What Are We Working For? Alienation and the Modern Struggle for Meaning

This piece was originally published in the May 2025 issue of Pandora Curated.

Illustration by Yashashree A

In our world, which glorifies productivity while offering little stability, many people find themselves working harder than ever yet feeling more disconnected from their labour. Workers are in a tiresome, perpetual loop of production, performance and care, giving constantly while gaining little in return. Modern work has become a profound site of alienation — not simply because our jobs exist in a precarious, underpaid economy, but because the very systems they are embedded in erode meaning, community, and purpose. 

Drawing on critical theory and lived experience, it becomes clear that contemporary alienation is shaped by emerging forces: spatial and social fragmentation, post-modern risk, and the commodification of both work and life. Perhaps in re-defining ‘work’, we can understand how care and collectivity point us toward a more humane social system, and find true meaning in our labour. 

It's no accident that modern employment is precarious in a world that postmodernists describe as a ‘risk society’ — a condition in which individuals are left to navigate systemic insecurities such as climate change and unstable work with little communal or infrastructural backing (Beck,1992). Being in the contemporary world is akin to a game of cards in Baumans' (2000) eyes, where the cards are held extremely close to one’s chest; there is no stable axis around which to fix identity, only a deepening of individualisation.  People no longer feel included in a larger global vision, despite what globalisation implies, while they work with no sense of purpose or direction. Why, then, do we still feel alienated in an advanced society, and what does this mean for workers today? 

The Postmodern Condition of Alienation 

Traditionally, work has been conceived as a predictable life stage where one seeks identity and purpose. While these jobs still exist, we are now witnessing a growing transnational class and gig economy that requires workers to constantly adapt to flexible, precarious roles within sprawling transnational systems. Alienation no longer manifests solely as physical drudgery and low wages, but as zero-hour contracts at chain supermarkets — employment detached from both product and purpose. The alienation persists, but its symptoms have become increasingly internalised. 

In this climate, one cannot rely on the historical model of the ‘proletarian productive worker’ — people see themselves as distinct from this figure; they are more individual and have more potential. Wage labour's ‘risks’ and bureaucracy do not produce the same burning unionisation or commonality that material impoverishment or rigorous labour do. 

Currently, when alienation is felt, workers no longer turn to unions or political party membership, membership in the former declining by over 60% in the UK since the 1980s (2022). Instead, they resort to individually focused medical and psychotherapeutic remedies and online spaces. Life then becomes a postmodern shopping mall where we gain identity through consumption and aesthetics when our jobs fail to grant it to us. You become the problem, not your job.

It seems paradoxical that this shift, of class losing its base in subculture and unionisation, is occurring when inequality is rising at unprecedented levels (Oxfam, 2025). We surrender ourselves to alienation, as it no longer feels possible to take a stand against power, as the powerful no longer refer to your office boss but a transnational corporation and a set of global elites who will simply move their capital where they please. This is not a power that you can hold accountable; this is not a power that wants to nurture your being. They require you to be disengaged and are acting to keep you this way — hence, any yearning for direct action and mutual aid is a separate activity, one exterior to work.

Nonetheless, there is hope that mechanisms of therapy and personal care, which are currently absorbed into commodified, individualistic models, may be redeveloped as sites of resistance to alienation. Instead of attributing trauma and mental health issues to individualist projects of the self, which require healing to recuperate as workers, we may employ these methodologies to channel dissent for structures perpetuating harm. 

Self-care can then be a radical challenge to alienation, as Audre Lorde famously advocated for, if one positions oneself as a social being, healing oneself from oppressive suffering to help others do the same. In a system that dehumanises and neglects workers at every turn, taking time to affirm your needs, health, and spirit is a critical act of defiance. It also may be the first step towards change, as identifying one's suffering as societal enables a new lens of collective understanding and prompts inventive modes of living beyond individualised harm. 

Spatiality and Alienation 

In our contemporary climate, alienation is not only felt or manifested in politics but built into work via our cities and architecture. Work exists as a separate, unique realm, where offices are zoned separately from suburban housing, where one must commute to a new, secondary location. Instead of work being embedded and fundamental to our communities, both spatially and emotionally, it is strategically ripped away from us. Many workers then attribute wellbeing issues to a lack of contact or relations with their team (2022). Through this structure, people no longer feel part of something greater than themselves or even minutely social; any ‘drinks after work’ culture is eroded when many employees have a gruelling commute in the evening.

Instead, workers sit in buildings high off the ground, away from home, and things of value to them. Interestingly, the very beginning of capitalism, the Great Transformation, involved the separation of labourers from the sources of their livelihoods. The modern labour market is successfully reconceptualising this dynamic by removing workers’ access and control over their workspace and resources to a separate, distinct sphere, which they can only access in the presence of a securitised network of managers. In Marxist thinking, work will always be alienating via this accumulation of resources from workers to owners, yet it remains striking that contemporary employers are instilling this via a geographical, infrastructural isolation of workers.

