“What do you want to be when you grow up? A scientist? An astronaut? A football player?”
It’s a question almost all of us were asked as children.
It belongs to those childhood rituals that seem harmless, yet already carry a deep cultural imprint.
From an early age, we watch adults spend most of their days away from home, absorbed in something called work.
It’s inevitable that this constant, almost invisible presence soon becomes a cornerstone of our imagination: to grow up means to work.
It’s no surprise, then, that even our national identity is carved from the same myth.
Article 1 of the Italian Constitution declares, with solemn pride:
“Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on work.”
But if work has become, for each of us, a destiny that accompanies us from childhood, here it becomes much more than that: the very foundation of an entire political community. The Republic is not founded on freedom, on justice, on care, or on community — but on work.
After the war, following years of devastation, there was an obvious need for dignity and reconstruction.
Making work the foundation of the new democracy meant restoring respect to an impoverished and exhausted population, giving centrality to citizens’ active participation, and marking a clear distance from fascism.
But that dignity was immediately filtered through the lens of the industrial paradigm: the human being as a producer, society as a machine to be restarted.
Work was no longer merely a means of subsistence — it became a measure of human worth, consecrated as collective identity.
Here emerges Gramsci’s lesson: hegemony is not only political or economic — it is cultural.
A social order truly takes root when it becomes common language, worldview, common sense.
Article 1 is not just a legal statement; it is a symbolic device that engraved in people’s consciousness the idea that work is the supreme good — an unquestionable value.
And this is not an Italian anomaly.
Across the modern world — from American capitalism to Soviet socialism, from European welfare to post-colonial development rhetoric — work has been erected as the foundation of the social contract.
Every political culture may have changed its flag, but it has kept the same dogma: the value of a human being is measured by their capacity to produce.
It is a planetary paradigm, one that has colonized consciousness so deeply that it now seems natural, inevitable.
Thus, the citizen comes to identify primarily through their productive identity — not as a member of a community, not as a keeper of relationships, but as a worker.
And yet, work has not always been synonymous with toil.
For millennia, in hunter-gatherer societies, the activities necessary for life were experienced as part of a rich, cooperative, often playful social fabric.
Marshall Sahlins called them “the original affluent society” — not because they had much, but because they desired little, and that little was easily within reach.
Peter Gray has shown how their “work” was play: not excessive (around 30–40 hours a week), always varied, carried out in groups, and — most importantly — chosen freely.
No notion of wage justice, no productive constraint: value resided in sharing.
With the agricultural and industrial paradigms, however, work became obligatory toil — a measure of merit and a tool for survival.
From that point on, our modern idea of work as necessity and sacrifice took shape.
Some thinkers have sought to dismantle this myth, exposing its ecological and social consequences. Serge Latouche and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen denounced the link between infinite work, infinite growth, and entropy. Philippe Godard put it bluntly: more work does not mean more life — it means more destruction of the planet.
Other possibilities — a provocation
And so the question becomes inevitable:
if work is not a good in itself, but a historical construction that today fuels consumption and destruction, why do we still consider it the foundation of our civil coexistence?
Perhaps because we can no longer imagine alternatives.
And yet, as hunter-gatherer societies remind us, there are other ways of conceiving human activity — based on play, sharing, and freedom.
Let us imagine, for a moment, that Article 1 of the Constitution had chosen a different word.
What would have changed if it said:
“Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on care”?
The foundation would no longer be productive effort, but mutual responsibility: care for life, for relationships, for the ecosystem.
Citizens would no longer be valued as workers, but as stewards of community.
And what if it said, “founded on gift”?We would have acknowledged that life does not rest on calculation and reward, but on the gratuity that flows through every society — the time we give, the hospitality we offer, the knowledge we share, the generosity that arises spontaneously.
Or again: “founded on community.”The Republic not as a sum of individuals who produce, but as a living fabric of people who coexist, cooperate, and build together.
These are not rhetorical exercises. To change the founding word is to change the imaginary. The symbolic bases upon which we build our institutions shape our relationship with time, with nature, and with ourselves. Choosing work has solidified the paradigm of endless production. Choosing care, gift, or community would have opened other paths.
Let us then return to Article 1:
“Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on work.”
Those words, born as a promise of redemption, now sound more like a constraint.
A Republic founded on work is a Republic founded on fatigue, on production, on debt toward a system that demands ever more output.
Perhaps it is time for a new foundation.
Not on work, but on life.
Not on labor, but on care.
Not on production, but on community.
A Republic founded on life would recognize finitude, embrace vulnerability, and measure wealth not in endless growth, but in the quality of relationships and shared existence.
And this is not a reflection limited to Italy. It is the urgency of our time — in every corner of the world where the myth of work continues to replace the care of life.
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