In Ling Ma's novel Severance, an epidemic turns people into zombies, doomed to enact the everyday rituals of late capitalism mindlessly: they work or stare into dead phones, their bodies falling apart bit by bit. Someone, I can't remember who, once said we can imagine the end of the world but not the end of capitalism. Jarvis Cocker offers a utopian solution: the world takes a break from economic activity every few years. Let's extend this further: why not a break from it entirely? Imagine a future free from making things purely for other people's profit and inadequate wages, attuning ourselves solely to 9-5 schedules, long commutes, holding down double or triple jobs, squeezing our hobbies and loves in between, and feeling anxious and terrible about the state of the world and our lonely, questing, spiritually undernourished selves. Such a future re-enchants the world: a recovery of time, nature, and community, of long days of reading and thinking and making for pleasure, of getting to know kin and friends and neighbours. Exchange the free market for more expansive, less vulgar freedoms.

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