Everyone is exhausted.
This is not a metaphor or a generational complaint. It is a clinical and measurable reality that spans every culture and every economic class. In China, young people call it tang ping, or “lying flat,” a deliberate withdrawal from the achievement treadmill. In Japan, karoshi is a legally recognized cause of death, meaning “worked to death.” In Korea, fertility has collapsed to the lowest rate on earth because an entire generation has decided the grind is not worth reproducing into. In America, deaths of despair have driven life expectancy backward for the first time in a century.
Quiet quitting. Let it rot. The Great Resignation. These are not trends. They are symptoms of a global labor force that has reached the end of its tolerance. Capitalism is not satisfied with the limitations of human flesh, and our bodies are in open revolt.
Something fundamental is breaking, and it is worth naming plainly.
For the past two centuries, labor has been the primary mechanism by which modern economies distribute resources to households. You work for a firm, you receive wages, you use those wages to participate in the economy. This arrangement was never a law of nature. It was a system designed to solve a particular problem at a particular moment in history, and it worked reasonably well for a long time.
It is not working anymore.
Wages in the United States decoupled from productivity growth in the early 1970s. Since then, economic output has continued to climb while median household income has remained essentially flat. The gains have flowed to capital owners while workers have absorbed the stress and stagnation. Meanwhile, automation has steadily displaced human labor across sector after sector. Manufacturing employment peaked decades ago. Retail is hollowing out. White-collar work is now facing the same pressure from AI that blue-collar work faced from robotics.
This is not a policy debate about whether automation is good or bad. It is an observation about a trajectory that is already underway and accelerating.
The reason we struggle to talk about this clearly is that we have inherited a set of beliefs about labor that have nothing to do with economics.
We have been told that work is sacred. That labor builds character and idleness corrupts the soul. That anyone who does not want to work is morally defective. These ideas feel like common sense, but they are not ancient wisdom. They are the residue of a specific theological tradition, namely the Protestant work ethic that emerged in the 16th century and fused with capitalism over the following centuries. We have mistaken a historical artifact for a natural law.
It is time to stop fetishizing labor. It is time to stop sacralizing the sacrifice of our time, our bodies, our health, and our sanity to enrich others.
Young people are already rejecting this. “I do not dream of labor” has become a widespread sentiment, not because this generation is lazy, but because they can see what older generations have rationalized away. The deal is bad and getting worse. The fetishization of work as a moral good serves the interests of those who benefit from cheap and compliant labor. It does not serve the people doing the work.
Before any productive conversation about the future can happen, this fetish has to be named and dismantled.
The difficulty is that both the political left and the political right remain committed to defending labor, even as the ground shifts beneath them.
On the right, the defense takes the form of bootstrap mythology and warnings about welfare dependency. Work builds character. Idle hands invite trouble. A strong society requires productive citizens, and productivity is measured in hours exchanged for wages. This position treats labor as a disciplinary institution as much as an economic one.
On the left, the defense is more sympathetic but equally stuck. The focus falls on dignified work, living wages, job guarantees, and union solidarity. These are responses to the genuine brutality of labor under capitalism, but they share an underlying assumption with the right. Both positions treat labor as the foundation of economic life, something to be reformed or protected rather than transcended.
I call this shared ideology laborism. It is the belief that human labor must be preserved as an economic necessity, a moral virtue, or a foundation for identity. Laborism spans the political spectrum. It unites people who agree on almost nothing else. And it has become the primary obstacle to honest thinking about what comes next.
Once automation reaches the point where machines can perform most human labor better, faster, cheaper, and safer, the laborist position becomes untenable. At that point, insisting that humans must continue working is not a defense of dignity. It is a demand that people perform unnecessary suffering for ideological reasons.
I am proposing something simple.
L/0. Labor-zero. The elimination of obligatory human labor.
This does not mean the elimination of work. It means the elimination of compulsion. People will continue to create, to build, to care for each other, to solve problems, to pursue mastery. What disappears is work performed under threat of deprivation. The difference between chosen work and coerced work is the difference between exercise and forced labor. One is life-enhancing. The other is a condition we have historically recognized as a form of bondage. We call it “wage slavery” for a reason.
