“The innocence of leisure makes it vulnerable to the predations of organized bodies — and there are many — that have designs on our free time, something they view as a natural resource awaiting their schemes.”

The average American commute is 16 miles each way. At the 2015 federal auto mileage reimbursement of 55 cents per mile, that’s almost $20 a day, or $4,400 a year. Over the year, commuters each spend – on average – five forty-hour weeks of unpaid time commuting. That’s shadow work: work for which we are neither thanked nor remunerated, but which is increasingly pushed onto us by firms trying to reduce their costs. Whether we’re pumping our own gas, going to online forums for tech support, or self-diagnosing with WebMD, we’re doing shadow work, and it is eating into our leisure time at a ferocious rate.

At the end of the first chapter of Shadow Work, I was a little worried. Shadow work is an interesting trend, one that we are often surprisingly unconscious of. I just wasn’t sure what Lambert planned to add in the rest of the book. Fortunately, Shadow Work more than finds its feet in the second chapter. The rest of the book serves as a thoughtful and insightful reflection on the nature of work and the nature of leisure in the modern world, from increased complexity to reduced social contact.

Whether shadow work is good or bad depends on circumstance: I like going to automatic check-out machines in the supermarket, but find it annoying to wade through phone menus rather than just talking to someone for tech support. Overall though, as Lambert points out, shadow work gives us autonomy and self-sufficiency, but at a price: isolation. Shadow work creates the opportunity for a self-imposed bubble in which we interact with ATMs, automatic cashiers, and websites, but not our fellow humanity. It also gorges on our free time in what is already a rushed and harried world. I don’t mind giving up some leisure time for choice, but given how much I’ve already lost, I’m finding it harder and harder to think I should give up any more.

Overall, thoughtful and insightful, and analyzes a trend with implications for all of us. It’s easy to slip into shadow work without noticing, bit by bit, and Lambert is right to highlight the costs. Definitely recommended. You can read more reviews on amazon, here: Shadow Work.