You've been waved asleep by the lull of a million blog, facebook, and advertainment 'articles' thrown in your face selling you diets, regimens, courses, therapy, and pills (and don't forget ~spirituality~ –that contrary to what you think takes it's business model from the Catholic Church™️) promising to cure you of the ill of procrastination. The word is ubiquitous among a zeitgeist of buzzwords and doublespeak. Make no mistake, it is yet another form of propaganda. Its purpose? To disguise a neglected 170+ year old concept: the alienation of labor as described by Karl Marx. Marx predicted how industrialization would distribute the division of labor into piecemeal tasks. He explained how in capitalism the worker is separated from the product of their labor due to its appropriation by the capitalist. A modern worker sees this illustrated in menial, repetitive tasks like signing a stack of files not knowing the contents. Marx elaborates, “so much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. That in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.”
-Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.