking hours), or even the depression captured by the expression ‘a life wasted making a living’, and, the antagonistic option, rebellion and struggle (the trade union on the inside, politics on the outside): ‘the greater the sadness, the greater is the part of a man’s power of acting to which it is necessarily opposed.’ Alternatively, unable to face the too painful fact of one’s dereliction, the subject strives to ‘imagine those things that increase or aid one’s power of acting’, thus repelling the spectre of sad dejection with the arms of re-enchantment, namely, by recreating a desire of one’s own, aligned with the master-desire yet distinct from it. This enables the recuperation of an idiosyncratic meaning that can overcome the void of abstract labour; an object-desire is reconstructed under the effect of a meta-desire for living happily, or at least with joy, or at any rate not meaninglessly. Thus re-concretised and newly charged with desirability, albeit through the very effort of the meta-desire for joyful life, abstract labour can be minimally reappropriated. And so we see employees finding an interest, and subsequently satisfaction, in tasks that they would in all probability deem profoundly uninteresting were they freed from material necessity.