The Time of Work

When we debate working time, we always speak of subordinate employment. Never of domestic work, volunteering, personal creation, or work on oneself. This reduction reveals a considerable blind spot in our political and social thinking, which I wish to examine here.

Subordinate employment is only a fraction of work

Controversies over labor law, working hours, and retirement age regularly mobilize public opinion. As Laura Perren reminds us in Slate in October 2025, Silicon Valley is importing the Chinese “996” model: working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, or 72 hours per week. Elon Musk advocates an “ethic” requiring “about 80 hours, with peaks that can sometimes exceed 100 hours.” The social struggles that enabled access to leisure and respect for the rights of working classes continue to structure our political imagination. The exploitation of underpaid delivery workers rightly provokes collective indignation.

Yet behind all these debates lies a reality: we are only ever talking about a tiny portion of the field of work—that of subordinate employment. Generally salaried, but not necessarily, since one can be a subordinate employee while being self-employed, even with multiple employers in parallel, like many taxi drivers and other private chauffeurs.

This exclusive focus obscures entire dimensions of our productive activity. Domestic work, performed mainly by women, remains absent from economic calculations despite its indispensable character for collective life and children’s education. Volunteer work, free and without expectation of remuneration, carried out by retirees and many others, nevertheless structures our associations, our cultural and social initiatives, our entire economy of mutual aid and solidarity. The work of personal creation—writing, painting, music, drawing—transforms us, founds us, creates us. Students’ schoolwork, work on oneself: so many forms of labor that almost never appear in public debates.

The true subject of these discussions is therefore not work, but the organization of domination in return for wages and the regulation of this domination. For signing an employment contract means explicitly entering—it is written as such—into a relationship of subordination. To obey, to respect schedules, often in contempt of the very meaning of the activity. Moreover, burnout and harassment do not occur in work in general, but specifically within the framework of subordinate employment. A care.com report published in 2025 indicates that 69% of employees feel exposed to a moderate or even high risk of burnout, while employers perceive only 45%. This gap speaks volumes about the lived reality of subordination (not forgetting that this is only a partial study).

Work as transformation: rediscovering the essence

I propose to approach the question differently and to think of the time of work rather than working time. This distinction is not merely semantic coquetry. It is about envisioning ourselves as entering into the time of work, that of our transformation and our journey, rather than that of our subordination in exchange for a wage.

Etymology invites us to do so. Contrary to the received idea that derives the word “travail” from tripalium, the instrument of torture, the root refers rather, as recent etymology teaches us, to travel, the journey, transformation. We indeed speak of the “travail of birth” to designate this process of profound transformation. Work therefore has fundamentally to do with the meaning of life. Without work, no true existence. Without work, no meaning.

This transformative and creative dimension runs through the entire history of thought. Marx spoke of “self-objectification” in the work produced. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), distinguishes “labor,” “work,” and “action,” thus recognizing the multiplicity of forms of our productive and existential activity.

Authors, for example, offer an illuminating model. They produce and create without a relationship of subordination. They do not have an employment contract, but a contract for the transfer of their copyright. They remain holders of their rights to what they have created, but transfer its exploitation for a given time, according to defined conditions on given territories, in return for remuneration, to someone whose profession is to commercialize it, a publisher for example. We thus find ourselves in constructive exchanges, necessary to the human community, but without subordination.

I would not say that these are egalitarian exchanges, because there is certainly more competition among authors than among distributors, as they are legally called, who commission works. But it is a modality of productive work, remunerated, without a relationship of subordination, without imposed schedules.

The quality of work depends on the degree of responsibility conferred on workers. When we perform work that has meaning, in which we express our share of creativity, when we understand why we do it and we are respected as human beings, considered in our dignity and not only in our function, we produce work of incomparable quality, for ourselves as for others. Because we want to. Because we decide to. Because we know why we do it.

Retirement is not withdrawal from life

This understanding of work as transformation sheds new light on the question of retirement. We often see people who reach retirement thinking they were in a job to earn money, quite simply, and who discover too late that this job actually gave meaning to their life. Some die fairly quickly after retirement, because their life loses its meaning, without them having become aware of it. Their job offered them not only remuneration in exchange for their time and subordination, but offered them the meaning of being able to contribute.

If they had not developed elsewhere, autonomously, other spaces of work and contribution, even voluntary, they did not prepare themselves to be able to continue working after retirement. For if one does not work after retirement, our life loses its meaning.

Retirement is the retirement from the main and subordinate salaried employment that stops and is compensated by remuneration allowing us to no longer depend on a job to ensure our material subsistence. But it is not withdrawal from life. It is withdrawal from the space of subordination.

Authors, artists, self-employed professionals, business owners—all these people who work without being employed—do not have retirement in the traditional sense. They can prepare for it voluntarily, contribute, and decide at a moment in their life to benefit from accumulated pensions. But we very often see doctors, my psychoanalyst for example, who practiced his work literally until his last breath. No one obliged him to do so. He did it because it had meaning for him in the human community: to be in this place thanks to his skills, to accompany people, to be in this exchange that gave meaning to his life.

What I personally received from him was both the therapeutic accompaniment he offered me, but also the inscription in the meaning of work. We were there, he as much as I, because we had decided to be there. He could refuse patients if he wished. Given his advanced age, he could very well have decided to stop receiving patients. But he chose to continue this work because it was the meaning of his life. Others, in the same field, can choose to stop receiving patients but to write about their experience, thus contributing and working through their writing.

Toward an economy of human transformation

There is no hierarchy to establish among the transformative activities that I place under the aegis of work. Grandparents, for example, can decide to help their children and in-laws by caring extensively for their grandchildren. It is work and it is an engagement in transformation.

My proposal, to think of the time of work, is to reinvest in work as a creative and transformative act. We collectively need this, all the more so since today work and jobs are profoundly changing in nature due to the cognitive capacities of machines, what we call artificial intelligence.

These systems will be able to increasingly replace non-mechanical jobs, intellectual jobs. Assembly line workers have been progressively replaced by machines and will be increasingly so. Many professions, many trades in which cognition is mobilized, many jobs will also be replaced by machines.

This is in my opinion very interesting, even exciting, because it invites us to enter into the time of work, that of human transformation, and therefore to reinvest our humanity in its creativity, in its contribution, in the meaning of its existence. Sam Altman (the head of OpenAI, publisher of ChatGPT) had moreover published as early as 2013 a text anticipating the future necessary changes on questions of remuneration, of universal income for example, in the future age when machines would begin to increasingly replace humans, obliging the latter to invest in the time of work that is human, beneficial, virtuous, constructive, transformative.

Faced with the “996” culture spreading in certain American start-ups, as documented in the Slate article, where companies like Cognition in San Francisco offer housing at the workplace so that employees “literally live where [they] work,” I propose a radically different path. Not the indefinite extension of subordinate employment that destroys creativity and meaning, but the expansion of the time of work as a space of accomplishment and transformation.

It is therefore urgent to rethink the notion of work and to enter into another dimension of the time of work, that of work that is no longer employment. This lucidity confirms that another path is necessary, one that reconciles work, meaning, and humanity. That of the time of work.