Through the sociology of organisational space, we realise how the very architecture of these buildings serves to reinforce the owner/worker hierarchy. Offices often contain an almost panopticon-like model of constant supervision, dictating norms around who can move where and when. They host isolated desks that undermine efforts of cooperation, with limited personalisation or opportunity for shared co-creation of ideas and knowledge (Halford, 2020). This model expands the phenomenon of ‘McDonaldisation’ to spatiality, where every town is dominated by the same architectural visuals, chain businesses and loss of feeling and tradition by producing a normative model of what an ‘office’ should or shouldn't look like. In these environments, what happens to workers' experience of spatiality and community building?

Although the work of the past was uniquely alienating in its ways, an ethnographic study of Northern England exposes the saddening disparity between the way older mining generations found their work to produce a sense of ‘place’ in their town, generating tangible social bonds, while younger people in modern service work are left feeling isolated and estranged from both the companies they work for and the spaces they inhabit (Bennett, 2020). Through this lens, it is important to consider how community and work are constitutive of each other. Thus, via a critical reorganisation of labour structures, work can become one of the focal mechanisms through which shared identity, place and tradition are formed — this need not be alienating, but creative and autonomous. 

Design and architecture can play an invaluable role in this shift, drawing from biophilic design, which recognises humans as scientifically connected to the environments they inhabit (Zhong et al.). By building green, light spaces with indigenous materials, biophilia heralds place-based relationships as foundational, avoiding the monolithic structures that dominate and instead cherishing the local. In the process, wellbeing, culture and sustainability are maintained, as well as a reduction in feelings of alienation.

Bullshit Jobs and the Lack of Social Purpose

If the space doesn’t alienate you, the nature of your work and its social utility may. Some people are nurses, builders and babysitters and find their work to be meaningful. Others simply have bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2018), where the labour performed has no tangible impact, and alienation is pervasive. For many, work is no longer interesting! People identify with tasks that challenge them, that make them think and innovate. 

However, in a flexible market with mobile workers, machinery dominates and has to be simple for anyone to use. In this climate, difficulty becomes a disruption, a nuisance, to the hyperproductive environment we have enshrined. Workers then become indifferent, with no attachment or focus on their tasks. 

Instead of the 15-hour workweek that was dreamed of for our technological age, millions of bureaucratic jobs are being invented to grant new status to a managerial class. If we were to question the nature of bullshit jobs and the alienation they cause, we would have to confront three things. First, many of the most important jobs in society are some of the least respected and lowest paid, such as cleaners, carers, or farmers. Secondly, large and wealthy sectors of the economy exist purely to present a fictitious status without delivering anything of value to society. And finally, and most dangerously, we could all be ‘working’ a whole lot less. 

The Ideology and Glorification of Work

In this environment of both bureaucratic and labour-intensive alienating careers, people not only sense emotionally that they are a ‘cog in a machine’, but also rationally announce it. But how does capitalism adapt to this announcement, this awareness of exploitation? 

They produce an ideology, a normative philosophy, regarding work. One that says that work is meaningful and virtuous simply because it is work. The hilarity of this is obvious in its reliance on circular reasoning — work is valuable, but why? Because work is hard. Why is work hard? Because it has value. 

Then, as Graeber (2018) argues, the uselessness of some work itself becomes a virtue, as anything making work fulfilling or valuable undermines the disciplinary role of work in our life course. This valorising of work in and of itself becomes almost religious. And in a way, it is, as Weber famously argued, the Protestant focus on work ethic motivated the onslaught of capitalism, with many believers accumulating money to prove that God was blessing them. But for many today, there is no God to work for, simply the worship of production and work itself. 

For many, the secular dogma of ‘hustle culture’ has replaced the void of spiritual faith in sustaining capitalism, with Tate-esque figures heralding hard work as the mechanism through which one advances and actualises — making work a private, individualist project, no longer a theological one implying ascetic devotion to a greater force, but instead an idolising of the self. 

The Creative Industry and Alienation

Hence, perhaps we are conceiving of ‘work’ entirely incorrectly. Lewis Hyde (1983) claims that work is distinct from labour; work is temporally bound, measured by the hour, while labour follows an independent trajectory. Work is often rewarded with money, but the reward for labour is transformation, like writing a poem, raising a child, or resolving crises. Creative, but difficult, tasks. Bureaucracies manage to make work out of what was labour. Teachers are bound to emails and reports, not the children they care for. 

The creative industry is no anomaly in this case. Despite being idolised as a realm of freedom and creativity, Fisher (2009) reminds us that the arts industry has, in many ways, become a factory of reproduction and regurgitated themes. Formulaic music dominates, with songs created simply for TikTok soundbites. Artists are no longer free to pursue their inclination for art itself, but for algorithms and trends. If you fail to conform, you fail to survive and must find sustenance elsewhere. 

In this realm, alienation takes hybrid forms, monopolising the process (tailored to a hyper-awareness of trends and fast-paced production), the product (that doesn’t reflect an authentic vision), other artists (whom they are promoted to compete with in an attention economy), and themselves (flattening their identities into a consumable performance). 

