Why new technology is draining meaning from your job

Bankers don’t attract much sympathy these days, but imagine belonging to an industry that has been blamed for eight years of austerity and for triggering political turmoil on a worldwide scale..

Across the labour market, he says, people are both anxious and bored at work. The anxiety comes from having too much to do, the boredom from having too little. "But there are also longer hours, complicated technology, endless meetings, pointless regulations, and massive administration that people are being swamped by and have no strategies to deal with, and which are strangling the spirit and creativity of employees . . . Many people are being confronted with the perceived pointlessness of these daily dreary demands and distractions."

Yet there is something different about workers’ current predicament, as the labour market undergoes the twin upheavals of rising job insecurity and technological displacement. The two are related, and they affect the value we place on our employment. If your job won’t be around for long then why invest your energies in it? And if computers will ultimately displace all but a few humans from the labour market then what will the rest of us do?.