the arcane and ritualised customer service practices that shape a great deal of contemporary work leave people detached from the tasks their jobs involve or should involve, and from their own selves. No wonder so many of today’s workers are so miserable.

Even for the most creative workers, autonomy has turned out to be transitory and unsustainable, or it has been an effect of identification with employers’ interests.

Our political and cultural priorities aren’t about making life more enjoyable but about getting ahead, attaining bigger and better things, “having it all.” But the system is rigged: Men have long been able to “have it all” because of free female labor.

The tension between the near impossibility of working in a particular calling or vocation across the course of a lifetime and the ideology that finding one’s particular calling is central to achieving salvation (or even this-worldly happiness) is mitigated in two ways: first, an increased emphasis on working on the self, and second, the ideal that