This is predicated on an understanding of productive work not as something indispensable to our sense of value but as something that should be limited to what is socially necessary and increasingly just a small part of what makes us human.

We need a society in which human life is not judged by its productive output or income or wealth, one in which technology is directed toward creating space for the multiplicity of the self to blossom.

“We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,” he wrote. The exclusive valorization of a meritocratic work ethic promises misery, overproduction, inequality and the marginalization of anyone who is unable to participate in this competition for exploitation. It is a mind-set we need to resist.

And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “eight hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, the most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it.