Why do we work? The obvious answer is ‘to live’. But it’s not our actual job – giving a lecture, selling a car, nursing a patient or flying a passenger jet – that directly secures our life conditions. For sure, as we have already demonstrated, most occupations in the West have drifted far away from the baseline of biological survival, which is partly down to the massive division of labour that has arisen in the post-industrial era. But this disconnect between labour and subsistence is also related to the main medium in which inhabitants of any capitalist society must communicate. Our specific job grants us access to manmade vouchers we call money. We then redeem these so we can then purchase life. How many vouchers we obtain and what we have to do to get them is the political question par excellence in our society and its highly skewed class relations. But it’s this fissure and complex mediation between labour (as an organic/social necessity) versus work (as a cultural artefact) that has been behind employment taking on a life of its own, spiralling out of control, absorbing everything else.