Escapology: A Third Way

Thanks to New Escapologist contributor Andy for drawing our attention to this excellent long read by Gen-Z writer called Martin Dolan. It contains some brilliant Workplace Woe and a great review of the recent antiwork literature coming out of radical and leftwing academic presses. I’m hardly the first person to feel anxious about spending my day doing seemingly arbitrary tasks. So much ink has been spilled on workplace angst that it’s become something of a cottage industry, from the countless pop psychologists hawking ways to Win Friends and Influence People to the nearly equal number of critics of such self-help gurus among thinkers and academics on the left. Ooh! Ooh! That’s me! Thinker on the left. The through line of these books is clear—between hustle culture, the gig economy, AI-proselytizing fraudsters and the deregulation-obsessed neoliberals eager to bankroll them, there’s a lot of bullshit in the contemporary American workplace. And yet besides the few remaining infographic…