Debt isn't just what you owe - it's an architecture of obedience. It colonises your time and keeps you trapped in bullshit jobs.
But in ancient societies, they knew permanent debt would destroy citizenship, so what can we learn from that?
We all live inside the cage of modern work culture, but that cage doesn't confine everyone equally. This episode asks: whose exhaustion counts as virtue, and whose is simply erased? Who gets to perform the sacrifice of overwork, and who is the sacrifice itself?
From the masculine spectacle of Musk and Zuckerberg's 100-hour weeks to the corporate Cool Girl who laughs at sexist jokes to survive, we trace how the system recruits us - all of us - into performing our own oppression. We explore the invisible rules that were never designed for most of us to win, the sycophantic rituals that keep hierarchies intact, and why the WGA strike matters as proof that collective action works even when we're exhausted.
Why are we so exhausted we can only imagine how to hustle harder rather than imagine alternatives?
In this episode, i explore how corporate culture transformed exhaustion from side effect to strategy. From the absurdist theatre of return-to-office mandates to tech billionaires who preach 100-hour weeks whilst paying others to play their video games, i examine how the weaponisation of work keeps us too tired to resist.
Drawing on Graeber, Arendt, and my own experience in toxic tech culture, i explore how arbitrary rules, hyperemployment, and the performance of busyness create an altar of exhaustion we're all sacrificing to.
What makes play different from games?
Play and craft offer the power to transform us. Work used to house the technology that allowed us to transition from childhood into autonomous adulthood. But today's work no longer delivers transformation, instead we are stuck in a perpetual adolescence.
This episode is historical - what was the role of work in early societies? How did Christianity influence labour and play? And what does the modern workplace have to do with plantations?
Watch a Kwakiutl potlatch here
Full show notes per post found at YourLocalAnthropologist.com
Why do we work this much? Even hunters and gatherers had shorter work days than us. Play is the crucial ingredient for breakthroughs and new ideas, so why don't we do it more?
This is the first in the series to deconstruct how we got here.
Full series can be read on https://www.yourlocalanthropologist.com/
Elina can be found creating new things
References:
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Bennett, S. (1971) 'An exploratory model of play', American Anthropologist, 73(1), pp. 45-58.
Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Allen Lane.
Graeber, D. (2020) 'After the pandemic, we can't go back to sleep', Jacobin, March. Available at: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-graeber-coronavirus-pandemic-economy (Accessed: 10 January 2025).
Hamayon, R. (2016) Why We Play: An Anthropological Study. Chicago: HAU Books.
Elina's been dying to figure out why we don't construct better worlds. Armed with a politics of hope and knowledge of our histories, she's hoping to find ways of solving this crisis of imagination.