You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos… - Anne Helen Petersen

We can understand that if companies actually want to cultivate that ever-alluring “good” company culture, they have to rethink not just the amenities and office space they’re providing their employees but the entire style of work, the whole ethos of optimization and presentism. Doing so will demand authentically embracing flexibility, as we discussed in the last chapter. But it will also mean reconsidering core values beyond “growth” and “scale,” and understanding that you cannot compel or surveil your way to sustained, quality productivity. Productivity is the by-product of a workforce that has had its essential needs met.

The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.

But unruliness – in its many manifestations, small and large, in action, in representation, in language – feels more important, more necessary, than ever.