好英语网为什么每个人都可以“反工作”
The world’s long-suffering workers have finally gained some measure of leverage over their bosses, and their new power is a glorious thing to behold.
全世界长期受苦的工人们终于在一定程度上获得了对老板的影响力，这份新的力量非常可观。
In South Korea this week, tens of thousands of union members staged a one-day strike to demand better benefits and protections for temporary and contract workers. In Britain, where Brexit has contributed to severe shortages of goods and labor, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has been taking dubious credit for what he calls a new era of higher pay.
本周在韩国，数万名工会成员举行了为期一天的罢工，要求为临时工和合同工提供更好的福利和保护。在英国，脱欧导致了商品和劳动力的严重短缺，首相鲍里斯·约翰逊(Boris Johnson)称这是一个高工资的新时代，并且这是他的功劳——这一点存疑。
And in the United States, a record nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, according to the Labor Department, and more than 10 million positions were vacant — slightly down from July, when about 11 million jobs needed filling. The shortage of workers has led to a growth in wages that has surpassed many economists’ expectations, and seems to have discombobulated bosses who are used to employees leaping at their every demand.
在美国，根据劳工部的数据，8月份有创纪录的430万人辞职，有1000万多个职位空缺，略低于7月份的1100万个。工人短缺导致工资增长，这超过了许多经济学家的预期，似乎让习惯了员工急于接受所有要求的老板们感到困惑。
There are many potential reasons for workers’ reluctance to work terrible jobs. People who are flush with unemployment assistance and stimulus money might be holding out for better jobs to come along. Workers who spent the last year and half on the front lines of dangerous jobs in thankless industries — for instance, enforcing mask rules for belligerent customers in shops and restaurants — could be burned out by the experience. And many workers continue to fear for their health in an ongoing pandemic, while a lack of child and elder care has added costs and complications that have rendered many jobs just not worth the trouble.
工人们不愿从事糟糕的工作有许多潜在的原因。获得失业补助和经济刺激资金的人可能会坚持等待更好的工作出现。在过去一年半的时间里，那些在吃力不讨好的行业从事危险工作的工作者——比如负责在商店和餐馆里试图让好斗的顾客遵守口罩规定——可能会因这一时期的经历而疲惫不堪。在持续的大流行中，许多工人一直担心自己的健康，而儿童和老人的护理缺乏增加了成本和困难，使得许多工作不值得费力去做。
All of this makes sense. But there might also be something deeper afoot. In its sudden rearrangement of daily life, the pandemic might have prompted many people to entertain a wonderfully un-American new possibility — that our society is entirely too obsessed with work, that employment is not the only avenue through which to derive meaning in life and that sometimes no job is better than a bad job.
所有这些都说得通。但也可能有更深层次的东西在酝酿。通过对日常生活突如其来的重新安排，大流行可能促使很多人接受一种奇妙的、非美国式的新可能——我们的社会过于迷恋工作，就业并不是获得生活意义的唯一途径，有的时候，没工作要好过坏工作。
“The pandemic gave us a kind of forced separation from work and a rare critical distance from the daily grind,” Kathi Weeks, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, told me. “I think what you’re seeing with people refusing to go back is a kind of yearning for freedom.”
“疫情让我们在某种程度上被迫离开了工作，与日常工作保持了一种难得的关键距离，”杜克大学(Duke University)性别、性行为和女权主义研究教授卡蒂·威克斯(Kathi Weeks)告诉我。“我认为，你看到的人们拒绝回去上班是一种对自由的渴望。”
Weeks, the author of “The Problem With Work,” is among a handful of scholars who have been pushing for a wholesale reappraisal of the role that work plays in wealthy societies. Their ideas have been dubbed “post-work” or “antiwork,” and although they share goals with other players in the labor market — among them labor unions and advocates for higher minimum wages and a stronger social safety net — these scholars are calling for something even grander than improved benefits.
著有《工作的问题》(The Problem With Work)一书的威克斯，是少数几位一直主张全面重新评估工作在富裕社会中所扮演角色的学者之一。他们的想法被称为“后工作”或“反工作”，尽管他们与劳动力市场上的其他参与者有着共同的目标——包括工会，提高最低工资以及更强大社会保障网络——但这些学者所呼吁的是比提高福利更宏大的东西。
They’re questioning some of the bedrock ideas in modern life, especially life in America: What if paid work is not the only worthwhile use of one’s time? What if crushing it in your career is not the only way to attain status and significance in society? What if electing to live a life that is not driven by the neuroses and obsessions of paid employment is considered a perfectly fine and reasonable way to live?
他们对现代生活，尤其是美国生活中的一些基本观念提出了质疑：如果有偿工作不是唯一值得花时间的事情呢？如果在事业上大展拳脚并不是获得社会地位和意义的唯一途径呢？如果选择一种不受神经衰弱和有偿工作困扰的生活被视为一种完美而合理的生活方式，那又会怎样呢？
Evidence for such a reappraisal is, admittedly, more anecdotal than rigorous. It might well be that as soon as labor markets loosen up, workers will again answer to their bosses’ every beck and call.
