Jonathan Malesic teaches first-year writing at Southern Methodist University and is the author of Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity. His essays on work have appeared in The New Republic, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, America, Commonweal, and elsewhere. He was a 2004–05 visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
The conflict between the solitary ideal and Thoreau’s real drive to map connection plays out concretely in his many ascents up New England’s peaks.
The fact is, work as we know it isn’t worth saving anyway.
Many office workers aren’t tasked with anything useful to do.