A century ago, everyone was convinced that by now we would be working a 15-hour week. It never happened. Not because of any lack of efficiency savings or streamlining. We still work for dear life.

In this book, anthropologist Dennis Nørmark and philosopher Anders Fogh Jensen set out to discover how we spend our working lives. It is a journey into absurdity, where the meaning of work has disappeared and the promise of leisure has never been fulfilled. Instead, we have more rules, useless projects, forgettable HR initiatives, endless meetings and trivial PowerPoint presentations.

The authors come from both sides of the political divide, but this book is not a meeting in the middle. It’s a showdown with an old-fashioned concept of work, and a blueprint for what we can do about it — as employees, as managers and as a society.

It is time to think and act differently. Otherwise, we may find ourselves committing the greatest act of self-sabotage in history. We risk making a mockery of our past and being seen as a laughing stock in the future. First, we must confront one of the greatest taboos of our era: Pseudowork.

Tam McTurk