Imagine this: You commute by car everyday into your corporate cubicle job, sit down, turn on your computer, and act as a glorified copy and paste button.

All day every day you copy text from employee emails asking for tech help and paste it into a separate form.

Or you stand guard over an empty room.

Or you drive an hour into work just to move some military equipment from one room to another.

Well, you can stop imagining because these are all real descriptions of people's jobs.

In his book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber supplies countless confessions from workers across the world condemning the pointlessness of their own jobs.

Indeed, a recent poll from YouGov found that one in five people living in the United States think their job is not making a meaningful contribution to the world.

And a similar poll conducted in the U.K. revealed that a quarter of British workers claimed their jobs lacked meaning.

That is a substantial amount of people who think their jobs are doing little or nothing.

Graeber points to whole industries like corporate law, telemarketing, and private equity whose jobs wouldn’t be missed for a second if they didn’t exist.

He also nods towards other industries that are not only useless, but create immense amounts of waste and emissions: speculative construction, planned obsolescence, and I would add the military in imperial countries like the US.

Real-estate companies building a high-rise on property that they think might gain in value, but is too expensive for most people to live in, phone companies that render gadgets unusable after two years, and a war-machine that starts wars to protect oil interests, and creates more emissions than many countries of the world, all are in the business of excess and excrement.

What if instead, we only built accessible dwellings for people, phones that lasted 15 years or more, and dismantled the military-industrial complex, maybe then we would have a little less environmentally destructive and meaningless work on our hands and a lot of hours to do something we actually care about away from our jobs.

And in stark opposition to these useless jobs, the paid work that actually needs doing and is often low-carbon is undervalued and cast aside.

Exploited farmhands, underpaid teachers, and burnt out caregivers, among others, are professions relegated to the lower rungs of worker status.

We “refuse to acknowledge the truly brutal reality of the kind of work that makes our cheap, convenient lives possible.

And so we outsource it, often to the most marginalized members of society, and that allows the rest of us to ignore it.”

So, in this economic system, a lot of the work we value most (as evidenced by both the paychecks of the people doing the work and the social value associated with that work) is some of the least important to the wellbeing of a society, and much of the work we devalue is the most needed.

On top of that the meaningless jobs that exist throughout the economy often are situated in industries that produce the most waste and emissions.

So if the capitalist form of work doesn’t work, how can we work less?

What would even happen if we worked less?

Or, dare I say it, end this capitalist form of work once and for all?

What would happen if we ended exploitative or useless wage work as we know it?

What if work wasn’t required to put food on your plate?

Well, we have lots of studies examining shorter work weeks which divorced pay from hours worked, and give us a very small glimpse at a different relationship with work.

Iceland, the UK, Spain, and even companies like Microsoft Japan among many others have all run four-day work week trials.

The results for almost all of them have been positive.

In Iceland, the government trialed a 32-hour work week while maintaining the same pay, and the participants reported significantly less stress, more focus, more time to do household work and more time to spend with family and friends.

And a trial for Microsoft’s Japan offices produced similar results.

From these studies we can see that less work means better quality of life, but something that is often overlooked in the conversation about a shorter work week is the environmental impact of less work.

During the Microsoft trial, for example, the offices used 23% less electricity and printed 59% fewer sheets of paper.

While a projection of the consequences of shifting the UK to a four-day work week without the loss of pay found that the reduction in work could cut the country’s carbon footprint by 127 million tonnes per year by 2025, that’s a 21.3% cut to the UK’s total yearly emissions.

While a 2015 Swedish study found that for every 1% decrease in working time energy use decreased by 0.7% and greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 0.8%.

Part of the reason why there are such significant reductions in emissions is that there’s less commuting, as well as less energy needed for computers, office lights, and paper production.

But also a shorter work week trial in France, found that when people have more time, they’re likely to spend it on low-carbon activities like gardening, walking, and reading.

In addition, if we are able to cut down on meaningless jobs creating useless stuff, consumption decreases and waste decreases.

We’re less tempted to buy a random gadget if there’s no one to make it and no company to advertise it.

And when we’re less stressed, less disconnected, and not burnt out, we are less reliant on technology as a tool to numb and distract ourselves.

But a shorter work week is just a taste, what would it mean to have a world not based on work for wages, but instead on pleasure and play?

A world without exploitative and meaningless work is a truly enticing idea.

Instead of people giving up their time with their children to work more, or people being abused because they have no way to get out of their exploitative workplace, or people working endlessly to not even make enough to pay for food or rent or clean water for their families, maybe we can have a world where everyday people wake up, are provided for and did the work because they wanted to, not because they needed to pay for the roof over their head and the food on their table.

How that would function is left to be seen.

But it would definitely require a shared burden of undesirable jobs, some amount of automation, and a much stronger sense of collective responsibility.

Maybe you help build your neighbor’s house not because you're getting paid to do it, but because you like carpentry and seeing the joy on your neighbor’s face when the building is complete.

Yes, this would certainly be a slower world, without people grinding away in warehouses to bring you that one-day shipping, but a slower life could give time for people to stop, appreciate and care for the environments and people around them.

If this sounds like I have my head in the clouds, there are a wide range of people and movements fighting to change our current relationship with work.

Some, mainly based in anarchist political tendencies, are fighting to abolish work as we know it.

They seek a world that embraces and finds, what anarchist Bob Black calls, a society based on “festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art.”

No, this doesn’t mean everyone will just sit on the couch and watch TV, these anarchist visions imagine full control of the means of production in order to transform work from a job that you need in order to eat to an act of pleasure that you do because you love it.

Think about all those useful things people produce in their free time: vegetables from a backyard garden, clothes from hobby sewing, and blogs, art, cabinets, the list goes on.

But others are merely working to reform the workplace to achieve more dignity for the worker.

They seek better conditions, higher wages, and more say in the workplace.

And still others, like degrowthers and progressives seek the shorter work week.

Lessening the environmental and social toll of work by a day or two.

Giving us the ability to rest, retreat, and capture some time for ourselves.

At the end of the day, we need to do away with our current relation with work.

To me, this necessitates abolishing it, because as long as capitalist wage work exist, the systems of domination between employer and employee will continue to exist.

Capitalism will continue to spawn meaningless jobs that pollute our environments and fill our oceans with trash.

Finding a path away from work and towards play and meaning is an essential task of a post-capitalist, post-carbon world.

We are capable of living in a world without wage work, we’re capable of living in a world where you don’t have to go to a job in order to eat, where the destruction of the natural world isn’t the cost of the job, where play is emphasized above toil.

We are capable, we just have to be bold enough to reach out and seize it.

But if doing away with our current relationship with work is a post-capitalist strategy for mitigating climate change, what solutions are being proposed within our current capitalist framework, and are they effective?