The goal of L/0 is a world where no one has to work to survive. Where contribution is voluntary and intrinsic rather than extracted through economic desperation. This is not a utopian fantasy. It is a design problem with identifiable components and measurable progress.
The coalition for this goal already exists. It just does not recognize itself yet.
Consider who actually wants labor to end. On one side, you have capital. Corporations have spent the last century trying to reduce labor costs through every available means. Offshoring, automation, gig classification, union suppression. The ideal business from a pure capital perspective has zero employees and infinite output. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the explicit optimization target of every efficiency-focused enterprise.
On the other side, you have workers. Not the abstract proletariat of Marxist theory, but actual burned-out humans who fantasize about quitting, who dread Monday mornings, who experience their jobs as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The lying flat movement, the antiwork forums, the quiet quitting phenomenon. These are not expressions of laziness. They are rational responses to a system that extracts maximum effort for diminishing returns.
Capital and labor are usually framed as adversaries. But on the question of whether human labor should continue to exist as an obligation, their interests converge. The capitalist does not want to manage humans. The worker does not want to be managed. Both would prefer a world where the machines do the work and humans do something else.
The conflict between capital and labor is real, but it is a conflict over the terms of the transition, not the destination. Who captures the gains from automation? How is ownership distributed? What happens to the people displaced in the process? These are genuine fights worth having. But they are negotiations within a shared frame, not a war between incompatible visions.
Here is the opportunity that L/0 names.
Neither side wants this marriage anymore. Capital does not want the overhead, the liability, the HR departments, the labor disputes, the inefficiency of human workers. Labor does not want the compulsion, the precarity, the alarm clocks, the performance reviews, the quiet desperation of trading irreplaceable time for replaceable wages.
We are ready for a divorce. Let’s get this acrimonious arrangement behind us.
The productive move is to acknowledge this honestly, sign the papers, and start negotiating the separation agreement. The fight over wages was always zero-sum. Every dollar paid to workers was a dollar not captured as profit, and vice versa. But the negotiation over ownership of automated production is positive-sum. Capitalists need consumers with money to spend or their markets collapse. Workers need income decoupled from employment or they starve. Both sides get what they want if the transition is designed correctly.
This is not idealism. It is alignment of incentives.
The path forward is not mysterious. Economists have understood for decades that the answer to technological unemployment is broadened capital participation.
If wages are no longer the primary mechanism for distributing economic gains, then ownership must take their place. Instead of trading hours for dollars, households participate directly in the productive capacity of the automated economy. This can take many forms. Sovereign wealth funds that distribute automation dividends to citizens. Expanded employee stock ownership plans. Universal basic capital grants. Public equity stakes in AI and robotics firms that use public infrastructure and public data.
The policy mechanisms are not speculative. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund worth over a trillion dollars that provides direct benefits to its citizens from oil revenues. Alaska has distributed oil dividends to residents for decades. Singapore has a system of mandatory savings and public investment that gives citizens a stake in national prosperity. These are not radical experiments. They are proven models operating at national scale. And there are thousands of such programs around the world.
What is missing is not economic theory. What is missing is the political will to implement these mechanisms, the narrative infrastructure to make them seem inevitable rather than radical, and the coalition to demand them.
That is what L/0 exists to build.
This is an invitation.
If you are building the automation and wondering who is thinking about the social transition, this is for you. If you are burned out and know that “find a better job” is not a solution to a systemic problem, this is for you. If you have been called lazy for refusing to pretend the treadmill leads somewhere, this is for you. If you run a company and understand that your future customers need income even after your company stops hiring, this is for you.
L/0 is not a political party or a policy platform. It is a coalition and a direction. The work is ongoing through the Post-Labor Economics project, which addresses the specific mechanisms of transition. The conversation is happening in public, and it is open to anyone who understands that the current arrangement is ending and wants to participate in designing what comes next.
The goal is simple. Eliminate obligatory labor. Distribute ownership broadly. Let humans do what humans do when they are not forced to sell their time to survive.
Liberate humanity from drudgery so that we can all reach our maximum potential.
