“I need to respect that person and that person needs to respect me”

This chapter explores the narrative that people associate strongly with a Zulu identity, but which also resonates beyond South Africa, a moral schema demanding that the good life requires respect for all people. It talks about hierarchies, how it affects people's perception of who they are, and how they learn to live with them. It defines inequality as the kind of situation when someone with lesser power has to figure out how to demand better treatment from someone in power. The chapter discusses how South African people manage with precarity — a situation when people have a source of income, a supportive social group, and a home to live in, yet they are always hovering just at the edge of losing those basic necessities. It also talks about respect as a moral code, respect being at the intersection of work and the good life, and it asks if respect is truly achievable.

“Hustling is when you try to make a good life”

This chapter introduces a narrative of “hustling” that motivates young people to perform their future hopes and never give up, despite full awareness of the disproportionate challenges they face in society. It defines a hustler as someone who tries, and talks about what entrepreneurship is like in South Africa. It discusses the difficulties that aspiring African entrepreneurs encounter as they try to become successful in their business. It talks about the lack of pride the new generation of South Africans have and how this has affects their attitude towards work and how this impacts African society. It talks about survivalist improvisation, how Africans put up an image of dignity in the midst of struggle, and their feelings of being trapped in that situation.

“Despite the contradictions”

This chapter offers closing thoughts that reiterate and summarizes the main points of the book. The chapter explores the ways people make a careful survey of their situation and work out a method to yield growth despite life's contradictions and pressures. If their lives look at times like wind-torn shrubs, that does not mean that they are poorly adapted or lethargic. Instead, it offers evidence of the hard work it takes to thrive in a world where the good life is hard to find. It shows that a dominant myth blaming inequality on laziness has guided, upheld, and justified racial inequalities in South Africa and the world since the earliest mercantile and colonial encounters between Europeans and Africans, and this narrative was never eradicated, despite antislavery, civil rights, and anti-apartheid movements that achieved important legal and structural changes. The struggle to change this social narrative is an unglorified resistance with no clear ending point, but it is essential to the pursuit of the good life. It also shows evidence that in order to generate employment while aiming for the higher goal of seeking good, South Africa must address the history of antiblack disrespect that perpetuates dysfunctional employment structures. The people described in this book refuse to conform to narratives of inevitable happy endings or easy hope, but neither do their stories end only in despair.

“They don’t want to work”

This chapter takes a look at the dominant narrative the author calls the laziness myth, exploring the origins and effects of a narrative that tells employers and employees alike that laziness is to blame for unemployment and poverty. It discusses the beliefs about laziness and about lazy people that make up the laziness myth: (1) that hard work determines who should achieve the good life, (2) that people who don't work hard are lazy, (3) that certain groups of people are especially lazy, and (4) that laziness is the source of social problems, so solving laziness should be central to solving social problems. The chapter explains the harm that the laziness myth has done using the experience of Zulu people as an example. It also presents three reasons to why the myth is just a myth: (1) because people are working hard but the myth keeps that work invisible, (2) because the causes of unemployment and poverty are systemic but the myth keeps those reasons invisible, and (3) because seemingly lazy behaviors have causes that are other than laziness.

“I’m just a laborer”

This chapter investigates how people make meaning of their lives in low-wage, low-status jobs, often by distancing themselves and the good life from work by calling themselves “just laborers.” It defines the word “laborer” as someone who is “working without skill,” “just doing the work,” not doing things that people aspire to do. It adds that treating oneself as just a laborer is a way of demanding a certain bargain, which is saying, I'm in a job that does not offer dignity or a good life, and I will not offer my life to the job either. It explains that for people in disappointing jobs, calling themselves just laborers communicates that their jobs are just a way to earn money; it is not a determinant of their identity, their status, their dignity, or the good life. In some sense, they have strategically estranged themselves from work. They are embracing some degree of alienation by intentionally separating their identity, purpose, and social ties from their acts of productive labor. In doing so, they can define their identity by their communities and interactions at home, not by their working life.

“We want to live a good life”

This chapter introduces the book and talks about the ways people seek a good life, and how their various ways of seeking a good life do — or don't — intersect with work. It aims to help in understanding some of the global political and economic trends that make it rare for South African people to find the good life through a paid job, and how people go on finding the good life anyway. It explains that when good work is hard to find, politically polarized discourses of scapegoating abound. It then discusses how the different narratives people are inclined to believe shape their lives. Finally, the chapter talks about the danger of the hard-work narrative.

“You can’t understand it”

This chapter looks at employment from the perspective of employers. It talks about their attempts to improve the lives of workers, and their frustrations that workers don't seem to behave as they want. It says that many employers are concerned about the supposed immoral behavior of employees as employers wanted hard-workers with what they called a “good work ethic.” The chapter talks about the phrase “hard-worker,” how it is used to describe the ideal worker, and how causes the myriad other possible reasons for behaviors that seemed like laziness to be overlooked. It discusses how relying on the laziness myth has left employers without feasible explanations for their workers' behavior.

“I have a good story”

This chapter demonstrates how asking the question “What is the good life?” leads to different knowledge than asking questions like “How can we generate employment?” or “How can we achieve economic growth?” The chapter offers a deeper look into the lives of four individuals who said they were currently living the good life: an engineer in a high-status job, an artist forging new relationships through his church and community, a low-wage worker in an unusual shoe factory, and a recently unemployed woman starting a small business. The stories offer evidence that the good life does not necessarily depend on employment status. Instead, the good life comes about through complex interactions of social and individual factors, as well as the ways by which people learn to make meaning out of their circumstances. The four individuals shaped concepts of the good life that made sense of their experiences within an antiblack and segregated society. They found themselves in socially embedded economic structures, and spaces where black cultural capital was validated. The fact that they often attributed these circumstances to good fortune should not prevent us from imagining and implementing ways to replicate such structures.