Why modern work is so chaotic and exhausting

Just a little over a year ago, everyone was talking about the Great Resignation — a trend of workers across multiple different sectors resigning from their jobs. But amid rising interest rates, inflation, stagnating wages, and layoffs in… uh…certain industries we may or may not be intimately familiar with, we seem to have entered an entirely new chapter in the history of work. It’s not just that things feel, ahem, a bit more uncertain than they used to; for many of us, the entire experience of work feels different too, with the rise of hybrid and remote employment introducing all sorts of new challenges around office etiquette, boundaries, and the-ever elusive “work-life balance.” We brought on UK-based business, tech, and culture journalist Anna Codrea-Rado — author of a fantastic book about freelancing, creator of the newsletter A-Mail, and co-host of Is this Working?, our all-time favorite podcast about work — to help us make sense of this strangely chaotic and confusing moment in the post-pandemic work landscape.We discuss how the culture of work has changed since the heady glory days of the r/antiwork subreddit (remember all of those viral news stories about people quitting their jobs via text?); the dystopian surveillance mechanisms and non-stop intrusions on our time that make our experience of remote work so exhausting; and some of the darker realities lurking beneath shiny new labor paradigms like the four-day work week and DAOs. Anna also opens up her own journey with work over the years, and the meta experience of navigating self-employment while writing and podcasting about it for a living.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe