We live in an age of contradictions. Never before have so many been so tethered to work that feels meaningless, yet never before has the possibility of living otherwise been so near at hand. We call this post-productive presence: life that resists the demand to prove its value through output. As David Graeber argued in Bullshit Jobs, much of what occupies our days is already hollow, tasks that exist to perpetuate the machinery of capitalism rather than sustain life. And yet, in the cracks of this machinery, other forms of wealth already glimmer—friendship, beauty, awe, care. To turn toward these is not laziness, but power. To imagine them as the basis of a renaissance is to reframe what it means to live well today.
Slavoj Žižek, in his book Freedom: A Disease Without Cure, reminds us that what passes as freedom under capitalism often reproduces the very constraints it promises to release us from. He points to the way our supposed choices—between jobs, lifestyles, or consumer goods—are framed entirely within the logic of the system. His provocation resonates here: post-productivity is not simply choosing differently within the realm of work, but stepping outside work as the ultimate measure of value. We might recall his simple but biting observation: sometimes the most radical act of freedom is not to choose among offered options, but to suspend the very framework of choice itself.
Power beyond domination
Traditional definitions cast power as control over others: accumulation of resources, command of labor, authority codified in systems and symbols. But in late capitalism, another form of power emerges. Power today may not be the ability to control, but the ability to refuse. Refuse labor, refuse productivity, refuse the demand that every gesture justify itself in market terms.
André Gorz, writing in the late 20th century, foresaw this tension. He argued that automation, rather than simply entrenching capitalist efficiency, opened a space where humans could be liberated from the drudgery of work. His vision of a post-work society was not the end of activity, but its radical redefinition: work as creativity, play, and lifemaking rather than survival. The refusal of labor, for Gorz, was the beginning of a renaissance, not a void.
Unproductivity here is not idleness. It is not collapse into nothingness. It is doing otherwise: tending a garden no one monetizes, making art that cannot be scaled, walking without recording. It is, as we might call it, post-productive presence—life defined not by what it yields for the market, but by what it sustains for itself, for kin, for world.
David Graeber sharpened this diagnosis in Bullshit Jobs. He revealed the absurdity of entire sectors of labor that even the workers themselves acknowledged as meaningless: jobs that exist only to maintain the machinery of capitalism, not to serve human need. In this light, the act of refusing work is not just personal liberation, but a collective critique: why persist in producing meaninglessness when life could be otherwise?
To live post-productively is to treat work not as extraction, but as lifemaking. Not market-making, but meaning-making.
Who gets to refuse?
The refusal of labor is not evenly distributed. Historically, only the wealthy could afford to step away. And yet, the aperture is wider than we often assume. Today, the possibility of stepping back from productivity has expanded in ways previous generations could hardly imagine.
For many digital nomads, particularly those from the Global North, the ability to reduce costs of living through geoarbitrage creates an entirely new landscape of possibility. A person from the U.S., Europe, or Australia can relocate to a lower-cost region and, with modest savings, buy themselves months or even years of temporal freedom. A year away from salaried work becomes possible not because they are independently wealthy, but because the global economy allows them to translate their earnings into longer spans of time. This is both privilege and opportunity: privilege, because it depends on passports, exchange rates, and structural inequality; opportunity, because it reveals that refusal is no longer confined to the ultra-rich.
In this sense, the infrastructures that make refusal possible are not only those of mutualism—co-ops, couch-surfing, solidarity networks—but also the infrastructures of global mobility: digital platforms, remote work systems, international banking, even low-cost airlines. These infrastructures are double-edged: they replicate colonial asymmetries even as they open cracks for those able to access them. The digital nomad who takes a year to focus on art, writing, or pleasure is exercising a kind of post-productive power that others cannot. By contrast, someone from the Philippines cannot necessarily leverage their local market rate salary to lower their cost of living elsewhere; the asymmetry of currencies and visas makes this option structurally unavailable. And yet, digital nomads' experiments in geoarbitrage reveal what could be more widely possible if infrastructures of care and redistribution were strengthened.
Ivan Illich helps us here. In Tools for Conviviality, he warned against systems that make us dependent on professionalized, centralized structures. He argued instead for tools that allow autonomy, flexibility, and shared use. The infrastructures that support post-productivity—low-cost housing networks, cooperative economies, community gardens, artist residencies—are precisely convivial tools. They allow us to step aside from wage dependency, to reduce our reliance on the industrial megastructure, and to redirect our time toward more convivial forms of value.
To refuse productivity is, in this sense, a political act made possible by material conditions, infrastructures, and choices. The ability to lower dependency on capital is itself a form of power—a fragile, partial sovereignty. And infrastructures of both mutualism and mobility expand that possibility beyond the rich.
