Alex Cockain discusses modern work culture and work-life balance in today’s society.

A BBC article published yesterday (The two words you need to help you to push back at work) explored how work seeps into weekends, disrupting rest, relationships, and mental health. None of this is new, of course. But it speaks to how deeply work has colonised what we used to call “free time.”

In her book Work’s Intimacy, Melissa Gregg calls this phenomenon presence bleed, a term which denotes the slow, insidious, creep of work into every corner of life. Like dye bleeding into fabric, work spills beyond its ostensible boundaries, soaking into our early mornings, evenings, and holidays, to the extent we may feel “on the job” even while either lying in bed, having lunch, or making food. Where factory bells once marked clear divisions between labour and leisure, today’s technologies make work feel never-ending. Many of us wake up checking emails, “just prep” over the weekend, priming ourselves even before exploitation formally begins, and even feel guilty when taking breaks. The to-do list never stops growing.

This constant state of working is only partly a by-product of technology. It is also bound to, and perhaps even a handmaiden of, the capitalist systems which shape how we use those technologies. Laptops, phones, and messaging apps don’t cause burnout on their own, but they make it easier for workplace expectations to colonise personal time. The pandemic intensified this, normalising the feeling of being “always on” even while, admittedly, producing flexibility for many.

The human cost is profound. When your mind is constantly spinning through tasks, exhaustion becomes more than tiredness — it’s depletion. You start to feel used up or extinguished. These are the hidden injuries of everyday, normal, and normalised workplace capitalism.

Yet most advice on stemming the flow of work, including that articulated in “The two words you need to help you to push back at work”, sounds oddly, and perhaps even uncannily, familiar: “set boundaries,” “manage your time,” and “ring-fence your weekends”.

In universities, persons known as “line managers”, as the language of corporations ‘bleeds’ into environments previously regarded as being outside the market, frequently say these things too, often with good intentions. But these messages still shift responsibility downwards. They ascribe individuals with the capacity, or agency, to solve structural problems with self-discipline, self-determination, and resilience — a classic neoliberal move. Importantly, these managerial “pleas” aren’t even always entirely about making time for leisure. Instead, they are articulated to help academics arrest the constant churn of routine, often meaningless tasks — endless meetings (and meetings about meetings) and admin — so that time and energy can be redirected into more “productive” labour like writing, research, and, above all, grant applications, in a system where ‘good scholarship’ is measured in financial terms.

Nevertheless, presence bleed, like other damaging, and corrosive, dimensions of workplace capitalism, cannot be remedied by individual action alone. This is because they are co-produced by people, albeit in the context of systems and structures which shape, and mediate, the human capacity to act. There is, moreover, no James Bond style villain here, lurking behind the scenes. Instead, corrosiveness is built into how we work together — or think we do. Consider Microsoft Teams, for example. It presents teamwork as horizontal and friendly, albeit while deepening overwork. Messages sent “just quickly” in the evening make extra labour feel natural, even polite. Teams become hegemonic, not because they openly enforce hierarchy, but precisely because they mask it. Work seems voluntary — a gesture of goodwill — even when it quietly consumes, and colonises, our weekends.

Power, then, doesn’t just come from bosses. It’s intimate and internalised. We police ourselves: checking messages while lying in bed, worrying about response times, turning our own thoughts into productivity tools. Michel Foucault might say we become good neoliberal subjects, regulating ourselves according to market logic. No one forces us to do it; we do it to ourselves.

That’s what makes presence bleed so insidious. Work and life blend so completely that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. And as things get wrapped in commonsense, they become even more impervious to critique – they seem “just the way things are”. However, if, as Norbert Elias has suggested, social life is a process, change is possible.

However, to stem presence bleed effectively, boundaries must be fortified from the top-down and the bottom-up. It is also important to attend to, and care about, the spaces in/between the top-down and the bottom-up: those moments of apparent solitude when we think we’re relaxing but are checking in, scrolling, or performing the logic of the marketplace on ourselves.

If we are ever to reclaim time and attention from work’s endless reach, we need more than motivational advice — we need to collectively re-imagine what work, rest, and worth really mean, and might mean, inside and outside capitalist conditions.

Alex Cockain, is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Education, and Teacher Education.