The ambi-work movement

Can there be a healthy medium between making work your life and ditching it entirely?

If I won the lottery tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t quit working.

That’s a statement that’s attracted comments ranging from ‘okay boot-licker’ to ‘you’re fucking mad’, and plenty of odd looks in-between.

I get why. It’s the kind of notion that chimes with all the hustle culture, ‘we’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day’, sucking up to managers, capitalism is king, ‘no one wants to work these days, get your fucking ass up and work’, stuff that feels increasingly repellant.

The anti-work movement had been quietly building for quite some time, but the pandemic pushed it into the mainstream.

While concepts of universal basic income would have previously been dismissed as commie nonsense, years of working for companies that have left many of us feeling completed unappreciated has made us question why on earth we should have to work at all.

Blame the death, the restrictions on our lives, the time spent at home forced to reflect, but for many of us, the work we did began to seem increasingly pointless. What’s the end purpose here? To sell products that no one really needs? To make money for someone who’s already very, very rich?

We started to question why we were working late, making ourselves ill with stress, dedicating time to things that increasingly didn’t matter rather than what actually brought us joy. Regrets, burnout, resentment, all that stacked up higher and higher until an inevitable topple, prompting The Great Resignation, companies complaining of struggles to find workers, and hundreds of articles about the antiwork subreddit.

The question, of course, is: if you quit your job and are against all work… how do you make enough money to pay rent? Yes, things need to change… but what can we do in the meantime?

Hence movements like work-to-rule, FIRE, quiet quitting - ways to make work, well, work.

You’ll see this on TikTok, on Twitter, in conversations with friends: chats about boundary setting, mentions of deprioritising work in the rankings of what life is about. Is this still anti-work, with the acceptance that - at least until we have total revolution - we do still have to work?

I reckon ambi-work - a sort of midpoint between anti-work and hustle culture - could be more accurate.

(Yes, I am coining a term, because I love to do that. I came up with ‘stashing’ years back and seeing it then get spoken about by Rachel Bloom was such a joy)

Ambi-work could be a sliding scale of readjusting the way we view making money.

For some people, anti-work actions like work-to-rule (doing the bare minimum you need to avoid getting fired, and nothing more) don’t seem to quite fit. Neither do declarations of ‘there’s no such thing as a dream job, I don’t dream of labour’.

For ambi-work (ambi like ambivalent? Let’s just say it works) people, there might not be a dream job, sure, and in an ideal utopia, they likely wouldn’t have a nine to five, but they acknowledge that work is a necessity for now… and they have some hope of a job they somewhat enjoy.

If you’re ambi-work, you’re not comfy with coasting or quitting, because hey, maybe you would like a promotion at some point. Maybe you are building towards some kind of longer-term work goal. Sure, maybe you do derive some satisfaction from a job well done.

Ambi-work perhaps looks like acknowledging that your current job isn’t working for you, so then taking actions to try to make it fit, or quitting it and finding a different one, rather than dismantling the entire concept of work entirely; whether that’s out of a realism about needing money to have the lifestyle you want, or a desire to have a career that you can tell yourself at least has some sort of purpose you care about.

So yes, it might be about setting boundaries - I really do believe that refusing to reply to emails and messages outside of your working hours is a very good move and should be normalised by bosses, and the same goes for taking a proper lunch break, leaving on time, and not picking up extra things that are going to up your stress levels to excess - and repositioning work’s importance in your life… but not removing it (or attempting to remove it, by disengaging) entirely.

Essentially, it’d be saying that no, your job might not be THE most important thing in your life… but it’s still AN important part of your life. It’d be taking steps to prevent burnout… but also avoiding boreout.

Obviously change needs to come from the top, and bosses shouldn’t be expecting or asking people to work long hours and take on so much stress they’re miserable. Ambi-workers might be naive in believing that work culture can change - or hopeful, depending on how you view it, or both.

In my lottery scenario, personally, I’d work but in a different way. I might do a writing/editing job part-time and attempt to write fiction, primarily to avoid boredom and falling into a depression pit.

In a non-lottery scenario, I’m working full-time, but trying to unlearn the idea that what you do is who you are, trying to be less emotionally tied up in what happens at my job, trying to put in better boundaries, and refusing to accept that my mental health has to suffer for the sake of earning an income.