Back to work blues? What we can learn from slackers

In 1999, crowds of art lovers, many of them baffled, filed into London’s Tate gallery to view My Bed, a work quickly established as one of the most iconic and notorious of our age. Tracey Emin’s installation painstakingly recreated her bed as it appeared after an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, triggered by the end of a relationship. A disordered tangle of used and dirty stockings, towels and sheets, the undersheet spilling freely over the bed’s base, was bordered by the accumulated debris of an exhausted life. This was not a bed of peaceful rest, airy dreams or frenzied coupling, but of illness, exhaustion and despair. The intoxicants and condoms strewn around conveyed not a lively appetite, but a quest for physical and psychic numbness, plunging us into a state the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg called “weariness of the self”.