"They were stable while at war,
but began to fall once they had won,
because they did not understand
how to be at leisure."
— Aristotle on the Spartans, 350 B.C.
After Work is a global survey of contemporary trends in labor and leisure, and contemplates the benefits and challenges of a potential "post-labor" society brought about by automation.
Modern globalized society is largely predicated on work. From childhood, we are taught to be result oriented and competitive. For many, their jobs form a large part of the personal identity. But as automation and artificial intelligence look to exceed human capacity, nations and individuals alike will be forced to rethink the role that work plays in our lives, as the majority of jobs that exist today could vanish within a few decades. Technology experts and economists dominate the debate about the consequences of this paradigm shift and often paint it as a sci-fi dystopia. What is absent is the human perspective in terms at what this will mean to us as human beings seeking purposeful lives.
With characters and narratives spanning four continents, After Work seeks an existential answer to what work means today, what things could be like in the future, and what might happen to us when we don't work. In the United States, the film breaks down the Calvinistic roots of their work ethic, and how they became a "No Vacation Nation" where every year hundreds of millions of hours of PTO are left unused. South Korean officials weigh in on the effort to counteract the societal problem of "death by overwork" and the differing generational outlooks on work. On the other end, citizens from Kuwait explain the unique situation in their country of guaranteed employment, wherein government jobs are overstaffed, but there is nothing for them to do, and layoffs are nonexistent. Citizens engage in a theater of productivity while the reality is that they are one of the most physically inactive countries in the world. In Italy, there is a generation of growing "NEET"s, who do not feel the need to seek any form of employment, education, or training.
Does work instill us with purpose, or inhibit us from living the lives we want? Will we be able to free ourselves from the nearly religious belief that work is the centerpiece of our existence, or will we continue to work for the sake of working? And if we do stop working, will we find renewed purpose, or succumb to an aimless state of over-leisure?
FILMMAKER'S STATEMENT: "I have a personal recurring nightmare about reaching the end of my life and in a moment of regret realize that I have worked too much. To be struck by an insight that I have prioritized wrongly due to an idea that is part of the culture I am the product of. Work is an idea as normal as the air we breathe, and therefore hard to question. Our society is a work society. From childhood on, we are taught to adhere to the work ethic, educator ourselves in preparation to eventually having a job.
When I started filming After Work, I had this clear intention: most of the debate about the future of work is dominated by tech people, experts of AI and automation. I am not interested in technology, my approach with After Work is about existential questions. I have tried to avoid the tech perspective as much as possible. Instead, I am focusing on the protagonists, on the human perspective. Intrigued by the possibilities of a post-work life, a work free existence, I wanted to come closer to solving the nature of work through a documentary film: will we be able to free ourselves from workism, the almost religious belief that work is the centerpiece of our existence? Or will we continue to work for the sake of working?"
— Erik Gandini
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