RARE PHOTOS: Relatable work memes nohourworkweek | Vintage Vibes

The No Hour Work Week has 14k followers and a pretty clear mission. The 'I Hate My Job' profile picture is probably all you need to know about their view on the modern work culture. Yet it's not just about being funny on the Internet. The page's creator(s) seem to be pretty passionate about the anti-work movement.

They share various resources for educating yourself on it in their bio. One of the links is to Bob Black's 1985 essay 'The Abolition of Work.' In this essay, the author posits that "no one should ever work" because it's "the source of nearly all the misery in the world." The alternative isn't to do nothing; Black suggests that it's 'forced labor' and 'compulsory production' that are bad.

So what should people do if they don't work? According to Black, it's play, which includes "festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art." But not the play as we understand it in terms of child's play. "I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance," Black proclaims.

For him, the problem with modern work stems from the fact that most contemporary jobs are meaningless and just plain unnecessary. And he isn't alone in this rhetoric. The rise of the anti-work movement in recent years has similar ideas behind it. It's that many contemporary white-collar workers are asking: "What's the purpose of work?"

For some, this might be nothing new. If you're familiar with the r/antiwork subreddit (and our content about it), you probably already know a lot of this stuff. But still, what is the end goal for the people in the anti-work movement? It's not to abolish working altogether. Proponents believe that they should self-organize and work only as much as they need. They don't believe in creating excess capital or goods because it requires working longer hours than needed.

The anti-work movement, just like Black's ideas, has roots in the anarchist and socialist economic critique. The proponents argue that the modern workplace only "enforces wage slavery and deprives workers of the full value of their output," as Brian O'Connor writes for the BBC.

Other critics of the modern work culture opt for a different strategy. One of them is Trisha Hersey, also known as The Nap Bishop. Her book Rest Is Resistance draws from Black liberation to oppose Grind Culture, capitalism, and white supremacy. "I don't want to be under the guise of believing that I have to be productive in order to be deemed worthy," Hersey talked about the central idea behind her book to NPR.

The first tenet of The Nap Ministry is that rest is a form of resistance against white supremacy and capitalism. But it's about so much more than just taking naps. Hersey says that the current capitalist system doesn't see people as people; it only looks for profit. 

"We have been brainwashed by this system to believe these things about rest, about our bodies, about our worth, this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn't view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine," the author told NPR.

However, there's a difference between the kind of rest Hersey is talking about and the rest that companies want their employees to have. Hersey is not advocating for more rest so people can then work more. "We're not resting to get ourselves more riled up to be on capitalism's clock. We are resting simply because it is our divine and human right to do so. Period," she says.

There is also much discussion about a shorter workweek. The so-called 'normal' 40-hour workweek could easily become a 21-hour workweek. In 2010,  Andrew Simms, Anna Coote, and Jane Franklin laid out the arguments for it in the UK. They claimed it would help address unemployment, overwork, over-consumption, inequality, sustainability, and even high carbon emissions.

In a recent interview for Bored Panda, career and leadership coach Phoebe Gavin explained how work shouldn’t become the #1 priority in life. "If you look at interviews of people at the end of their lives, often you find that people regret working too much.”

“Very, very frequently, you find that people wish they had spent less time working and more time on other aspects of their lives. And the only way to avoid that is to be conscious and intentional about how much of your life you give to work," Gavin said.