Could Long Covid lead to the rise of a four-day work-week?
Alongside being constantly exhausted, in pain and out of breath, one of the hardest things about having long Covid is finding self-worth outside the world of work. I’m one of nearly 2 million people in the UK and 20 million in the US now facing this challenge. It’s one that other disabled people know well: our culture glorifies work, often at the expense of health. Remember all those dreams of change we entertained at the start of the pandemic? Now I’m wondering: could Covid-19’s long tail usher in a deeper shift away from our work-obsessed culture?
The time is right for one. Before the pandemic, we had already been working too long and too hard. British workers, for example, put in two and a half weeks more work per year than the average European, and half of our workplace absences are caused by stress, anxiety or depression. Meanwhile in the US, workers spend an extra four hours a week at work, with three-quarters of workers experiencing significant workplace stress.
I see it clearly in my friends in their early 20s, having to choose between tedious but self-preserving service work and more “creative” jobs that consume their lives. So many of them, struggling with anxiety and depression, will base how good they feel about themselves today on how “productive” they have been. Pleasure has become guilty; rest, a moment of failure; and burnout, an almost inevitable milestone.
How did we get here? Some – most famously the theorist Max Weber – trace it all the way back to the rise of Protestantism in the 16th century. Others point to the 20th-century propaganda campaigns that followed each of the world wars, recasting work as a patriotic duty. More recently, the “benefit scrounger” discourse of the 2010s and the entrepreneurial
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