The golden mean of industriousness

It is a cliché of our times that work has wormed its way into the home, eating away at our free time. On this view we are, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s words, “born free, but everywhere are in chains”. With Wi-Fi and a smartphone, you are never really away from your office if something needs doing. Indeed, the office, a place where you go to work, is a thing of the past for many – it has become an abstract concept, a virtual set of relations, not a physical space. We just work where we happen to be, interacting with co-workers, clients, and the public in a complex web of relations. We receive emails and phone calls,