User:Artemis gryllaki/Special Issue 7

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Start up, Burn out: Life Hacks

Themes, Theory & Research

Burn Out Life Hacks Entrepreneurship Entreprecariat
Precarity Productiviy Procrastination Efficiency Insecurity
Flexibility Labour Rights Security Gig Economy 9-5
Alexa Optimisation Life Coach Positive Affirmations Ever-Working
Eliza Hackivism Hackerspace Artificial Intelligence Get Things Done Siri
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Entreprecariat is a portmanteau that combines entrepreneurialism and the precariat. As such, it captures both as coexisting axes of a semiotic square of the social. The entreprecariat refers to the reciprocal influence of an entrepreneurialist regime and pervasive precarity.

The entreprecariat is the semi-young creative worker who put effort in her own studio while freelancing for Foodora, the manager on the verge of a burnout, the employee who needs to reinvent himself as soon as his short-term contract is over, the fresh graduate who struggles to repay his loan with a top-notch university. As Guy Standing maintains, "the precariat consists of those who feel their lives and identities are made up of disjointed bits, in which they cannot construct a desirable narrative or build a career, combining forms of work and labour, play and leisure in a sustainable way."

Entreprecariats share the urgency to optimize their time, their mind, their body, and their soul in order to deal with precarious conditions, be they financial, psychological, affective, physiological, temporal, geographical. Lifehacker.com well represents this urgency, since it offers optimization techniques encompassing everything, from the work sphere to life as a whole. In the entreprecarious society, everyone is an entrepreneur and nobody is stable.
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For Millennials, a path deprived of detours is unrealistic if not outdated. It’s the very idea of a career characterized by constant uncertainty.

In his youth, Joseph Schumpeter, an influential Viennese economist, considered entrepreneurs to be a rare species that stands at the top of the social pyramid because of its precious ability to innovate. Starting from similar premises, management guru Peter Drucker argued that to accelerate innovation, society as a whole would have to become entrepreneurial, getting rid of that disincentive to progress that is the permanent job. Everyone is called to free enterprise. This is the general sense of what we can call, with a dose of irony and bitterness, entreprecariat.

“Fake it till you make it” is an expression that embodies the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. Individuals become an incomplete product in constant optimization that resorts to a conspicuous optimism to present themselves as autonomous to others and to themselves. All this with the risk that, admittedly being the master of their own destiny, the responsibility for their own failures falls only on themselves.