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The vast majority of young people in places like the Middle East and North Africa face a bleak socioeconomic future. Youth unemployment in the region hovers around 30 percent, which is expected to skyrocket as economies struggle to create enough jobs to keep pace with a massive demographic youth bulge. In 2000, the World Bank estimated that the region would need to create about 100 million new jobs to keep pace, and it’s nowhere near to closing the gap.

The effect of this socioeconomic crisis is about more than just employment and livelihoods for young people; it represents a fundamental breakdown of the social contract in the region. For decades, governments in the Middle East and North Africa promised socioeconomic support — free education, subsidies and public-sector employment — in exchange for limits on political participation and civic activity.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?