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I'm Andy Beckett and I'm a columnist and a feature writer at the Guardian and I'm the writer of the Long Read that you're going to listen to.

It's about post work which is about whether there's a world that exists beyond the current world of work which in so many ways isn't satisfying anymore.

It's not providing a living for a lot of people. It's not giving them social mobility. It's not giving them status.

And four or five years ago I became aware that there was a group of writers who were exploring what was wrong with the modern world of work.

And they were probing some of these issues and I myself was a bit interested in unorthodox work if you like because when my children were young for quite a few years I work part time and I spent time looking after my kids instead of working.

And I was really aware of how in some ways that was very pleasurable and exciting getting away from regular work but also in some ways quite intimidating questions of status being out in the park with your kids rather than being in your office.

We're sometimes there so I started researching the piece and I dug around and I realized that going back several hundred years people like Paul Marks, William Morris, Maynard Cain's interesting thinkers had proposed versions of work that weren't the standard 95 and in the 1970s particularly during the three day week and other points in America.

People have sort of tried to live either because economic emergence is dictated it or because they just fancied it in ways that weren't orthodox so they work fewer hours they work shorter hours they swap gender roles in terms of who did the most work so there was this kind of lost history of people questioning how work should function.

And what I had discovered I guess four or five years ago was the kind of modern inheritors of that tradition and then obviously with the pandemic we're now questioning work in a much more sort of profound way.

And a lot of people are resigning from their work the great resignation is it so called a lot of people just leaving their jobs altogether or deciding they don't want to do work in the same ways before.

So these ideas of kind of post work I think are really really relevant now even more relevant than when I wrote the piece and there's also a lot to explore about how working differently might affect family structure family routines what kind of buildings we might need what cities might be like in a way a whole world beyond the current world of work which in some way seems impractical because we all need to earn a living on most of us do.

But on the other hand work now is so unsatisfactory in so many ways that increasingly people are beginning to think there must be something beyond it an experiments are happening I'm in Britain and across Europe and America with sort of short time working with people just giving up work altogether to see if they can find a living by the means so the world opposed what I'd argue isn't just a kind of pipe dream it's actually happening now and the pandemic has probably accelerated that change.

Welcome to the Guardian Long Read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture politics and new thinking for the text version of this and all our long reads go to the Guardian dot com for a slash long read.

Post work the radical idea of a world without jobs by Andy Beckett.

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