THE LONGEST RUNNING SELF-ESTEEM PROJECT:

The job was once something we felt we could depend on. A stable relationship, the job created a consistent link between the work we performed and the recompense we received. We were given roles to play and guaranteed livings -- whether that meant sewing crops in a Neolithic farm to gain access to the fruits of our hunter-gatherer colleagues' expeditions or manning the front desk at an insurance company in exchange for a paycheck and health care.

We once learned from our jobs. Bargaining portions of our lives away in apprenticeships to be trained in particular skill sets like the manufacture of wooden cabinetry or forging of iron tools, we gained a sense of unique purpose. Some jobs, such as smithing or the management of horses, became common surnames, such was the extent to which we identified ourselves with them. The job was a directed pursuit toward a practical discipline, not just a meaningless scramble for the ingredients necessary to sustain ourselves in an unkind world.

Until recently, our jobs defined us as members of a structured society moving toward unified goals. "Probably no other sentence comes up at a party as often as: 'So, what do you do?,'" the Berlin critic Patrick Spaet recently wrote in the Baffler. "There is an unspoken question behind this: 'Are you useful?' Work determines our social status: tell me what your job is -- and I'll tell you who you are."

"The work fetish has become deeply ingrained in the DNA of western industrial nations," Spaet continues. And why should it not? The job has been our friend, a contract between an individual and a larger group thereof that they will not be left behind so long as they continue to fulfill their duties. But our commitment to the job has wavered, and our fetish for work is wavering as the nature of labor and who benefits from it has changed.

This past year, 2014, was the year the job broke.

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