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Hasn’t lockdown been just the greatest thing ever? Staying at home on full pay, sitting on the couch in your pyjamas with your laptop, waiting for the latest Uber Eats or Amazon delivery. Sure, the kids got underfoot, but that’s nothing an iPad or Nintendo Switch can’t take care of.
That was the life!
At least it was, if you were a middle-class, urban, university-educated, almost certainly publicly employed professional. Lockdown was a sweet, sweet deal.
No wonder they don’t want it to end.
Call it what you like – the Great Resignation, the Great Vacation, the Great Reshuffle – but it’s not easy to ignore the way many people across age groups and labour sectors are wondering if it’s possible to be part of the Great Capitalist System while retaining mental health, family relationships and the right to work without anxiety or fear.
“Across age groups and labour sectors”? In fact, it’s a very specific class who have the luxury of furrowing their brows about “the Great Capitalist System”, while casually browsing their Twitter feed on their latest-model iPhone and sipping a latte at their favourite chi-chi ethnic café in the inner city.
The “Great Uncoupling” from work is most obvious among professionals and knowledge workers, but it’s there too in frontline workers in hospitality and the care sectors. Many are simply physically and emotionally drained, but that weariness prompts a recalculation about the pressures of a structured workplace. Perhaps they too will look for jobs where they can go into the office a couple of days a week and operate more freely at home or in a nearby hub on the other three.
Because, yes, it’s just so easy to switch careers when you’re a woman with a Cert III education working in aged care or a tradie who took up the tools straight after high school.
Work still matters – and not just financially – but for many people it’s beginning to lack the addictive quality that defined professional careers in the past 20 or so years. Work remains a key element of identity and a source of meaning as well as money, but the Great Love Affair is waning.
The Australian
Actually, for the 99% of us who aren’t double-degreed Boomers writing newspaper columns, work is very much about keeping a roof over our heads, filling the petrol tank and paying the electricity bill (both of which expenses have doubled, largely thanks to the infatuations of “anti Capitalists”) and sending the kids to school.
If nothing else shows how out of touch the Laptop Class elitists really are, consider the two examples Helen Trinca cites as icons of the “Great Resignation”: a state premier and a world No. 1 tennis player.
The Laptop Class are the most out-of-touch elite since Marie Antoinette played at being a milkmaid in the Hameau de la Reine.
