“Let everyday life become a work of art! Let every technical means be employed for the transformation of everyday life”. So wrote French theorist, Henri Lefebvre, in 1947. He defined everyday life as “Whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized activities”— those moments spent outside of the narrow roles defined for us by our jobs and society at large. He described everyday life as a "backward sector"; an area of life that lagged far behind what life could possibly be. In opposition to this tendency, he urged all to “live life as a work in progress...live life like a work of art.” In this respect, everyday life is the one part of our life over which we should have complete control. Those moments before and after “the job” where our thoughts, ideas and activities are our own. We work to gain our leisure and our leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. Yet this is increasingly difficult to do. The technology that was supposed to liberate us from the confines of the office and shorten our time spent at work, has only served to disintegrate the bounderies between work and leisure. As kept creatures of our employers, many of us have traded the fenced-in yard of the 9 to 5 work day for the “e-office” and the "freedom" of the leash: e-mail and the cellular phone insure that we have no excuse not to hear our masters when they call. To stretch the analogy, the cell phone has become the equivalent of the diamond studded collar that we imagined as children all Park Avenue poodles wore. In short, our leashes have become a symbol of our status and the frequency with which our masters tug on it has become a measure of our worth. The ultimate fashion statement is to appear to be so valuable to someone, anyone, that we have to be accessed 24 hours of the day.

Our personal identities have become subsumed by that which we do for money, that which we do to survive. The economic imperative of American culture has become so ingrained in the fabric of our daily lives that the menial tasks that we perform in service to the system have become the sine qua non of how we define ourselves as individuals. No one thinks it unusual that we introduce ourselves to total strangers by our name first, and then by the role we perform within that system. Among men especially, the alloy of identity formed from the melding of the “personal” and “professional” selves is more acute—so much so, that the element that is perceived to be the impurity of this mixture is the “personal” self. In fact, the very definition of “professional” behavior requires that we remove the taint of human predilections from our thoughts and actions and descisions. In contrast, if you remove the “professional” identity from the mix then the very structure of one's “personal” self begins to disintegrate. Marshall McLuhan once said “violence, whether spiritual or physical is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.” Is it any wonder then that when men (and it is almost always men) “go postal” at work and, with gun in hand, slaughter their former co-workers; the proverbial “straw that broke the camel's back” is the loss of their job? Similarly, among other elements, joblessness and the resulting loss of self esteem, is a mitigating factor in the psychological make-up of men who engage in domestic violence.