诚然，这种重新评估更主要是基于各种轶事而不是严谨的证据。一旦劳动力市场出现松动，员工将再次听从老板的所有命令，这是很有可能的。
But David Frayne, a sociologist who is the author of “The Refusal of Work,” noted that traumatic events often cause people to reassess their lives and goals.
但《拒绝工作》(The Refusal of Work)一书的作者、社会学家戴维·弗莱恩(David Frayne)指出，创伤性事件往往会让人们重新评估自己的生活和目标。
“The pandemic has had the potential to create that kind of disruption on a mass scale,” Frayne told me, and the disruption has created new political opportunities for regulating labor markets in a way that favors workers. He pointed out that in Britain, where he lives, politicians have begun to entertain the idea of a four-day workweek, a plan that was long considered a no-go.
“疫情有可能在大范围内造成这种破坏，”弗莱恩告诉我，而这种破坏创造了新的政治机会，以有利工人的方式去监管劳动力市场。他指出，在他居住的英国，政界人士已经开始考虑每周工作四天的想法，而这一计划长期以来一直被认为是不可行的。
In the United States, the Biden administration’s huge social policy legislation — now stalled in Congress — was also conceived in part as a way to address the kind of problems working people experienced during the pandemic. And the pandemic cracked open space to discuss more far-flung ideas for a society that is no longer centered on work — especially a universal basic income, a policy that is being tested in pilot programs across the country.
在美国，拜登政府庞大的社会政策立法——目前在国会受阻——也在一定程度上被认为可以解决劳动者在大流行期间遇到的那种问题。疫情为讨论一个不再以工作为中心的社会这一远大想法提供了更广阔的空间——特别是全民基本收入，这一政策正在全国各地的试点项目中进行测试。
You can get a peek of a post-job world at /antiwork, a Reddit forum “for those who want to end work” that has gone viral in recent months, with hundreds of thousands following its subversive cause. /antiwork teems with posts from workers who are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore — including many screenshots from folks saying they are telling off their managers, quitting in a rage after years of abuse.
你可以在Reddit论坛“反工作”(/antiwork)上一睹后工作的世界。该论坛“专为那些不想再工作的人而设”，近几个月来在网上走红，有几十万人关注它的颠覆性事业。“反工作”充斥着员工们发的帖子，他们非常崩溃，再也无法忍受——还有好多截图，图中是人们痛骂自己的经理，经受多年的虐待，他们愤怒地辞职了。
I’ve been reading /antiwork for months, and I’ve been surprised to find myself joining in the visceral thrill of seeing people wrest the reins of their lives from the soul-sucking, health-destroying maw of capitalism.
几个月来，我一直在看“反工作”，我惊讶地发现自己参与了一种发自内心的激情，目睹人们从吸食灵魂、破坏健康的资本主义的大嘴中夺回了生活的控制权。
I was surprised to find common cause with people on /antiwork because, of course, I have very little to complain about, job-wise. Indeed, at least once a day I revel in open-mouthed gratitude. What I do to make a living — writing this column — is less physically demanding and more intellectually rewarding than anything my ancestors had to endure to earn their supper, and — don’t tell my bosses — more than fair compensation for my time and effort.
我很惊讶地发现，我和“反工作”上的那些人有着相同的诉求，当然，就工作而言，我没什么可抱怨的。事实上，我每天至少有一次会张着嘴满怀对这份工作的感激。我的谋生之道（写这个专栏）比我的祖先为了赚取晚餐而不得不忍受的事情要消耗更少的体力，获得更多的智力回报，而且（别告诉我的老板）它为我的时间和精力所付的报酬，比合理的数字要多。
It sounds perfect, right?
听起来很完美，对吧？
And yet, a lot of times my job can feel like an all-consuming hell. I’ve got a wife and kids and two lovely cats, but work is the first thing I think about every morning and the last thing I worry about every night. My job has dibs on my mind and my time, it gets the best of my attention and creativity, and it is the subject of my deepest neuroses and my most intractable stresses.
然而，很多时候，我的工作感觉就像一个吞噬一切的地狱。我有妻子、孩子和两只可爱的猫，但工作是我每天早上想到的第一件事，也是每晚担心的最后一件事。工作占用了我的精力和时间，占用了我最佳的注意力和创造力，也为我带来最深层的神经衰弱和最困扰的压力。
I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t really realize how much work ruled my life until the pandemic — until this huge meteor took aim at our lives and forced me to reconsider what I was doing.
我很不好意思地说，在大流行之前，我并没有真正意识到工作是多么严重地主宰着我——直到这颗巨大的灾星瞄准了我们的生活，迫使我重新考虑我在做什么。
I’m not saying I’m quitting — I hope to keep this gig for a long time. It’s just that I now have space in my mind for a truth that my prepandemic workaholism never allowed me to consider — that even a dream job is still a job, and in America’s relentless hustle culture, we have turned our jobs into prisons for our minds and souls. It’s time to break free.
我并不是说我要辞职——我希望能长期保住这份工作。只是现在我的脑海里为一个事实腾出了空间，在疫情之前，我的工作狂精神不允许我去考虑它——即使是一份理想的工作也只是一份工作，在美国无情的忙碌文化中，我们已经把工作变成了思想和灵魂的监狱。是时候挣脱束缚了。