What does it take to scratch a living in the UK today? We questioned workers, from copywriters to cam girls, cab drivers to cops, and the answers were surprising

Between 2021 and 2023, I spoke to 100 strangers about their jobs. I asked them, what do you do all day? Why do you do it? And do you like it? Their answers filled a book, Is This Working? It is a record of life and work in the listless British economy of the early 2020s, a “services economy” in which 85% of us, from the cam girl to the accountant, spent our days producing intangible products.

It’s a vague idea, the services economy, but it does at least capture the growing sameness of modern work. One theme in the book is the spread of administrative work. Time and again, my interviewees spoke of workdays being consumed by admin tasks that had little to do with the jobs they had signed up for. As the matron I interviewed put it, “Things you did routinely but never wrote down now take five pages [of forms] on a computer.”