Praxis Seminar Series 2025-26: Session 20

Juan Evaristo Valls Boix

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

The Joy of Missing Out: A Critique of Work in Neoliberal Society

12 May 2026, 17:15

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

 

Abstract

This lecture seeks to read the term JOMO, drawn from popular memetics, as a productive conceptual tool for naming the shifting sensibilities in our relation to work that have come to mark European societies over the past decade. If the affective economy that underpinned the neoliberal regime of labor was defined by stress and excitation, the 2008 subprime crisis and the 2020 pandemic crisis have generalized depression as the dominant form of social malaise. This reconfiguration of the psychospheric landscape inaugurates the possibility of a subjectivity other than that of the self-entrepreneur, opening a horizon for cultivating post-capitalist desire through anti-ambition and an affective detachment from work.

 

 

This event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UID/00310/2025, Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00310/2025).