My Time

The modern morality of “You're on my time [...] is the indignity of a man who feels he's being robbed. A worker's time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it. Insofar as an employee is not working, she is stealing something for which the employer paid good money (or, anyway, has promised to pay good money for at the end of the week). By this moral logic, it's not that idleness is dangerous. Idleness is theft. This is important to underline because the idea that one person's time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar. Most human societies that have ever existed would never have conceived of such a thing. As the great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter — slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter’s time. Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber