If your job tells you that you are “family”, run. In Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe explores how thinking about work as a passion and a labor of love obscures the exploitative nature of work.

In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Marxist feminist scholar Kathi Weeks lays into the idea that the Protestant work ethic is necessary or natural. Instead, she outlines how our devotion to the idea that our system of labor is perfect, right, or natural is keeping us in a state of exploitation. In this book she sets the stage fo why anti-work politics are necessary and beneficial. Weeks also introduced me to the idea of a post-work imaginary, a space where we imagine a world outside of work.

Much of my work centers on the work/anti-work experiences of Black women. Stephanie Perry is a content creator who hosts weekly livestreams where she encourages Black women to shift their relationship to work and live lives of ease. Through her weekly livestreams and the conference ExodUS Summit, co-founded with Roshida Dowe, Perry leads Black women to lives of location and time independence.