"In an age struggling between crises of economic overproduction, environmental catastrophe, falling salaries and increasing robotisation, there cannot be any other explanation for the current culture of "hard work" than that of a burgeoning religious cult.

Yet work is hardly devoid of ideological content. As we do it and understand it today, work has become in itself the very essence of ideology: the act of willingly submitting the short time allowed to us by our mortality, to an all-encompassing, faceless abstraction. In the words of Guetta, we work endlessly because it is "the only thing we know how to do". What really matters, and really defines us as worthy people – unlike those benefit scroungers – is that we keep working hard, regardless of whether our work goes towards the production of land mines, the deforestation of the Amazon forest or the supply of frog-shaped slippers to gadget shops. Abstaining from work, or being forcefully cast out of it, puts one in the dangerous position of a stateless person during a war, or of an atheist in a theocracy."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/britney-spears-bitch-work-religion