★A courageous consciousness-raising book that makes us understand why　work has become a trap from which we must at all costs escape. Is it true that there is no alternative?

Efficient, dynamic, creative. But also: overloaded, disheartened, depressed. Overtired. Overworked. Torn between calls, family commitments and public relations, the blue light of smartphones casting a glow on our faces at night. Oppressed by work but also in love with work, entranced by it, victims of a corporate Stockholm syndrome. Because, nowadays, work is everything and everything is work.

And yet, never as much as today, the feeling is that work is not enough. Never before, in a post-pandemic world that continues to sing the magnificent tunes of neoliberalism, has working seemed so meaningless.

A ghostly question, then, began to hover over us: why bother? Who makes me keep believing that the dream job will come and I I won’t even feel like I’m working? Who makes me keep thinking that if I put my mind to it, sooner or later I will make it? Who makes me believe that there is no alternative?

Through historical explorations and accurate surveys of the present, Maura Gancitano and Andrea Colamedici urge us to reflect on the origins and developments of the concept of work, which is multifaceted and controversial, highlighting its links with what we hold most sacred, such as religion or morality. But they also invite us to turn our perspective on the rhetoric of privilege or merit. And above all, they urge us to imagine a solution, a world in which it is possible to change. Why Bother? then becomes an act of love towards our transience and humanity, towards our exhaustion and our will to resist. A courageous consciousness-raising to finally understand that work – for what we have turned it into today – is a trap, one from which we must at all costs escape. But perhaps with a dancing step.

ANDREA COLAMEDICI and MAURA GANCITANO are two philosophers, and the creators of Tlon, philosophy school, publishing house and theater bookshop, where they organize workshops of philosophy in Italy and abroad. Together they wrote Lezioni di meraviglia e Tu non sei Dio: fenomenologia della spiritualità contemporanea. Their philosophical outreach activity is full range: on their very popular social media pages, they speak about society and vocations, talent and community.