I’m Home, I’m Working
Essays on Home, Labor, Leisure, and Rest as Resistance
The distance between labor time and leisure time, the demarcation between the spaces of the home and the office, between the public and the private are blurred, often impossible to distinguish. Work is now transportable under a sociopolitical system that values us solely when we produce, so every crevice of the home is converted into a potential office. Even sleep, rest, and leisure have been transformed. We rest so that we may recommence work refreshed, energised, in the optimum state for productivity. But this rest has become commodified too; it is a luxury product we must work hard to afford.
I’m Home, I’m Working collects essays and artwork that reflect on how labor and capitalist logic have infiltrated and restructured our relationships with our homes. Finally, it proposes the idea of rest as one of the many acts we must perform collectively to resist and dismantle an inherently exploitative system.
“Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.”
— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness