In the midst of the unfolding crisis with work – a fundamentally spiritual problem – it seems to me that we desperately need new cultural metaphors to describe labour. What, actually, is this thing called “work”? Why do we do it? What does it afford us? What can’t it afford us?

For now, I find solace in the metaphor of work as trace. In a world whe... See more

I’ve recently been exploring the metaphor of work as trace – that it isn’t so much about what we put out into the world as how we put it out; that the thing we really ought to care about, the thing that ultimately matters, is the intention from which the work emerges. The rest is all mirror, representation, resemblance.