Fiction’s Role in the Rise of the Anti-Work Movement

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In recent years we’ve witnessed the rise and fall of hustle culture, which was criticised, parodied, and memed into oblivion. More recently we seem to be seeing the same level of criticism levelled at traditional jobs and workplaces. Online trends like the ‘lazy girl job’, the cutesy name for a job with decent pay for minimal effort, and viral LinkedIn posts from out-of-touch CEOs and solidifying LinkedIn’s place as the most cringe social media platform, show how contemporary work culture is being questioned. This ‘anti-work’ movement is growing on platforms like Youtube, Reddit and TikTok, and more and more of our culture and entertainment is starting to reflect this, particularly literary fiction over the past few years with releases like Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, Several People Are Typing by Calum Katsulke, Temporary by Hilary Leichter, Finna by Nino Cipri, and We Had To Remove This Post by Hannah Bervoets all falling into this genre.

Novels that explore the workplace, its absurdities and its cruelties aren’t new, but the sudden recent rise seems to be indicative of the rising tide of anti-work sentiment. Take classics like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a novella about a man who feels so dehumanised by his work as a travelling salesman that he transforms into a giant insect. Or Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener whose titular character’s famous line “I would prefer not to” in the face of his Wall Street boss’s demands still reads like a rallying cry for those beaten down by endless Zoom break-out rooms, team days out, and meetings that could have been emails.

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A lot of this new anti-work fiction isn’t just critical, but follows in the footsteps of writers like Kafka by leaning into the absurd nature of contemporary work culture, like Hilary Leichter’s Temporary and Cakum Katsulke’s Several People Are Typing. Temporary follows a woman doing increasingly insane temp work, from endlessly shining shoes to swabbing the decks of a pirate ship, commenting on the simultaneous freedom and drudgery of temporary work in a culture obsessed with the increasingly elusive ‘stable career’. Katsulke’s novel has an even more surreal premise as the central character’s consciousness gets uploaded to his company’s Slack channel – a truly on-the-nose examination of the murkiness of work/life balance in a ‘work from home’ era. In Temporary, Leichter writes "there is nothing more personal than doing your job" which speaks to the way in which we are so often seen as defined by our work, its job title, its hours, its salary, and the fact that so much of our lives will be spent working. The surreality of Katsulke’s protagonist’s predicament also speaks to the tension between the aspirational, fulfilling, and identity-defining careers and the demands this can place on your time outside of work in a culture where we are expected to be always contactable.

Work truly is one of the most personal things we experience, yet we are encouraged to compartmentalise it away from our ‘real’ lives. What purpose does this serve? We can’t just leave work at the office when we are increasingly encouraged to think about colleagues as family and our work as our identity. This is the entire plot to last year’s riotously successful, surrealist TV series Severance, after all.

What is poignant about the trend in fiction writing is that a significant number of these new books which explore our relationship with work that have become popular are from Japanese authors, both new releases and new English translations. Books like Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, and Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi. Japan is known for having a fraught relationship with work. A 2018 study showed that on average Japanese workers only took 52% of their allotted annual leave for fear of judgement from colleagues or bosses. Even those in the high office are not immune from this pressure, as in 2019 Japan’s environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi faced calls to resign after announcing his plans to take paternity leave. There’s even the term ‘karoshi’, death by overwork, which is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a problem particular to Japan.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that a lot of Japanese literature explores work culture, but why are those books making it so big in translation? So much Japanese literature that becomes popular in the West has surreal, absurd, or magical realist features, with publishers perhaps looking to replicate the huge success of Haruki Murakami in the Western market. Also popular are what host of Reading Women podcast Sachi Argabright called “slice-of-life stories”, often slim and quiet novels that follow a character’s mundane routines. What both styles have in common is their ability to cut straight to the absurdities of modern work culture, whether it’s by dissolving reality so that only an immense industrial factory remains or through attention to the minutiae of everyday life in all its beauty and monotony.

“Work truly is one of the most personal things we experience, yet we are encouraged to compartmentalise it away from our ‘real’ lives. What purpose does this serve?”

Over the past few years anti-work and anti-capitalist ideas have become more mainstream despite, or perhaps because of, us being under an increasingly right-wing government in the UK and experiencing a growth in hostile attitudes and legislation against workers and unions. The huge amount of strikes we have seen over the past few years indicate mass discontent at working conditions in the UK. But as rail, teacher, and university strikes are frequently becoming a new normal - as employers do little to meet worker demands - the avenues to show this discontent are narrowing and, crucially, losing public enthusiasm.

Could this new wave of anti-work fiction help or is it just another trend manufactured by publishers to shift stock? The answer is probably a bit of both. More criticism and exposure of the absurdities and cruelties of work culture can only be a good thing – extra points for these books being genuinely entertaining and often hilarious to read. But it seems ironic that a micro-genre focusing around resisting work culture and capitalist rhetoric has become popular and profitable for publishers, only contributing to the cycles of capitalist production the books criticise. 

It’s the same problem we face again and again: if something radical is gaining momentum then we are sure to deradicalise it through commodification. But the anti-work movement is growing and it might be much harder to commercialise something that centres around removing oneself from commercial and corporate spaces - but perhaps that kind of hope is only possible in a fictional world. 

Words: Natalie Wall