Britney Spears once famously said, “You gotta work bitch,” and as often is the case, Comrade Spears was exactly right. Few qualities are as lauded under capitalism as hard work. Conservatives like Dinesh D’Souza tell us that socialism, even if it works, will create a society of sloths looking for handouts. Meritocracy’s defenders insist that the people on top earned their status through grit and drive, despite overwhelming evidence about the role luck and advantage play in determining life outcomes. Others cast hard work in explicitly religious terms — “a duty to God,” as one conservative writer put it.

Yet despite spending much of our waking lives working, most of us find our jobs a source of unhappiness rather than fulfillment. Real wages have declined in recent decades, and attacks on unions have allowed bosses free rein to act as private tyrants, regulating our behavior even when we clock out.

It’s easy to forget, despite what the self-declared defenders of Western civilization will tell you, that leisure was once synonymous with the good life. For the ancient Greeks, it offered citizens time to spend with their family, pursue higher-order artistic and philosophical activities, and participate in the governance of the city. Of course, this was in part because ancient Greece was a slave society where free Greek citizens — nonslaves — were relieved of many of the burdens of manual labor. And even in nonslave societies, for many centuries absolute scarcity forced humans to spend most of their lives in a horrible grind against natural necessity.