We should be striving to work less, not toiling until we drop

Progress wasn't supposed to mean chasing an ever-receding prospect of retirement. It's time to challenge this bleak vision.

Work already consumes too much of our lives:L for the next generation, it could consume even more. The state pension age will be bumped up to 66 by 2020; and according to experts reacting to the government's review of the state retirements age, those lucky young things now joining the world of employment could be waiting into their 70s for a state pension. An inevitable byproduct of rising life expectancy, they say; but surely a gift of progress should be the granting of more healthy years of leisure, not fewer.

It gets worse: the pensions company Royal London says average earners who from the unlikely age of 22 put aside money for retirement will find themselves working until around the age of 77 if they wish to enjoy the same standard of living their parents did on retiring. In some parts of Britain, that magic could be 81.

Sixty years of nonstop work, of being a servant to others, of personal freedom restricted and regulated. Imagine turning 61 and realizing that you still have another two decades to go.

We should be aspiring to a more balanced life: a period of contributing to the nation before decades of global sightseeing, babysitting for grandchildren, back-to-back boxsets and quality time with partners. Scrap those images for septuagenarians chained to desks, performing brain surgery or staking shelves, and tell me you don't shudder. Will employers even be willing to take on workers of that vintage?

In any case, we already work too much. Research released by the TUC last week showed that British workers put in unpaid overtime worth 31.5bn pounds last year. Five million toiled an average of 7.7 hours a week for zilch. To compensate them for this unpaid labor would mean - on an average wage - an extra 6,114 pounds on their pay cheques a year. In the public sector, workers are compelled to donate even more of their labor for nothing: they make up a quarter of the workforce but account for a third of all unpaid overtime. Ever more employees are working excessive hours, defined as more than 48 a week; 3.4 million workers (excluding the self-employed) now work excessive hours, a jump of 15% since 2010, after a long period of decline. Out of 29 European countries surveyed by Eurostat, British workers work among the longest hours.

This simply cannot be good for us. It's hardly a surprise that 9.9 million days were lost to work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2014/15, though I suspect many suffer in silence. But it is surely time that can be better spent: hours robbed from watching children grow up, taking up new hobbies, widening cultural horizons, or just catching up with sleep. (Why not?)

Should we resign ourselves to a bleak future of work devouring even our old age? Surely we should start planning for a world where we work less, rather than more. That's exactly what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's compelling book, Inventing the Future, asks us to do. At the center of their vision is a society where our lives no longer revolve around work. Work represents the loss of our autonomy, they point out, where we are under the control of bosses and employers: "a full one-third of our adult lives is spent in submission to them." Their alternative is not laziness: reading a book or playing sport all require effort, "but these are things we freely do". As we work less, our lives become our own.

It was once taken for granted that progress and working less would go hand in hand. At the outset of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes suggested we would be working only 15 hours a week by now; but the average full-time British worker today puts in nearly 28 hours more than that. It was presumed that advances in technology would reduce the need for human labor : actually, it can fuel demand, Srnicek and Williams point out that the arrival of the personal computer led to the creation of more than 1,500 new types of job.

The postwar western world enjoyed near-full employment, an era that has long since passed. Not only are unemployment and inactivity rates higher than they once were, but work has become more precarious, with zero-hours contract, insecure self-employment and reluctant part-time workers. As srnicek and Williams explain, having large numbers of people without secure work helps keep in line those with work. The trend, they believe, will surely be towards even more precarious work.

This isn't alarmism. The TImes columnist Philip Collins points to research that technology could, in the next 20 years, mean the automation of 60% of retail jobs. Because technology is destroying more jobs than it is creating, 11m jobs could go.

But threats can be opportunities too. For a long time, the left has stopped thinking about how we build a different sort of society. We know what we are against, but not what we are for. The horrors of Stalinist totalitarianism made grand visions of society rather unappealing. A new right that is bursting with intellectual zest, and the curtailing of the power of organized labor and forms of collective solidarity - a model of globalization that seems to put severe limits on what the state can do - have all conspired to make it harder to imagine building a radically different sort of society.

Refreshing, then, to hear alternatives, like Srnicek and William's manifesto for change. Rather than regarding the march of the robots as an existential threat, they demand the automation of the entire economy. Wealth would still be created - albeit by an army of machines - but we would be freed from the "drudgery of work". In addition, the working week has to be severely cut back. To make this work, the social security system needs a dramatic overhaul. Basic income - where we all are given a payment from the state as a right of citizenship - should be introduced. It is an idea that is already creeping out of the political mainstream: Labor's Jonathan Reynols, no Corbynite, is among basic-income converts.

We have a choice: a society where work becomes ever more dominant even as it becomes ever more precarious, where some work until they drop and others are demonized for being unable to work; or a society where we can realize our full potential in every sense, with more time for leisure, for love, for each other. I choose the latter.