Consider the following comments on work.
We built a civilisation that needs us to work and then forgot to ask what the work was for.
A society that defines people by their jobs will struggle to value anyone it cannot employ.
The dignity of labour is praised most loudly by those who have escaped it.
We call work a calling when it pays well and a grind when it does not.
Work expands to fill the time, and the meaning we ask of it expands to fill the rest.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that work is not merely how we earn a living but how modern societies distribute worth, which makes it both a source of meaning and a quiet instrument of exclusion. Open by granting the obvious good, that work organises our days, builds skill and lets people contribute to something beyond themselves. Then complicate it: when identity is fused to employment, the unemployed, the carer and the retired are treated as lesser, and the worker is reduced to output. A strong third move separates the labour that genuinely fulfils from the labour we romanticise to make its drudgery bearable. Caution: resist both the gospel that hard work is always ennobling and the cynicism that all work is exploitation, since the interesting question is which work serves the worker and which merely uses them.