The Work Dogma and Contraction of the Existential Imagination

I found this argument, in David Frayne’s excellent Refusal of Work, deeply persuasive. From pg 110:

Employment itself can be held partly responsible for the negative experiences of joblessness because, in allowing people only a limited space in which to cultivate other interests, skills and social ties, full-time jobs can often leave people with few personal and social resources to fall back on.

In contemporary capitalism, the notion of a public life has become so synonymous with paid work that it has indeed become difficult to imagine other ways in which a person might transcend the isolation of a purely private existence.