In Working, Studs Terkel’s narratives reveal the paradoxes at the heart of the contemporary phenomenology of labour: the universal human search for dignity, meaning, and recognition within labour, even as it becomes a site of alienation, exhaustion, and dispossession. His interviews expose a fundamental tension — labour is not merely a means of survival but a formative experience, shaping subjectivity and social belonging. Yet, the very idea that labour should define human worth is neither natural nor timeless; rather, it is the result of a historically contingent process, in which modernity has transformed labour from one activity among many into the dominant structure of social life. This transformation, however, has not come without cost. If modernity has cast labour as a realm of self-realisation, it has also made visible its pathological dimensions. The intensification of labour — its acceleration, its fragmentation, its extension into every facet of life — has produced not only new forms of economic precarity but also profound existential disorientation. Burnout, anxiety, and the dissolution of stable temporalities are not merely personal afflictions: they are symptoms of a broader political and structural crisis. What once promised emancipation now often delivers exhaustion. This condition is not merely a failure of policy or regulation — it speaks to a deeper contradiction within modernity itself, in which the supposed centrality of labour is increasingly called into question by its own transformations.