This algorithmic governance not only dictates the product but also the way creators view themselves. The very conditions of digital labour, with precarious and relentless demands for content, obsession with engagement, structure the creative act as a form of un(der)paid work. 

Hence, this digital creative economy produces alienation in a particularly postmodern fashion: one can feel productive and successful while being systemically exhausted or erased. When the curation of an artistic persona and identity becomes as valuable as the art itself, the individual becomes a product and can be bought and sold, monetised and glorified in the same way. This is a dehumanisation so acutely alienating, blurring the line between self-expression and self-exploitation, where to be seen is to be consumed, and to create is to commodify one's very being. 

Similarly, local industry and traditional trades are being eroded by the same process. When SHEIN pumps out thousands of new items each day (2021), refinement of design and creative experimentation die, while speed and surplus thrive. Here, the product is disposable, the process meagre and workers are alienated from their humanity via repetitive, surveilled, and dehumanising labour. 

Not only are workers detached from their selfhood, but they are also estranged from others in a complex supply chain, never meeting those who buy their product or seeing the economic fruits of their labour. This very disconnect marks a saddening departure from the craftsmanship and community that should define the arts and local industries, instead reflecting the intensification of alienation under neoliberal, digital and deregulated markets.

Redefining Work Through a Critical Lens

In these conditions, it’s often difficult to reconcile jobs as positive or beyond alienation. It then remains helpful to situate your feelings within activist tradition and thought, to relocate how these sentiments have been challenged and reconceptualised throughout capitalism’s history. The effort to redefine ‘labour’ and ‘work’ as something meaningful and bound by passion is particularly championed by feminist communities, which have long advocated for the validation of emotional and domestic care work. 

It’s thus no wonder that they find it utterly violating and unethical that bullshit jobs are rewarded more than the tiresome, uncompensated labour they have performed for centuries on end. Graeber hoped for a ‘revolt of the caring classes’, of people who desire jobs that make a difference but understand that these jobs are underpaid and underappreciated. The task is to transform this system. To acknowledge alienation in contemporary work is to stop and say: This is illogical — who is being helped? Who is making a change?

A further reconceptualisation comes from Eula Biss (2020), who defines work by ‘service’. We don't like in our individualist, rationalist culture to ever see ourselves as in service to or reliant on anything else. We want to imagine ourselves as fragmented but flourishing entities. And I understand; in a society where service generally means submission to a boss who disrespects you and a job that negates your purpose or humanity, it’s a struggle to change our minds. But truly, we are in service to every being we encounter, every point we stand upon, and the very world we inhabit. But what does this look like?

 An utter reevaluation of our economic model is required to recentre the values of care, collaboration and stewardship. Our promising route is cooperativism, worker-owned enterprises such as Spain's Mondragon federation or Italy’s Emilia-Romagna social co-ops, demonstrating how democratic governance and profit-sharing can provide the bridge between the self and the work. 

Alongside cooperatives, participatory economies and participatory budgeting experiments, such as in Porto Alegre, Brazil, show how granting direct decision-making power over resource allocation builds community solidarity and aligns production with genuine social needs. 

These changes can seem unachievable, but tried and tested policies like universal basic income and a shorter workweek can present work as a voluntary, beneficial social act, not a disciplined survival mechanism. Feminist models of distributed care, such as self-help networks and collective parenting organisations, illustrate how positioning care work as a collective responsibility can celebrate traditionally undervalued work and strengthen shared bonds. Grassroots and time banking systems, where skills and hours are exchanged, not bought, conceive work as a space for people and needs, not products and profits.

To truly reconsider work is to reconnect, ground ourselves, and return to the sanctity of life and living. Work should be about flourishing, creativity, and contributing to life’s joy, rather than perpetuating alienation. Reframing work as a service to the world might be where true fulfilment resides.

Edited by the Curated Editorial Team

Harriet Sanderson (she/her) is a Politics and Sociology student at the University of Edinburgh and a contributor to Pandora Curated. She is a writer interested in protest politics, direct action, and mutual aid, and investigates how the ‘local’ is contextualised within wider geopolitical shifts. She is passionate about bridging academic theory and lived experiences, and leans into this paradox in her writing.

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Keywords: Workplace Alienation, Modern Work Culture Critique, Bullshit Jobs Theory, Postmodern Condition of Labour, Creative Industry Exploitation, Mental Health and Work, Meaningful Work vs. Meaningless Jobs, David Graeber Bullshit Jobs, Alienation in the Gig Economy, Spatial Alienation at Work, Capitalism and Mental Health, Precarious Employment Effects, Care Work and Feminist Economics, Digital Labour Alienation, Hustle Culture Criticism, Redefining Work in Capitalism, Biophilic Design and Workplace Wellbeing, Worker-Owned Cooperatives Model, Participatory Economics Examples, Audre Lorde Self-Care Resistance.