Temporal autonomy and the claim to want more
If power is no longer control but refusal, then its deepest register is temporal. To live otherwise is to reclaim rhythm: to waste time without collapse, to set one’s own cadence of work, rest, play. Temporal autonomy becomes the rarest currency of all.
Graeber noted that one of the tragedies of modern capitalism is that people often spend their lives not in necessary or meaningful labor, but in simulated productivity—endless reports, emails, and meetings that produce nothing of substance. To reclaim time, then, is not laziness, but resistance. It is to say: my hours are not for your machinery.
And here we must confront a toxic ideology: that if one is already well-paid, well-treated, or working remotely with global location independence, then one has no right to want more. That gratitude should silence dissatisfaction. That critique is indulgence. This ideology must be refused outright. No matter how comfortable one’s job appears compared to others, it remains labor tethered to market logics, extracting hours of life in exchange for survival. To say that someone “shouldn’t complain” because they are privileged is to confuse relative comfort with genuine freedom. The truth is sharper: every person has the right to want more from life than work alone can offer.
Other currencies of value
Beyond market logics lie other currencies of value, forms of wealth that capitalism cannot account for, though it continually tries. To dwell in them is to exercise power not as dominance, but as flourishing. These currencies are not marginal; they are essential. They show us what it means to live post-productively.
Aesthetic
The aesthetic is not decoration; it is sustenance. A painting slowly made, a garden shaped for beauty rather than yield, a melody hummed without an audience. These are gestures of freedom because they resist the demand to be useful. To take delight in form, in texture, in color, is to claim time for its own sake. In a world that insists every act be optimized, beauty is a refusal. It is a reminder that what stirs us cannot be measured in profit.
Relational
Friendship, kinship, community: these are currencies richer than any wage. To share a meal that takes all afternoon, to sit with someone in silence, to raise children in common—these are forms of work that capitalism calls unproductive but which sustain life at its deepest level. Relational wealth is power because it cannot be outsourced, cannot be automated, cannot be commodified without losing its essence. It is the wealth of being needed, of being held, of being known.
Ecological
To plant a tree whose fruit you may never taste. To tend to soil, to water, to compost. To sit in reverence before a river. These acts root us in value beyond extraction. The ecological is both material and spiritual: it sustains the conditions of life, but also gestures toward humility, reminding us that our time is not the only time, our rhythms not the only rhythms. Ecological wealth is measured in continuity, in cycles that exceed us, in the health of systems that hold us. To live post-productively is to align with these cycles, rather than distort them for gain.
Existential
The existential is the hardest to name, yet perhaps the most profound. It is the sense of awe before the night sky, the recognition of mortality, the experience of meaning that escapes productivity altogether. To waste time staring at the stars, to write a diary no one will read, to wonder about one’s place in the cosmos—these are not luxuries but necessities. They are what make life more than survival. In existential wealth, we find not answers but depth: an orientation that insists life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
Toward a renaissance of human flourishing
The question, then, is not simply: Who can afford to be unproductive? It is also: How do we extend that possibility? What infrastructures of solidarity, redistribution, and mutual aid might expand temporal autonomy beyond the few? How do we cultivate conditions where post-productivity is not privilege, but commons?
André Gorz believed that the reduction of working hours could unleash a cultural renaissance, one in which imagination and creativity would no longer be subordinated to capital.
David Graeber showed us that much of what we call work is already meaningless, and that the compulsion to “stay busy” often disguises emptiness.
Ivan Illich invited us to design tools and systems that free us from structural dependency, offering convivial infrastructures where autonomy could be exercised collectively.
Together, they gesture toward a horizon where flourishing is not a privilege, but a shared right.
This renaissance must be painted vividly, because it is the reason to live. Against the bleakness of contemporary working life, post-productivity offers an alternative radiant with possibility. A life where mornings are not measured by meetings, but by the smell of bread baking, or the time it takes a seed to sprout. A life where value is measured in the density of friendships, in the depth of presence, in the care extended to place and kin. A life where the right to waste time beautifully is honored as the highest form of agency.
Consider the artist residency: a space deliberately carved out for post-productive flourishing. Here, the value of one’s presence is not output, but exploration. The residency honors time itself as a medium—days given over to experiment, to conversation, to idleness that is anything but empty. It is a model, however small, of the renaissance we seek.
It would mean dismantling the illusion that productivity is inevitable or desirable, and insisting instead that the most radical form of power lies in reclaiming time. To live post-productively is to demand that lifemaking, in all its messy, relational, unprofitable glory, is enough. And more than enough—it is what makes life worth living.
Power, reframed, is the ability to say no to market logics and yes to other forms of value. It is temporal autonomy exercised not in isolation but in constellation—with others, with place, with ecology. The renaissance of human flourishing is not a utopia deferred; it is a possibility already visible in cracks and margins. What remains is to choose it, defend it, and extend it—until no one has to apologize for wanting more than work.
