Through the Ecologies of Care project, we have already reflected extensively on the biocapitalist consequences of the precarious reality we inhabit.
From the 1980s onward—and even more so from the mid-1990s—the flexibilization of labor was widely promoted as an urgent and inevitable necessity, intrinsic to the development of the new post-Fordist economic, productive, and organizational system.
Writing phrases such as “highly adaptable” or “able to manage high levels of stress” on our résumés seems to function as a guarantee of employability.
Yet the neoliberal translation of the word flexibility appears much closer to the blurring of the boundaries between private and professional life, to the liquidity between intimate and performative spaces, between affective relationships and entrepreneurial selfhood, than to the promise of overcoming global economic crises by responding efficiently to market instability and thereby contributing to greater collective well-being.
“Processes of labor flexibilization were initially presented precisely as a solution for women, both in response to their low participation in paid employment in Italy (46.3% in 2009, compared with the European average of 58.4%) and as a way of addressing work-life balance, while taking for granted men’s absence from domestic and care work. The dominant rhetoric surrounding atypical employment thus portrayed different forms of flexible work as particularly advantageous for women’s participation in the labor market.”
What we had perhaps not reflected on enough is the widespread sense of guilt, the collective and persistent exhaustion that this social process has been capable of generating.
It only took a day at the beach to remind us, because “the society of exhaustion […] has turned even the beaches of Bali into labor camps.”
In The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han identifies the paradigm shift between the Fordist “immunological” society and our own, characterized by four defining disorders: depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, and burnout. The key difference is that the former was structured around external threats—persistent viruses that could be fought through immunological defenses—whereas the latter internalizes those very threats.
“The contemporary subject is no longer constrained from the outside but exploits itself from within. The postmodern individual no longer obeys a repressive authority but rather an internalized imperative of performance, convinced that they are acting out of choice and thereby expressing their own freedom.”
This is the crucial point: the neoliberal subject does not perceive their condition as oppressive because power no longer operates primarily through prohibition but through an excess of possibilities.
Put differently: not only are we exploited by systemic precarity—we actively participate in reproducing the very system that generates it. The result is guilt over leisure time, self-judgment for moments of enjoyment that serve no professional purpose, and a constant drive toward ever greater specialization.
Our résumé gradually takes on the form of an autobiography, where the intervals between jobs, the empty spaces in our lives, become sources of frustration and diminished self-worth.
Guilt manifests itself not merely as a secondary effect of precarity but as a structural condition of lived time. Unproductive time is never fully free; instead, it remains suspended within a state of perpetual evaluation. What should be rest is immediately recast as a missed opportunity, as time stolen from becoming one’s “best self.” The result is an internalization of judgment that transforms the individual into a mechanism of self-surveillance: every pause requires justification, every activity unrelated to performance must be translated into indirect utility. Even leisure becomes a space of assessment, where one’s value is measured not by who one is, but by who one might become.
One could conclude with an imaginative or motivational leap, arguing that recognizing this condition is the first step toward overcoming it. Yet could not that very impulse itself constitute another way of sustaining the machinery of production?
Bibliografia
- Price, Devon, Laziness Does Not Exist, Atria Books, New York 2021.
- Han, Byung-Chul, La società della stanchezza, trad. it. di Federico Bucci, Nottetempo, Milano 2012
- Annalisa Murgia, Dalla precarietà lavorativa alla precarietà sociale. Biografie in transito tra lavoro e non lavoro ,I libri di Emile
- Murgia, A., Poggio, B. (2012) “I giovani tra lavoro e non lavoro. Storie di equilibri instabili in una prospettiva di genere” in Sociologia del lavoro, n. 124, pp. 166-181
Autrice: Francesca Cannone
