People Who Lunch

On Work, Leisure, and Loose Living

By: Sally Olds

Narrated by: Christine Lakin

Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

A riveting investigation of the utopian experiments attempting to resist the unrelenting demands of late-stage capitalism—only to end up living comfortably alongside it

What do post‑work politics, the cult of crypto, clubbing, and polyamory have in common? All have spawned thriving subcultures united in their rejection of the patriarchal capitalist order: from wage labor, to the reign of the shareholder class over capital markets, to romantic relationships that feel like contractual arrangements to be negotiated, and more.

People Who Lunch is about hating work and needing to work, intimacy and technology, labor and leisure, and the challenge of living our ideals in a less than ideal world. In it, Sally Olds brings her “unsparing scrutiny to bear…as she grapples with the sense of entrapment in the machinery of capitalism and remorseless logic of commodification” (ABC Arts).

In one essay, Olds’s brief flirtation with post-monogamy forces her to confront the emotional prison of the “open relationship”; in another, a multi-hour viewing of a critically acclaimed performance art piece highlights how even the highest forms of culture exist to convert pleasure into capital.

In the end, her forays into these colorful worlds betray a deep irony: escaping a system built on the exchange of wage labor is, quite simply, a lot of work.

©2024 Sally Olds (P)2024 Little, Brown Spark

Critic reviews

“Anyone who saw me reading People Who Lunch in the park would have found me at turns furrowing my brow, nodding ruefully, and cackling aloud. Olds’ writing is that rare combination of unsparing and enjoyable, a much needed departure from the formulaic.”—Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time

“Illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Olds’s idiosyncratic perspective consistently surprises, and she elegantly blends cultural, historical, and class analysis into an easy to digest whole. This is a pleasure.”—Publishers Weekly